David Cruising at Prospect Park
2024

I centered the series David Cruising in Prospect Park around David Wojnarowicz, a multidisciplinary gay artist, writer, and political activist from New York who died of AIDS in the early 1990s. I imagine him as an older man cruising, aided by new geolocation technologies and apps like Sniffies or Grindr. Here, the quotidian and life itself become the queer, the utopia—grounded on this Earth, not above like God or the desires of the Space Age.

 

In these images, we transcend space and time—not by moving upward but by existing simultaneously in the past and future. By bringing David Wojnarowicz back from the dead, he and I cruise queerness together, creating the utopia José Esteban Muñoz spoke of when he encouraged us to “call on the past, to animate it, understanding that the past has a performative nature, which is to say that rather than being static and fixed, the past does things.”