Ryan Conrad

Don't Believe The Hype

Ryan Conrad

DBtH! is a silent looping video intended for screening on public surfaces in gay neighbourhoods across Canada. It beckons viewers with sensuous displays of queer public affection paired with scrolling text that both provokes and informs. This site-specific work claims public space for queer intimacy and political imagining at a time when Canadians are being encouraged by both the federal government and LGBT civil society organizations to celebrate the so-called 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality.

things are different now...

Ryan Conrad

How do younger queers who have never known a world without AIDS, including the accompanying prevention and treatment strategies that have been popularized over the last two decades, relate to the history of the epidemic and to those that managed to survive its earlier conditions? This is the central question that motivates this project’s focus on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how its meaning has shifted and changed along generational lines.

b. 1983

Ryan Conrad

Ryan Conrad

An exploration of candid childhood home videos of a safe, suburban, white, middle-class life juxtaposed with a retrospective narrative foreshadowing the many forms of anti-queer violence soon to be survived.