Tannon Reckling: Foreclosed Gay Bar Since 2020
Tannon Reckling, Untitled, graphics card packing, cat cage parts, found Deviantart.com image, red print, fake pokemon concept art around HIV/AIDS, broken glass, clay metal, wood, 2019. Image courtesy the artist.
July 26, 2023
What are you doing right now?
I am waking up this morning and writing this email in a small rural town in Kansas. I am helping my family move my aging grandfather. Last night there were terrible storms here and we saw magically rainbow lights in the storm clouds that I have never seen in a storm before.... was it from the intensity of the storm in this world record heat? Was it affected by the massive Canadian wildfire smoke? I have heard "this has never happened here before" so many times the past few years in my coast to coast travels.
Where are you located?
Usually in New York City these days; I am becoming more and more peripatetic.
Image courtesy the artist.
Let's discuss HIV/AIDS.
Just published this text on Visual AIDS blog (https://visualaids.org/blog/what-good-is-this-tool) that I have been working on for a few months. It is a way of thinking through nuances in already present capitalist AI tools in health care, customer service, social borders of all types, fake economy magic numbers, etc. I am thinking about this in collaboration with things like organics, system theory, queer tinkering, and larger social imaginaries to daily semantic routines for those living with HIV/AIDS in 2023. Technology/surveillance/data activists and HIV/AIDS activists have much in common through a goal of harm reduction; they can learn a lot from each other from their histories and current contexts.
Tell me about your curatorial practice.
I recently finished a Curatorial Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art while working on the Project for a New American Century exhibition which explores realistic material circumstances of the next few decades.
I am currently working towards curating a show at Bureau of General Services- Queer Division at the NYC LGBT Center for the fall. The show will be a retrospective with WUSSY Magazine, QueerKY, and other queer publications. In this labor, I am interested in the combination of online queer presences and non-NYC/LA queer locales. In 2023, only a certain economic position can survive in large cities. LGBTQ+ identities in more rural or non-urban places face everything from increasing legal discrimination to increasing closing of public gay spaces. I am trying to find stakes in this position because I don't want a public facing queer social image to be that of a cool rich kid in NYC or LA. As a person of trailer trash origins who sees the power of a "rainbow coalition" in increasingly polarized life choices for queer people that are increasingly materially harmful in conservative areas and solidly neoliberal in others. I am always interested in collaborating with other queer creatives, hmu. This paragraph might be a flavor of my curatorial practice which is tied to my art practice: it's all the same shit anymore and I'm done pretending these categories are useful.