The Toronto AIDS Memorial Project (2015-16)

The act of making trauma permanently visible through the Toronto AIDS Memorial was intended to create a place for private and communal mourning.

However, today, like many AIDS memorials, the site is seen as provoking private acts of contemplation. Yet the original intention was informed by a concept of public mourning, which was meant to be activist. Michael Lynch, who spearheaded the AIDS memorial, argued that mourning and activism were not opposite, rather if done well they could fuel each other.

In this project, I examine the archival traces of activism that underlay the call for the AIDS memorial in Toronto as a case study for a proposed visual culture methodology that seeks to address the excess of disciplinary boundaries. The model examines subject, object and archive as inter-woven yet distinct. This case study provides a means of exploring the role of the research subject and looks at the contradictions inherent in public art as a site of memorialization.

Certainly, the need to make and to challenge distinctions between the personal and the social informs this particular case. Further, the activist intentions of the moment of origin can be reinserted into analysis of AIDS activism today and the role of visual culture pedagogy. Expanding the archive to include consideration of other controversial beginnings to contemporaneous memorial sites such as The Grove AIDS memorial in San Francisco serves to undo the situatedness of the research object at the same time as it confirms it.

View the gallery below to look at some photos taken of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto. These photos show the current AIDS Memorial in Toronto, mementos left at the last vigil, and a couple of the original submissions for the competition.

Click on any photo to view an enlarged gallery of the images