Peter Maloney – Fugitive Text

Fugitive Text draws together photographic diptychs and triptychs made since the mid-1990s in response to the artist’s experience of love, desire and loss through the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It incorporates photographs taken in-camera as well as images drawn from a variety of sources, including vintage photographs found in flea markets and images re-photographed from pornography and popular culture. The photographs – views of architectural and public spaces, flowers, nudes, images of sea and sky – are paired and, in most cases, overpainted with text –anecdotes, fragments drawn from memory, popular verse and queer culture.

The images draw on Peter Maloney’s experience of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (as an HIV-positive person who lost much of their social group during the 1980s and early 1990s) and on photography’s specific relationship to memory, time and place, and testimony. Combined with scraps of text, the images become memory fragments. The memories suggested by these works are those of someone remembering love and loss – friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS, and also the moments of desire, risk and sensation that in a way mark the queer experience of time and space.

The book, with its exposed spine and multiple fold out triptychs, was designed by Elliott Bryce Foulkes and is in itself an object of exceptional beauty. The works are accompanied by texts by the prominent American author and cultural critic Lynne Tillman and writer and curator Shaune Lakin.

117 pages, 30 x 20 cm, softcover, M.33 (Melbourne).