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  • Radiant Spaces:An Introduction to Emily Roysdon's Photograph Series Untitled
  • Jean Carlomusto (bio) and Roysdon Emily (bio)

Emily Roysdon's photograph series Untitled, an homage to David Wojnarowicz's series Arthur Rimbaud in New York, evokes for me, at first glance, the eerie experience I sometimes have on the streets of New York City. I'll see a friend I haven't seen in years. As I approach to say hi, I realize that person died of AIDS years ago and the person passing by merely bears a resemblance to him or her. A momentary lapse; a suspension of disbelief; a desire to recall a friend's presence into the everyday tableau of the city streets—Roysdon's work reminds me of these radiant spaces: places of suture and reclamation.

Inspired by Ernesto Laclau's argument that myths offer possible collaborations and "a new space of representation," Roysdon assumes Wojnarowicz's subjectivity in a playful cultivation of everyday life.1 She has him hanging with the gang, even stitches him into bed—not with her but as her.

Roysdon's Untitled is a courageous endeavor both to acknowledge Wojnarowicz's mythic stature as a queer icon and to keep him engaged in a queer feminist backdrop. Her photos embrace what I appreciate in Wojnarowicz's original Arthur Rimbaud in New York, a desire to reembody our eccentric and slutty icons, to transport the spirit of our heroes to the present drama of our lives, a drama they somehow inspire anyway.

Jean Carlomusto: In your artist's statement you mention that these photos reflect a "personal realization of a complex identification with Wojnarowicz." Besides [End Page 671] David's "politics, urgency and method," what are the other identifications you have with him?

Emily Roysdon: David was one of the first people who allowed me to identify as an artist, and it was his everyday life, method, and commitments that spoke to me here. Living life.

JC: Wojnarowicz had a strong identification with Rimbaud. Their lives shared many similarities—broken home, abandonment, homosexuality, early death. Are you going to the "spiritual soul mates" level of identification with David?

ER: I do heavily identify with David on a personal level. Many of my best friends have died—my first when I was eight—so I identified with the sense of loss and growing up young that I think I saw in David. Having to make different kinds of decisions in a youthful mind but also deciding different reasons to live and deliberate ways to do that.

JC: Since David's original Rimbaud series was done in the seventies, before HIV/AIDS, what made it dramatically possible for you to "go home again"? Did you find the specter of HIV/AIDS intrusive in creating these photos?

ER: I wouldn't say intrusive, perhaps melancholic. I feel emotionally as well as politically attached to the AIDS community because of the loss I mentioned earlier. Growing up, even in college, the age when I was discovering David, many people do not have a relationship to death and loss and grieving, and I had to do most of this on my own and very young, which is of course a giant specter in the communities affected by HIV. I was absolutely fascinated that communities were being wholly affected by, as well as growing up and organizing around, something that had been so critical for me. But besides death, moving into a critical and queer identity in those years, I felt responsible to the history, the struggle and commitment, that we all still face. As far as "before" the "infamous disease" . . . it's almost hard to imagine, really, having grown up "inside AIDS" as a queer, and ideologically in the United States, the space "before."

JC: Were you conscious of looking for the "space before" when creating these photos?

ER: I wasn't looking for a space either before or after.

JC: Interesting. I find David's place in these photos as one of hope.

ER: Yes, it is a hopeful space, a productive space. [End Page 672]

JC: Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz both acknowledged and drew energy from their roles as outsiders. In fact, this has remained...

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