Strange Space (1992)
Colour, sound. 3’ 46”
Leslie Thornton, 'Strange Space'. Courtesy: EAI
The 1990s saw a vital body of activist video works that directly addressed the AIDS crisis. Thornton created Strange Space in collaboration with actor Ron Vawter, who died of AIDS in 1994. Created specifically for the 1992 Day Without Art/AIDS Awareness Day, the piece addresses what Thornton terms "the relationship between the medicalization of the body and the personal". While Vawter reads aloud from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, a doctor is heard discussing Vawter's medical condition. Medical photographs of internal organs and images of the moon's surface create landscapes of inner and outer spaces, suggesting both personal and technical experiences of physicality and mortality.
