Ghosts of the Trucks of the West Side Highway incorporates sound, documented performance, and photography, taking advantage of a truck’s uniquely charged site-specificity while exploring an underrepresented aspect of queer history: specifically, the gay truck-sex culture of 1970’s New York.
I recorded sounds from a group of men performing sex acts inside in a truck: an homage to the trucks that formed impromptu public sex spaces, parked beneath New York's West Side Highway in the 1970's. During exhibition, the audio is played back on concealed speakers in the installation, invoking auditory phantoms of the men who participated in the truck-sex culture that arose at the height of gay liberation. A photograph by Leonard Fink featuring men cruising the trucks along the West Side Highway is blown up, cut apart, and printed on gauzy fabric panels suspended inside the exhibition truck, as if a ghostly after-image of a moment in queer culture lost to AIDS and gentrification.
The piece has been exhibited at Install:WeHo, an installation art festival in West Hollywood, CA, and at MIX NYC, a festival for experimental queer film, video, and installation in New York City.