The Brooklyn Rail

Patrick Staff: hatefull to the stomach, harmefull to the braine

The multimedia artist Patrick Staff has created two related bodies of work that use the rubric of contagion to critique systems of oppression. Using video, sculpture, and photography, Staff focuses in particular on the paradigm of health, as synonymous with heterosexuality and gender conformity, to highlight examples where LGBTQ modes of being are seen not just as a clinical pathology marked by social degeneracy, but as something transmittable.