STEVE'S MEDS (2024)

STEVE'S MEDS was recorded at my late-brother Steve's Toronto home on New Years Day 1992. It was transferred to digital and completed it in 2024.

I knew Steve had to take a battery of drugs to keep himself going as an HIV positive man living with AIDS. I also knew that my brother always took a diligent approach to anything he was doing, so I figured he'd know quite a bit about the drugs he was taking. By the time I made this video, he'd been reliant on various pharmaceutical since the mid-1980s. Even though we were close, Steve didn't tell me he was HIV positive until he became quite ill. 

The video begins the morning after his New Years eve party and a pan across piles of dishes from the evenings festivities briefly set the scene surrounding our interview. The film then cuts to Steve and I in his bathroom where he kept all his medications. It was a beautiful, spacious room with lots of black shiny tiles, so I thought it would make a good location for the work. As Steve prepares the "set" by wiping down the countertop, our sibling banter fills the room. However, as soon as he starts describing his meds, his tone switches to that of a clinician or an expert on the topic, which he was. Steve then goes through his medications, one at a time, noting their name, purpose and the dosage he was taking. The video finishes with my question of how much his meds cost, which was a lot. 

In the swirl of everything that was going on at the time for me with Steve's illness I don't think I recognized the poignancy of what I'd recorded. Nonetheless, I carefully stored this tape. It was only when I was reviewing all the raw footage that I'd shot in the late 1980's and early '90s that I rediscovered it. Looking back on it now, I think there is additional value to this recording as a document of a time when so many HIV positive people were struggling for their lives, when antiretroviral drugs were fresh on the market and largely of limited accessibility. 

The title for this work came easily to me because it makes a partner to my work Steve's Vinyl, a performance and give-away of Steve's record collection organized to coincide with World AIDS Day (Dec 3, 2011).