The University of Waterloo Art Gallery (UWAG) is opening our doors on Monday, December 1 from 12 - 5 pm in honour of Day With(out) Art/World AIDS Day 2025. Artist Andrew McPhail will be on site from 12 - 2 pm. His current exhibition TEXTiles, This is not an AIDS Quilt is a survey of works made between 2019-2025, featuring 59 hand-sequinned bedsheets, pillowcases, and quilts. A Day With(out) Art is an international day-of-action and mourning in response to the lingering AIDS crisis. Both of our current exhibitions, including Underlay by Brenda Mabel Reid, close Saturday December 6, making this a perfect opportunity to visit the gallery and honour AIDS survivors.
Andrew McPhail TEXTiles, This is not an AIDS Quilt
In the last decade, Andrew McPhail has produced an ongoing body of textile-based work that draws from his experience as a queer man living with HIV for over 30 years. Developing out of his drawing practice, McPhail’s work has evolved into a hybrid straddling sculpture, installation, and performance. Utilizing readymade disposable materials, ranging from Band-Aids to Kleenex, his accumulative work pointedly examined failure, sexuality, and the frailty of the human body. Text has always played a critical role in his work, and over the last decade McPhail was increasingly drawn to the gaudy impermanence of brightly coloured sequins as a medium for his humorous, often caustic slogans: Sick & Tired. Fragile. Epic Fail. The End. Obsessively hand-stitching these sequined texts onto bed sheets, pillowcases, and quilts, the sum of McPhail’s ongoing project evokes a metaphoric bedroom, a place of comfort, security, compassion as well as passion, but also of sickness and death. TEXTiles knowingly honours the emotional and material impact of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a monumental collective undertaking honouring the names of all those lost to the AIDS epidemic. McPhail’s iteration is a more modest, personal production; a self-deprecating portrait of an artist willing to make light of their own survival.
Andrew McPhail is a visual artist who received his MFA from York University in 1987. In his accumulative, craft-oriented practice he uses ephemeral, disposable materials such as Band Aids, Kleenex, and Post-its to create monumental yet ephemeral sculptures, installations, and performances. Over the last decade he has been hand-stitching sequins to spell out text on pillowcases, bed sheets, and quilts. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He was the recipient of the Canada Council International Studio Residency in Paris in 2013 and the Nordic Artist Residency in 2023. He is the co-founder, with Stephen Altena, of the Hundred Dollar Gallery, and a founding member of The Assembly in Hamilton, Ontario. (Artist Website)
Andrew McPhail, Tired, 2020, hand-stitched sequins, pillowcase. Photo courtesy of the artist.