Originally cast as the second part of a six-part feature Panic Bodies (1998), the original 16mm negatives were rescued courtesy of the Cinematheque Quebecoise, then rescanned, recut, and reimagined. They were shot in 1996, the year the AIDS cocktail arrived. It’s not uncommon during illness to experience one’s body grow as large as the world, here the body is figure and ground, friend and enemy, projection surface fragments, memory machine. I asked the excellent performance artist Ed Johnson if he could come by and perform in this psychodrama of loss and longing.

“In A Boy's Life touch extends across the flesh to the drawing of a self-portrait, an image which is traced, then erased, and mirrored in gestures across a window surface through which we see the outside world on stark overexposed celluloid, like the blank white page on which the self is invented. The act of drawing is matched with the stroking of the penis and brush strokes made across various surfaces of the home. This linkage of creativity and sexuality is immersed in domestic space which is, in turn, transformed. The scrub brush strokes become gestures of sadomasochism as they are applied to the body. This reference to bodily and domestic cleanliness recalls and undermines the fetish of hygiene and sexual representation endemic to Western society. The act of masturbation is then shot through a kaleidoscopic filter which transforms the images from singular pleasure to playful formal multiplication.” Darrell Varga