The Remains of The Day

Jerome Caja

The Remains of The Day

October 9 – November 7, 1992

Opening Reception: October 9, 1992, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

The Remains of the Day, guest curated by City Lights Books editor Amy Scholder and artist/designer Rex Ray, is a powerful testimony and elegy to the effects of AIDS on an artist’s career. Their work shares a humorous, yet poignant, critical focus on issues of sexual identity and cultural bias. In 1991 Charles Sexton died of AIDS at the age of 34. Before his death, he made a pact with Jerome Caja that Jerome would use his ashes to create works of art.

Charles Sexton’s most productive period followed his diagnosis. According to co-curator Amy Scholder, his work stands as ‘a documentary of this disclosure, his illness and ultimately, his death…it is a testimony to the effects of the AIDS virus on the social body as well as on the physical body.'

Jerome Caja paints with women’s cosmetics, from eye liner to nail polish onto various forms of urban bric-a-brac—bottle caps, lead sheets and crushed cans. A self-proclaimed ‘frail, tattered San Francisco drag queen,’ Caja works in a cosmic yet dark manner, broaching issues of death and sexuality.

Curator Amy Scholder has edited numerous books including the HIGH RISK anthology and is the editor of Artspace Books.

Rex Ray is one of the leading Bay Area graphic artists. His work has been featured in publications for City Lights and Penguin USA and in exhibitions at New Langton Arts, the LAB and Intersection for the Arts.