Exhibition: Matthew Leifheit: The Gay Chorus: No Time At All
June 1, 2025—July 13, 2025
Gallery:
About the Exhibition:
The songs presented in this sound installation-as-recital were sourced from an archive of gay men’s chorus performance and rehearsal video recordings from the decade preceding the advent of highly active antiretroviral treatments (HAART) for HIV/AIDS in the United States (1985–1995).
At the time of the installation, the artist Matthew Leifheit had preserved 46 hours and 22 minutes of performance footage, drawn from 53 VHS tapes digitized during 2023 and 2024 in archives spanning New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Washington, DC. Given the inherently limited archival lifespan of VHS recordings, much of the audio exhibits distortions and degradations resulting from the passage of time and the deterioration of magnetic tape.
The sound installation, The Gay Chorus: No Time at All, conceived by Leifheit for the New York City AIDS Memorial, liberates long-unheard voices from archives in cities across the United States, uniting them in an hour-long recital that looped daily throughout June, LGBTQ Pride Month, 2025. Utilizing directional audio technology, the installation was meticulously designed to remain confined within the memorial structure, allowing the sound to drift subtly from overhead and envelop the space in a reflective auditory experience, offering a resonant and uplifting reflection. The sound installation began each day at 10:00 AM and repeated every 75 minutes.
The Gay Chorus: No Time At All is a continuation of the New York City AIDS Memorial’s public art program, which has included the immersive sound experience Hear Me: Voices of the Epidemic in 2020 and installations and events by Steven Evans, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Jenny Holzer, Avram Finkelstein, Jim Hodges, and others.
About the Artist:
Matthew Leifheit is an American photographer, magazine editor, and professor based in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the Yale School of Art, Leifheit is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, the journal of emerging photography he has published since 2010. Leifheit's photographs have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, TIME, and Artforum, and have been exhibited internationally. His work has been supported by residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo and The Watermill Center, receiving grants from the New York State Cultural Council and the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale, where he was awarded the Richard Benson Prize in 2017. He is currently full-time faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
Selected Press:
Support:
Support for public programming at the New York City AIDS Memorial is provided, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
The New York City AIDS Memorial gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Phillip A. Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons.
This installation was made with the support of Powerhouse Arts: Audio engineering by John Michael Swartz; Production & installation by Jeremy Gender.
The Gay Chorus: No Time At All is exhibited through NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program.
Still images courtesy of the artist; event photographs by Sam Clarke