Good Grief is a multimedia performance by J.R. Uretsky, performed at Providence Public Library and the RISD Museum in 2023. The piece features video, interactive sculpture, printed pamphlets, live music, and uses humor and performing objects. It explores themes such as grief, death, heartbreak, and mental illness, with an emphasis on the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. The focus is on how queer communities found healing together amidst the crisis.
Good Grief pamphlet (Risograph, 2023)
Before 2019, I couldn’t vocalize my desire for a double mastectomy. I thought about the removal of my breasts a lot. Always by accident, ripped from my chest by a speeding train. Breast cancer deciding for me, leaving the fate of my tits to chance and wishing beyond reason that they would disappear on their own. But it was time, and I finally understood that if they were going to go, I would have to do it. Making a choice was the first wall of fear I passed through. That’s what this story is about, becoming a ghost, leaving my old self in a tomb of fear and self-hatred, passing through walls of fear again and again until I could finally see myself.
Then, 2020 came and decimated the medical system. A system that, after a year of dodging and weaving a labyrinth of bureaucracy, had become my enemy. I had medical insurance, just not the right kind. But the whole reason I was torturing myself at a shit job was to have medical insurance. However, it was 2020, and I was an American with health insurance, so I should be so lucky. I gave up that first year of the pandemic. We had to survive, and my boobs could stick around a little longer. My ghost floated back into the tomb, and I died.
The last person to see my breasts was the surgeon, who made his blue marks on them and then stepped back to examine his lines. This was his art, and I was grateful and embarrassed.
My entire center of gravity changed after top surgery. I had to learn to stand up straight and move through the world without shame—a daunting task for a ghost. I had reconciled my daily deaths. But something was different now. It was 2023. I survived COVID and had a massive surgery. I had made a good decision. I looked up from work, peered through the thick curtains of depression, squirmed out from the perpetual crush of capitalism, and for the first time, imagined a future.
Video
For this project, I wanted to hear the voices of elder dykes who lived through the AIDS crisis. When COVID hit, I wanted an elder to tell me what to do. How to fight. How to survive. But many of them didn’t survive the 1980s. My uncle Jimmy, who I am named after, was lost to AIDS. He was the first AIDS case in my hometown and left for New York City to die with the rest of his people. He was twenty-two. One of the videos in the performance uses a voice-over from my Auntie Jiffy telling me about her brother, my uncle, my namesake, who we have all outlived.
Some of my videos are scripted. These scripts are autobiographical (almost confessional) dialogues between myself and a therapist. Our conversation eventually merges with dialogue from an episode of Star Trek. The video begins with me discussing with my therapist an irrational fear that arose after I had a double mastectomy and eventually turns into a conversation between Ensign Harry Kim and Captain Janeway from Star Trek Voyager, where Janeway encourages Kim to take some time off after having just returned from the dead.
Much of the video footage is from AIDS Project Rhode Island Archives, Avery Lord Aerial Photograph Collection, and the Kim Deacon Collection at Providence Public Library. Video is one visual element essential to my routine, be it accompanying live music or introducing narrative aspects.