Lovett/Codagnone, Greetings
September 21 – November 2, 2025
Mask-only opening reception, Sunday, September 21, 5-7pm
Mask-optional opening reception, Sunday, September 21, 7-9pm

Opening September 21, 2025, PARTICIPANT INC presents Lovett/Codagnone, Greetings, a solo exhibition focused on the collaborative team’s early photographic practice from the mid ‘90s. This is the third in a sequence of exhibitions and estate activations made in collaboration with John Lovett and the Lovett/Codagnone Estate (1995-2019). PARTICIPANT INC facilitated an archival exhibition at CCS Bard, Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves, curated by Andrew Suggs, and their first survey exhibition, I Only Want You to Love Me, curated by Diego Sileo at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan. Lovett/Codagnone will be included in the upcoming group exhibition, Vivono (They Live): HIV/AIDS in Italy, 1982-1996, curated by Michele Bertolino at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy.

Lovett/Codagnone’s formative photography-based works referenced S/M through the displacement of gay subcultural signifiers into suburban environments or urban public spaces, and often referenced historical photographs that were made privately or for private use, such as those of Pierre Molinier and Jimmy DeSana. Circulating widely in art as well as, at times, gay porn magazines, Lovett/Codagnone’s photographs signaled the increasing conflation of public and private — a political imperative that defined the early 1990s. Lovett/Codagnone’s restrained, conceptual exercises in the fluidity of dominance and submission also underscored the importance of sustained visibility, now inseparable from the methodologies of AIDS activism as practiced by collectives such as ACT UP and Gran Fury, with which their early work coincided. As culture inoculated itself against the destabilizing power of such practices through fashion and other mainstream depictions of S/M and drag performance, Lovett/Codagnone contested this assimilation and focused on the underlying dynamics of interaction that sexual roleplay can literalize, not only in relation to bonds of intimacy, but also in the context of familial and communal structures.