At first glance, some of Patrick Michael Carew’s artwork looks almost otherworldly: deep, oceanic jewel tones juxtaposed against a collage of noir-like silhouettes. Stare long enough, and the beauty begins revealing itself. Something in the textures transforms from ethereal to the every-so-slightly clinical. Each piece of his latest show, “On the Shoulders of Splendid Ones,” is part of a stunning, heartbreaking, and grief-stricken puzzle.
Carew wanted the work to be beautiful.
“It is such a morbid topic, but how can I add some levity to it?” Carew told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “How can I make it really beautiful to bring people in? Because beauty is what people see first. And if it’s not attractive and desirable to look at it, people aren’t going to engage with it.”
The work draws from Carew’s experience living with HIV, the history of the AIDS epidemic, and the lives and memories of those lost to it. Using his own body as a source of material, he creates prints with blood, medical ephemera, and archival imagery.
‘Notes on Contact’ artist talk w/Patrick Carew
Time Thu., Nov. 12, 6 p.m.
Location USF St Petersburg Harbor Hall, 1000 3rd St S, St. Petersburg
Trained as a photographer, Carew, named last spring as one of CL’s 2026 artists to watch, earned his bachelor’s in photography from Pratt Institute before coming to the University of South Florida to pursue his Master of Fine Arts. He arrived in Florida eager to push the boundaries of photography beyond the camera, eventually combining photographic processes with printmaking and collage.
The work became personal when he began grappling with his own HIV diagnosis. He considered making self-portraits or taking photos of others living with HIV, but he was new to Florida and hadn’t established a community yet.
“I was really just thinking about, ‘How can I visualize this experience without making a spectacle of the body?’” Carew said. “Because it is a bodily experience. But how do you talk about that without putting the body on display?”
Rather than photographing the body, he began experimenting with his own blood and saliva as materials for creating photographic prints. He created large slides, similar to samples viewed under a microscope, using an enlarger to project the resulting patterns onto photographic paper.
“It’s a really beautiful, abstract way of talking about the body, but it’s still indexical,” he said. “It’s not an abstraction of the body; it is the body.”
Other materials come from the accumulation of living with HIV. Carew saves the prescription inserts that come with his medication, keeping the paper tucked away alongside the other ephemera of treatment. In one work, he uses a cyanotype process to turn the translucent inserts into layers of blue text. The instructions overlap, becoming impossible to decipher.
“I have an entire tote bag of every prescription bottle I’ve ever gotten,” he said. “Part of this project is accumulation. It’s something I’m going to continue accumulating over my life. When life gives you lemons, you’ve got to do something with it.”
The obscured text is more than a visual effect. Carew sees a connection between the dense medical language in the inserts and the difficulty of making sense of diagnosis or treatment. Information is there, but is it understood?
“It’s a little reward,” he said. “If you can get close enough you can pick out words.”
The found photographs bring another kind of history into the compositions. Carew draws from queer archives, local news materials, the AIDS memorial Facebook page, and USF Special Collections. When he finds photographs shared by family and friends online, he reaches out and asks permission before incorporating them into his work.
He digitally prints and then hand-cuts figures from the photographs, working them into compositions alongside his own prints. The resulting images come from shifting the cutout figures around like a ouija board, adjusting the shapes until the visual clicks into place.
At USF’s graphic arts program, he found a creative collaborator in Erika Greenberg-Schneider, associate professor of graphic design and printmaking. Their work together, along with the resources of Graphicstudio, helped him experiment with processes like photogravure etching, photographic images are transferred onto metal plates, usually copper, etched with acid, and printed on a press. The effect is a velvety and continuously toned image.
“I was impressed by his imagery and his openness discussing the issues affecting the queer community and HIV,” Greenberg-Schneider said.
The two pursued a Graduate Research Collaboration Award through USF St. Petersburg and were successful. Carew said the funding supported his research and thesis work, without him having to rush the process. For Carew, making the work personal also meant making space for stories that might otherwise go unseen.
His hope is that other artists, especially younger ones, feel empowered to tell their own stories rather than trying to anticipate what the art world and collectors want to see.
“The more personal and specific you can make your work, the more universal it becomes,” he said.
“On the Shoulders of Splendid Ones” is far from finished. As Carew continues developing the project, its questions of memory, visibility, and the body remain open.
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This article appears in Nov. 05 – 11, 2026.
