My Middle Name

Mikhail Zalesky

My Middle Name is an artistic and design research-driven body of work that reanimates elements of the life, identity, and collective memory of the researcher and artist's late uncle, Don. Once one of Canada's most successful male models in the 1970s and 80s, Don was a victim of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and passed away from related complications in 2006. His life was marked by both extraordinary splendor and profound struggle - a duality that inherently warrants deeper reflection and retelling.

But for Zalesky, who is also a queer man, this project is more than an act of remembrance; it is a response to an inherited absence. Don died when Zalesky was 12, before he had come to terms with his own queerness and before he could fully recognize the loss of what Don might have represented: a mentor, a compatriot, and a mirror through the turbulence - shame, doubt, and joy - of queer becoming.

Through participatory research, autoethnography, and archival exploration, Zalesky reconnects with the loves of Don's life, the spaces he inhabited, and the ways in which he lived across different epochs; a world that had been absent from Zalesky’s own life for nearly two decades following Don's death. Once recontextualized within Don's world, Zalesky engages in an embodied practice that collapses temporal and spatial distances, allowing Don's presence to reemerge in the very dynamics that once defined his existence. The resulting artifacts - drawings, photographs, video work, and found objects - not only recount Don's story, but bridge the gap between his absence and Zalesky's own queer becoming, deepening his understanding of self, inherited queerness, and the collective queer experience.

My Middle Name is ultimately an act of yearning; the contradiction of finding life through death.