Hayes’s renowned practice across video, installation, and performance presents a deep commitment to community and sharp attention to politics, often with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ subjects and histories. Her four-part, decade-long video series Ricerche takes a documentary approach and was originally inspired by the artist’s early appreciation of Pierpaolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking Comizi d’amore (“Love Meetings”). For this 1963 film, Pasolini traveled across Italy interviewing those he encountered about the country’s rapidly changing views around sexuality, family life, and morality. Against a contemporary American backdrop where similarly moralistic undercurrents are bubbling up, Hayes’s Ricerche: four, the newest and fourth in the series, asks trenchant questions of a group of LGBTQ+ elders about their loves, the lives they have lived, and their collective identity.
Ricerche: four consists of a two-channel video that shows the group of assembled elders assembled seated in a row. The flat-screen televisions that play the two channels are meant to be installed on top of a mismatched group of outdoor furniture that extends outward and around in a circle around the screens. As viewers enter the circle and sit in the seats to watch the film, they literally and figuratively join the group of elders in an elegantly simple collective action.

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