Sports fans often feel like their team’s stakes are life or death. Even the vocabulary of “die-hards” reinforces this, and as any Buffalo Bills fan can affirm, elimination from the playoffs initiates a period of actual grief.
It is in this way that sports fandom and personal experiences of loss — through illness and even death — are bound together like opposing tacklers on the line of scrimmage.
This is what interests Paul M. Nicholson, a visual artist and the director of the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College. His latest installation, “Lifelong Bills Fan,” blends his own grief about the death of his mother from cancer with one of the threads that connected them: watching Buffalo football.
He still remembers the team’s remarkable comeback against the Houston Oilers in 1993 in his hometown of Wellsville, about 75 miles from Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park.
“We did what a lot of people did: we went Christmas shopping at halftime,” Nicholson said. “They had all the TVs on in the store, and we had the radio (on) in the car. When we went home and watched the end, we were just going nuts.”
Decades later, his mother, Mary, faced a cancer diagnosis. Nicholson cared for her. They watched one last game together before her death in 2021.
Then Nicholson was left with the loss. But also, he had his mother’s medical supplies, including an IV pole and IV bags. He decided to fill them with Frank’s RedHot, a key ingredient in Buffalo wing sauce. He took a folding table — the kind Bills tailgaters have been known to jump through — and inverted it, turning it into a hospital bed.
The resulting scene is “Lifelong Bills Fan,” which also includes hot sauce snaking through a peristaltic pump, a small refrigerator filled with vials of what looks like carrots and celery and even a white lab coat with red stains on it.
“That’s part of what is convincing about it: everything in the installation is really a real object,” Nicholson said. “It has real utility. It’s something you really might see in an actual doctor’s office environment.”
The labels for this equipment read “Lifelong” in Bills red and blue, with Josh Allen’s name on the IV bags. The IV pole supporting the bag is the same one his mother used for her own treatment. Even the lights next to the “bed” — an inverted folding table modified with handrails Nicholson attached — resemble both stadium floodlights and the kind that might be seen in an operating room.
In each venue, there can be grief. And there’s hope.
That’s what struck Bleu Cease, the executive director of the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, where the installation is on view through May 9. He said Nicholson’s work brings together the cultural tradition of sports fans with the highly personal loss of a loved one. Both involve celebrating wins and mourning losses.
“The way Paul has melded those two things with great facility and irreverence — it’s a coping project,” Cease said. “It’s also quite humorous, and it brings levity to what can be serious subject matter.”
One of the most notable elements of the installation is a screen that shows Bills highlights as heart-rate blips next to obituary photos of lifelong fans. It’s a literal representation of the show’s core theme, but Nicholson said it also helps keep the scope of the project in perspective.
“It’s sort of a dicey proposition to have your emotional thing tied up with a sports team because you might be tempted to superimpose your feelings about your mother to the game or to the team,” he said. “(I’m) just trying to make sense of something for myself. That’s probably a good way to think about it for me.”
Among the lifelong fans on the screen is, of course, his mother, Mary. Nicholson’s screen also uses software to animate the photos of the deceased, giving them a kind of new life in the context of their relationship with Buffalo football.
“That was deeply unsettling, I have to say, to make that video and to reanimate my mother,” Nicholson admitted.
But it’s exactly the kind of thing his mom would’ve appreciated.
“She’s kind of the origin of this,” he said. “My mother had a great sense of humor, so she would have thought that was, I think, just fine and pretty funny.”
“Lifelong Bills Fan” is on view at Rochester Contemporary Art Center’s LAB Space through May 9. More information is available here.
