Tag: queerart | Femme Art Review

A Lesbian’s Heart Is an Ocean of Secrets: A Conversation with Kitty Rauth

*Power (Buried Series III)*, 2024. Original lighting fixture found in Grey Towers Castle basement, wiring, ground glass.
15”x15”x36”

By Matt Morris

I’m an angel…seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me?
–Djuna Barnes, Nightwood.

Sail away, sail away, sail away.
–Enya, Orinoco Flow.

Half a decade ago, Kitty Rauth (they/she) set sail from the comforts of their established art home in Philadelphia and washed ashore in Chicago, where they’ve unleashed a tempest of radical generosity, spirited discourse, and sensitively executed material inquiries into excess and loss at scales simultaneously personal and political. Upon completion of their MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they chartered their next adventure as an educator at the same institution, along with a heady mix of ambitious and frequent exhibitions of their own work, community organizing with the venerable alternative space Comfort Station in Chicago’s Logan Square, and facilitating various food and meal based happenings with their ongoing project Round Table as well as collaborations with foodie scenesters like TXA TXA CLUB.

Kitty is driven by an upbeat ‘sink or swim’ mentality across their endeavors, demonstrating an inclusive, supportive ethos that ‘rising tides lift all boats.’ They dream up futures with greater livability and pleasure for more than the status quo while integrating a circumspect problematizing of multiple pasts and histories. Last summer, when we exhibited together at LVL3 with Jacquelin Zazueta, I saw a shift in the core vocabulary of their approaches to objecthood, and the year and a half that followed has witnessed a flood of hybrid citations, technical curiosities, and well-researched expansions on discourses that their practice has centered.

Rauth’s most recent outing is Pleasure Cruise, a two-person exhibition with Ále Campos that was on display in September and October 2025 at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Centre. Together, they composed artifacts of queer life glistening from shadows and new shores. Campos offered annotations at the intersections of the sexual and social with installations of looped videos of their drag persona, Celeste, played variously from out of black plastic-curtained reconstruction of a back room gloryhole and yellow-washed urinal. Rauth complimented these vestiges with sensitive records of overwhelm, treading the waters of ecology and embodiment mapped across histories, fictions, and fantasy. Both artists have achieved lusty, heroic feats with the romantic inflections of devilish details and nuanced subtleties in a cultural moment when queerness is being abbreviated, flattened, and distorted at numerous political thresholds. I was honored to carry on some continuous conversations with Rauth about the work they prepared for Pleasure Cruise, as well as the deeper shifts in flow that have been giving shape to their studio research. What follows is compiled and condensed from those chats.

Kitty Rauth. *Put Away*, 2024. dimensions variable. found table, hinges, linen tablecloth, table setting for 5, ribbon.
photo credit: Lily Szymanski.

Matt Morris: While your practice spreads across myriad media and formats, ‘the object’ and its constitutive material states are often at the crux of your investigations: how are those approaches to matter, sculpture, thing-in-space useful for your articulation and analysis of desire and its capacities?

I think of your work often holding a residue of prior shifts in states of matter—melted wax candles, caramelized sugars, cast gelatins, shattered dinnerware, to note a few examples. What are the curiosities and conditions that preoccupy you at these thresholds of transformation?

In the case of your most recent works, several converging inquiries arrive at fluidity as crucial: do you interact with fluidity as a form? A mode?

Kitty Rauth: I want to tackle these first two questions together, because the concerns here are quite interwoven.

We live in the world, in uncertain times and fluctuating space, amongst real objects with real significance and human attachments. I’m concerned with objects’ and materials’ histories, and how they perform in the world. Performance in their usage, lack of usage, and inevitable state shift. I want my work to be a reminder that all things shift and change. Functionality and intention often fails, but through failure, we find change. It feels to me like a guidance, an adage, a prayer, much like Octavia Butler’s notion in Parable of the Sower that “God is change.”

All of this had recently led me to toy with the concept of fluidity. The power of undulating and/or crashing waves of a body of water, the endless overflow of a fountain, the tiniest tides in a glass of water. Truthfully, though, this water feels quite heavy. It both holds me afloat and weighs me down as I’m facing all that it holds.

Kitty Rauth. *Fan Fiction*, 2025. vinyl wall text. 60” x 60.”
Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim

MM: As I contemplated these liminal states, how they linger in your work, and especially interacting with your white-on-white wall vinyl piece Fan Fiction, I associated strongly to a passage of Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body that, if you and Femme Art Review will humor me, I’ll quote in snippets here, to see how you feel about it alongside your work:

No sunset m/y living one will illuminate the board where the name of your ship will be inscribed. I can tear from m/y forehead the violet bandeau that signals m/y liberty so dearly bought as for you all m/y dearest ones I ask you if you love m/e to let mm/e die one night far away in the sea…The flow becomes continuous, the foamy juice whitened in its eddies rises to the shoulders, the head emerging hair spread out, cheeks pale. Now the fingers tap continuously on the membranes. An agitation disturbs the flow of transparent juice fluid water. Abundant salty tears are shed into the flow, I drown, the water re-enters by m/y eye juice tears, in it I see blacks golds lights crystals scales…the thrust of our limbs floating on a great body of bluish lactic liquid, the water rises iodized translucent, it reaches the topmost branches of the last visible trees, it beats warmly against the legs of the swimming women, submerged up to m/y facial orifices I see that the liquid mass continues to increase with suspended mucus pearly elastic filaments, the golds the reds now have the same colour and consistence as the clouds, the rising wave debouches in the sky, farewell black continent of misery and suffering farewell ancient cities we are embarking for the shining radiant isles….
–Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body.

KR: Thank you, Matt. This feels like such a gift. This passage feels like it cracks open something that has been brewing in me with this show. The work meditates on the complications of pleasure, of what it provides, of what it distracts from, and of how it can implode on us. My personal relationship to pleasure lives in a very lesbian space— intimate, romantic, demanding, nuanced, occasionally all-encompassing, occasionally skittish. In what feels like a painful opposition to queer celebrations of pleasure, I am sometimes terrified of the way it can and has drowned us, and Wittig seems to have captured this complication so beautifully and poetically. I will be sitting on this for some time.

MM: There are a number of related critical facets in this fluidity that I want to tick off: annotate however you might associate and expand on them.

Wet.

KR: In the same breath, sensuous and miserable. Dripping, cold.

MM: Melt.

KR: Slow decay, disappearance, but also how you feel in love.

MM: Drown.

KR: Overwhelmed, all-encompassing, endless.

“I’ll never let go, Jack.”

MM: Overflow.

KR: Abundance, excess, indulgence.

Also,

A scene from Saltburn (2023) in which the Catton family is seated for a formal lunch in the wake of their son Felix’s unexpected death the night before. The curtains are drawn, bathing the dining room in a crimson light, and you watch as Felix’s sister Venetia despondently pours herself a glass of red wine, zoning out while the wine glass overflows onto the white tablecloth.

MM: Saltburn and Emerald Fennell’s films generally are interesting corollaries here, because they underscore the widening gap between the ways mainstream consciousness perceives sex as unmanageably perverse, bodily realities like menstruation as savage and taboo, and expressions of grief like the scene you’re mentioning as not only confounding but unmentionable, ineffable even. We enjoy the privileges of a fairly robust queer community in Chicago as a context for our goings on, but I wonder—given the cultural climate of our times—what it feels like to show work like you and Ále have done this fall? How do you perceive being perceived while demonstrating desire, queering pop culture, experimenting with legibility and visibilities as you have?

KR: Desire and our perception of sex, and how we use, interpret, or weaponize pop culture, have always been temperature checks for the political and cultural climate. You are right, we are very lucky to live and work in a community where the sexuality and queerness of the work in this show, to my knowledge, hasn’t sounded any alarm bells (not to say it wouldn’t in other iterations or with larger audiences or farther reaches, as we’ve seen in the recent censorship of Sally Mann’s work).

In this realm, my work allows some flexibility in the perceiving—yes, it’s work that engages pleasure, queer interpretations of beloved pop culture, nods to climate change, etc., but as you mention, I am playing with legibility in a way that demands attention. And I have found throughout the run of this show that, honestly, not that many people are paying attention! Those who are “in” see the work deeply and share their own experiences, anecdotes, and concerns. Those who aren’t push me back towards the former group, so that we can weather it all together.

MM: For as long as I’ve known you and your work, I’ve consistently felt an intense reckoning with loss, mortality, and death as coextensive to particularly queer modes of pleasure, care, and embodiment as you describe them, in material and in form. Can you narrate how you understand those mordant dimensions, how and why they came into your approaches to making?

KR: The first time death entered my making was through its innate connection to fatness and disability. Going into grad school, I was exploring the roots of fatphobia and found myself deeply involved in Terror Management Theory, the idea that we are always, consciously or subconsciously, trying to escape death through rules, structure, and legacy. But I grew up in a household where death was an accepted part of our story, and with a grandmother who was a death doula. For my whole adult life, I’ve been in community with legions of queer people whose shared history is so entangled with death that we have had to develop a very different and sometimes explosive relationship to pleasure and existence. The promise of death makes us choose differently, and I think my work is often living in the space of that promise.

Kitty Rauth. *Belly of the Beast, a World to Unearth*, 2024. Manufactured onlay, spray paint, latex paint
24”x36.”

MM: Your newest work may be the most understated I’ve seen you produce (compared to more baroque presentations in Chicago and Philadelphia) while also referring to really intense modes of affect. Were you aware of the development of this relative economy of gesture as a means of expressing some of the biggest feelings in the work to date?

KR: I have used these big flourishing motifs in my past work to point toward excess, but also because I really love those over-the-top architectural gestures that hold history and tell the complicated stories of wealth, class, abundance, et al.

Over the last year or two, I have felt a schism in myself. I don’t necessarily feel like I need “all that”- I have significantly pared down my life, my style, my social circle, and have in turn had the “Who even am I anymore?” existential bug out. But in all of these spaces, including my studio practice, it has allowed me to get to the root of the matter and focus on the one or two gestures that feel reflective of some internal reckonings. To be clear though, none of it was ever a conscious choice, but rather I think a reflection of what I’ve been developing in my 30s.

Kitty Rauth. *As the water rises*, 2025. Table, linen damask tablecloth, linen napkin, handblown champagne flute, fountain pump, champagne
38” x 16” x 16.” Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim

MM: With glassware of various kinds, both holding and demonstrating breach/fragmentation, containment and interiority, but also escape and leakage are operative in these works. The fountain component of As the water rises in particular calls attention to both the holding as well as the breach and overflow. Can you speak about vessels and holding, what is inside/contained?

KR: The vessels in this body of work are both drinking glasses, meant to hold liquid for consumption. As the water rises contains a champagne glass on a small, dressed table. The glass continuously overflows, pointing towards indulgence or decadence; an endless over-pouring, it is uncontrolled and unceasing. As if almost through magic or a ghostly force, it is endlessly filled. Through quieter means, the water glass in Unsinkable commands space simply through its contents. Filled with glacier water, there is ownership and a cavalier one at that. It beckons a curious, forbidden sip.

Kitty Rauth. *WSL1yd*. 4x scale historical recreation of White Star Line flag in linen, canvas, rope, pulley, cleat
128” x 53”, dimensions vary &
Kitty Rauth. *Maiden Voyage*, 2025
single-channel video 2min 30 sec loop. Cinematography and editing by Ruby Que
Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim.

MM: In the video Maiden Voyage, 2025, you ‘christen’ your own body by breaking bottles against it as is conventional for maiden voyages of sea vessels—your form becomes ship, form, and an additional vessel within this body of work, but one suggestively disoriented from biological determinisms and carrying offspring, instead embarking toward what? Doom and shipwreck? Cruising? Longing?

KR: There is an amount of not knowing involved in the nautical tradition of breaking a champagne bottle on the hull of a ship on its maiden voyage. Not knowing what’s to come, not knowing how it will go. If a ship is a body, a vessel, it holds memory and that memory takes time to accrue and embed itself. The captain may have expectations, but the vessel can’t yet understand.

For me, the gesture of breaking bottle after bottle holds a simultaneous hope and hopelessness. A prayer, almost, that things will be alright, as torturous as it feels. There is no roadmap for where we’re supposed to go from here, for how to reorient ourselves to whatever new horror is next. We’re just sailing forth towards the unknown.

MM: A tenet of queer life, if not existence generally, is doubt, right?

Transgressive, suppressed sexualities call attention to the total lack of a map or manual for navigating becoming ourselves. You’ve spent years noticing shifts in material states and reflecting on those in your work; it sounds like you’re approaching life transitions and change in similar ways.

Kitty Rauth. *Untitled (Wilted Series #4)*, 2023
Manipulated found glass, houseflies
12” x 6” x 5.”

KR: It’s true. I seem to be constantly thinking about queer mapping, navigation, and orientation, and a huge looming cruise ship felt like an apt object for projection.

MM: For WSL1yd you recreated one of the flags flown above the ocean liner RMS Titanic on its first and only (incomplete) voyage. In the ways I also cite from available histories in my work, I’m very influenced by the radical interventions being made by folks like the political scientist and historical interpreter Cheyney McKnight, who revisit recorded histories and artifact as a starting place for counter-narratives that contest monolithic (and patriarchal, white supremacist, heterosexist) power structures around how we orient to past and future. In your own interpretations of the flag piece, how did fantasy and fabulation, alterity and re-interpretation come into play?

KR: This piece started as a joke with myself to create a huge red flag, a colloquial kind of warning flown on the ship itself. The White Star Line’s logo, this red flag with a white star flowing in the wind, was imprinted all over the ship, and I dug into the Titanic Museum’s archives to look for real-life representations of it. I found archival photos of an intact version made in the 1940s, which I imagine would have also flown on the Titanic. I was shocked at the size, as the original flag was only 1 yard long, a fact written onto the strip of canvas attaching it to rope. A 3’ flag for an 883’ ship was just ridiculously small to me, and the owning company’s flag display seems to me like the swinging dick of the ship, no?

While we’re on the subject of counter-narratives, though, I found this incredible piece of Black American oral folk tradition that tells the story of the sole Black man aboard the Titanic, Shine. Although Jim Crow laws barred any Black staff, crew, or passengers from boarding the Titanic, the story of Shine documents a Black crew member trying to warn the captain of the sinking ship. After being ignored, Shine escapes the sinking ship and heroically swims to land to enjoy a Seagram’s Seven at the bar while his white counterparts drown. Langston Hughes reinterpreted this into a written poem called “Shine and the Titanic”, and I was really excited to read how the ripples of this historical event have been held onto over time through storytelling amongst Black communities.

MM: The way/s you’ve used WSL1yd as a kind of architectural partition and curtain feels both very queer coded—following on curtain-like interventions by Liz Collins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Millie Wilson, Allyson Mitchell, Macon Reed, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Tom Burr, to name just a few—and also dis/orienting in the shifts in scale of the object and from the context of a ship to a gallery interior. Curtains, folds, flaps, partitions, and thresholds have some overt erotic legibilities: what did this work and its installation mean for you?

KR: I think this installation was directly in conversation with “rabbithole,” a video installed inside a glory hole by Ále Campos that sort of introduces the show. In both pieces, there is an ask for the audience to look past or move around the partition to participate in something that feels forbidden. The flag acts as a curtain to cover and mask the video of myself breaking cast sugar champagne bottles over my back while naked in a seemingly endless body of water. It felt important that the viewer is moving into a different space where they can more privately experience the work from. Rather than anonymity, it’s asking for closeness, for intimacy, for grace.

MM: It seems to me that you’ve widened the scope of your research to consider the ecological and industrial dimensions of culture, along with your sensitivities to history and myth-making, class struggle, and biopolitics, which are ongoing. One way I see you contending with all these intersectionalities is in complicating the (lost?) love object into hybrid, multiple positions. For instance, methodologies for queer love and care advance into a varied array of questions concerning environmental tourism, pleasure cruises, and not only the historical incident of the Titanic sinking in 1912, but also the interlocutor of James Cameron’s 1997 film adaptation of that event. What all were you managing together as this work came into focus?

KR: I’ve always been obsessed with the RMS Titanic and it’s sinking since I was young. Titanic (1997) was one of the first “adult” movies I can remember watching– I was 6 when it came out in theaters, and I remember my parents getting a babysitter so they could see it in theaters. I was upset that I wasn’t allowed to join, but as soon as it came out on VHS, I replayed the double-tape on my parents’ TV over and over again. While putting together the show, Ále and I spoke about the movie holding the shared space in our lives as a flashpoint for both of our sexual and romantic awakenings.

I watch this a few times a year at least and track other artists working within this history (Claudia Bitran, Dynasty Handbag, among others), although the Titanic often seems to be the butt of the joke. When I would talk to people about making work about the Titanic, they always laugh as if we all understood that Titanic art cannot be serious or at the very least, must engage camp as an overarching sensibility. At points, I even framed it this way myself because these reactions convinced me the only access point was through humor. But the work came out of me in the best way I know how.

MM: How do you think about the love, pleasure, and longing that figure into, say, sexual orientation, and how they exist in fandoms, particularly in adolescent and developmental phases of maturity?

KR: The joke that got me starting to think about gender-flipping in the short form fanfiction I wrote in conjunction with this show goes back to 2016, when I used the Femme-Butch Scale meme format (referenced below) to track my proposal that Young Leo is actually better viewed as a lesbian. I was 24, just off the peak of my deep investment in the One Direction fandom where I was reading sensual and emotional Larry Stylinson (Harry Styles x Louis Tomlinson) fanfictions written largely by 20-something lesbians. I don’t think this was a coincidence, especially since young twinks often read as gay women (lol) and was undoubtedly the way I found myself in the trenches of Online Directioners. And for me, this felt like a safe place to explore different emotional tones of queer romance while stuck in the very straight culture of my undergrad, without putting my heart on the line before I was ready.

Femme-Butch Scale: Young Leo (intervention on meme template by Kitty Rauth, 2017)

MM: I think fandoms have been a stalking horse for the parasocial turn, self-consciously so, with self-organized fan conventions starting in the 1930s and becoming more widespread in the 60s and 70s. How would you describe the experience of identifying with characters and properties in, say, Titanic?

KR: I think sometimes there is a moment when a celebrity almost becomes synonymous with the character they play, and that’s when I say, “Okay, fair game.” For me, this is “Young Leo” (who feels like a separate entity from Leonardo DiCaprio the Actor, if you follow) and Jack Dawson. With the Young Leo Femme-Butch Scale as a jumping off point, my rewatches became more and more about reading into a sapphic dynamic between Jack and Rose—the immediate attachment, the secret and forbidden love, the way Jack shows Rose a different potential for her life. And Jack’s hair!!! Simultaneously, in my own life, I was soaking in new political realities, learning ways of recognizing and interacting with the world that were so different from how I had grown up in polite east coast expectations. In a dramatic flourish of self-fantasy, I always insert myself as Rose DeWitt Bukater with Jack Dawson as my love interest. Since, I have tried to convince many trans mascs in my life to adopt his hairstyle, to varying degrees of success.

MM: How does fangrrrling and identifying in these ways relate to self-determination and the fashioning of a self?

KR: My favorite game with my BFF is assigning all of our friends’ personalities to different characters, like a never-ending Buzzfeed quiz. I am always projecting myself into pop culture. It’s hard not to imagine how I would act or react in a situation. But most of all, it is an opportunity to recognize and come to terms with aspects of myself to allow for future meditation. This way of engaging with media can be helpful in understanding oneself, figuring out what feels good and fits well, or what to shed to grow into a new version.

Kitty Rauth. *Set Piece for an Institution*, 2024
wood, drywall, screen-printed cotton, liquid starch, manufactured molding, sandbags, fabric
8’ x 9.5’ x 3.’

MM: I think you know this, but for our readers’ sake, I’ll again confess to you that I’ve never seen Titanic. Do you think it’s important to have done in order to be able to appreciate or understand the world you’ve been developing with it as a reference? If so, I propose pausing our exchange for me to screen it.

KR: The biggest understanding of the film one must have to really appreciate the fanfiction I wrote involves the question of whether or not the narrator is hallucinating her lover. It felt like an opportunity to question what she needs and what this short but intense relationship gave her. In the movie, Jack wins his ticket in a poker game just before the boat sets sail, so there is no record of his existence. When telling her story 85 years later, Rose is not immediately believed that he was real or that it happened. Yes, this love affair was important, but what lasted was her freedom, the way Jack showed Rose that she had agency over her own life, that things could look different, and that it was worth the sacrifice.

Regardless, I would love to host a movie night with snacks and pastries this winter so that you can truly understand. ♥️

MM: It’s a date!

Forgive me, this might be a messy thought still: I’m thinking about the resources that support queer and other dissenting, alternative approaches to living—Virginia Woolf’s 500 guineas and a room of one’s own, meaning the means and space to be who and what you want to be able to make what you need to make. I’ve been reading Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians and have been struck by how she underscores the ways notable queer women at the end of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries inherited wealth from their fathers and invested it into queer community, art, and writing from their peers, and in facilitating ways of being that went against dominant norms. Meanwhile, in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she analyzes and fabulates toward near total elisions of queer femme and trans masc people of color in modern history, with the rate of invisibility proportionate to a lack of economic means. Class, poverty, systemic racism, and criminalization mark the possibilities of supportive queer communities and the historical record of them quite differently, dependent on circumstances. Hartman’s indispensable work shows that the capacities to love and fuck and thrive persist despite the most challenging of conditions, but given the upstairs/downstairs class divides in Titanic and adjacent narratives, the tensions and subordinations within the LGBTQIA+, and the ongoing erasures of women desiring women, or even women desiring at all, I wondered if this zone of thinking figures into your inquiries.

KR: I love hearing this report back from Diana Souhami because the answer to all my inquiries is always that the lesbians are holding it down! During the run of Pleasure Cruise, I had some peers point out the stark differences of priorities within the queer community, and how proximity to privilege and power changes one’s relationship to others and to the ways in which we seek pleasure. I’m interested in the connections you’re drawing to an upstairs/downstairs dynamic in the Titanic that feels translatable to the striations of queer personhood. Those striations, or maybe more clearly letters within the LGBTQIA* alphabet, tend to react differently to power and seemingly relate via their social status within our larger society more than their economic one. Much more to think about here.

__________________________________________________

Readers can encounter more of Kitty Rauth’s work and goings on at kittyrauth.com and on Instagram @_sugarm0mmy_.

The Gift of Time: In Conversation with Holly Timpener

Holly Timpener, Our Bodies in the Pandemic, Montreal, Feminist Media Studio, 2021. Richard Mugwaneza.

By Brody Weaver

Holly Timpener is a non-binary performance artist, facilitator, and PhD Candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Concordia University. Their extensive body of performance art addresses themes of trauma, resistance, and transformation, particularly as they overlap with their own lived experiences. Making use of the body, duration, and minimal materials, there is something classic and pure about the performance work that Timpener creates. In Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), where I have been living since 2018, this branch of performance art is less common than it’s more hybridized and interdisciplinary forms.

What draws me to Holly’s work are the containers they create through collaborative performance-as-research projects. Discussed in depth in this interview, Timpener has brought together more than 50 trans and non-binary artists to create performance art addressing trauma, gender, and transformation, and has managed to foster intentional spaces for their creation and reception across physical and digital space.

Pi*llOry, cleverly appropriating it’s name from a medieval device designed to secure one’s body in place for public humiliation and abuse, took place through five iterations in Toronto, Ontario (and online) between 2019 and 2020.

Epicenter Revolutions, an ongoing project forming the core of Timpener’s work as a PhD student, began in 2021 and has featured five iterations across Montréal (Quebec), Saint John (New Brunswick), Kumeyaay (San Diego), Poznań (Poland), Berlin (Germany), Mexico City (Mexico), and was recently manifested as the exhibition Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations at Eastern Bloc in partnership with Fierté Montréal (Montréal Pride).

I met Holly in the way most great connections are formed–a mutual friend saying, “Hey, I think you’d like what this person is doing. You should talk to them,” and for this, I have Grey Piitaapan Muldoon to thank.

This interview transcription is an edited version of Holly and I’s two-hour conversation, which took place on the morning of June 20th, 2025. Note that Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations is discussed here before the exhibition had taken place.

* * * * *

Brody:

To get us started, I would love to hear about how you began creating performance art. What was your catalyst?

Holly:

I danced and I went to theatre school, but I have a real problem with authority. Autonomy is a big value in my life, and I felt like it wasn’t being met in a theatre and dance context. I was searching for something where I could still perform and meld my life into the performance so that they weren’t so separate.

In 2011, I met Sylvie Tourangeau, who is one of the core members of the Montreal-based performance group called the TouVA Collective, with Victoria Stanton and Anne Bérubé. Sylvia was doing a performance workshop on Toronto Island, and it changed my life. She has been my mentor ever since. Some of the things I’ll be talking about today, I note back to this workshop, because it created my foundation as a performance artist and facilitator. When I opened the door to enter the workshop, I was hit by a wall of magic. I joined the circle with Sylvie and the other participants, and I was ready to learn skills. I was ready to learn technique, which comes from my theatre background. Sylvia’s teachings are open to letting people extend their life experiences into the art that they create. I wasn’t ready for the kind of radical openness she gave me, this permission to look inside and trust that I knew what I needed to do.

Holly Timpener, Trans Bible Readings, Saint John, Epicenter Three, 2022. Corey Negus.

Brody:

A lot of people have stories of an influential teacher, mentor, or role model who changed their path forever–it’s informative to know who influences artists in their early stages. It’s clear to me that you are a performance artist before you are an academic, and I mean that as a compliment.

Holly:

I take it as one.

Brody:

What you’re saying about performance art as an accessible entry point for theorizing about lived experience and embodiment is so powerful and real. That’s its special power, and what makes performance a unique form of art.

I want to ask you about how that formative workshop experience influenced your approach to the collaborative projects you’ve organized, called Pi*llOry and Epicenter Revolutions. Can you describe these projects for readers who may not be familiar? They’re quite expansive with multiple iterations, locations, and participating artists.

Holly:

My curiosity and techniques for performance art developed through taking part in workshops, constantly in group settings, and I found that is where I grew. Right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was craving queer and trans community, and performance community, those spaces of trust. I’ve been out for most of my life, and my experiences within these workshops were with queer people, and that’s how I developed trust and deepened relationships. Because of my history with trauma, I wanted to understand the relationship between queerness and trauma, which I had been questioning in my own art practice. Entering my master’s program, I wanted to further understand the relationship between performance and trauma, so I created Pi*llOry. Pi*llOry was an invitation for queer folks to perform trauma to shift it into something else.

I was curious how performance can help form queer networks of healing. There were five iterations of this project, with the last being online, and all of the artists who participated were shifting trauma in different ways. While I was researching, I became interested in how performance art transforms the self, not physically, but internally. Transforming trauma, and queer trauma specifically, has an impact on our internal sensations and internal experience. I was looking for existing resources focusing on the intersection of performance art and internal transformation, but I couldn’t find anything. Of course, external transformation is a huge part of performance art. They go hand in hand.

As Pi*llOry was coming to an end, I was in love with working collaboratively and feeling so fulfilled. These collaborations and groups helped get me through COVID–we were there for each other, online, and we were checking in on each other throughout the whole process. From the first iteration, we always kept in contact, and performers from previous iterations would attend the later iterations, and it was a real family. That was wonderful.

Leena Raudvee, Teetering on the Edge, Toronto Media Arts Centre, Pi*llOry One, 2019. Aedan Crooke.

I wanted to create something that could address internal transformations through performance. Thinking back to my first workshop with Sylvie, something we said every day, multiple times a day after a performance, experience, or what have you–“I was transformed.” All the time. How was that? How was that experience for you? “I was transformed.” It’s funny, looking back on it. It could be so cliche, and perhaps it was. I have no problems with cliches. If it was said so much, why could I not read anything about it? Internal transformations initiated through performance art have helped me learn so much about my own gender identity, and I suspect that other trans and non-binary artists have had the same experience.

My response was to create the project Epicenter Revolutions so that we could create a family again, and continue the family created in Pi*llOry. It started in 2021, with the last iteration happening in 2024. The project travelled to Poznan, Poland, Berlin, Germany, and Mexico City, and some participants were in Guadalajara, Mexico, and San Diego, California. We were lucky to have participants all over the world who have different experiences of gender, politically and personally, which affect their gender and internal transformations. A lot of the work addressed trauma in different ways, so it has remained a through-line between the two projects.

Brody:

Jumping back to Pi*llOry, queer performers invited queer audiences who knew they would be witnessing work intended to shift trauma. You created a semi-closed space where the performers and the audience are signing on to something specific. I think that’s key to understanding the success of Pi*llOry, and in turn Epicenter. We’ve all had experiences where we are moving around an art gallery and encounter an intense artwork that we were not prepared to see. This brings forward a conversation about emotional safety and “trigger warnings,” if you will. This is a common topic in art spaces today, to which I think a lot of old school feminists and performance artists might say, “I don’t really care about any of that. The work is meant to be an affront.” At the same time, I think the container that you’re creating is intentional and wise. Can you talk more about your practice of inviting participants and witnesses into your projects and how you approach creating that container?

Claudia Edwards, Regenesis, Pi*llOry Two, Kensington Market, Toronto, 2019. Chris Blanchnot.

Holly:

I call myself a facilitator, but it is important to me to act without any kind of hierarchy. I consider myself an equal participant in all the projects. I separate myself as the academic who has the opportunity and privilege granted to me by an institution to act as the facilitator. In both Pi*llOry and Epicenter, I put out calls for participation through social media and people who participated often helped me disseminate the call. Since performance art is quite a niche category, it was important for me that anybody who wanted to participate could be in the project, regardless of whether or not they have performed before. I never asked for a CV.

Each iteration is structured differently because it has to suit the needs of each individual. There’s a lot of flexibility and creativity in the ways the journey might manifest leading up to the event itself. I try to facilitate in an open way so that everyone feels included and encouraged to participate in the way that works for them, while maintaining a sense of community and trust. This helps the community grow and has allowed us to become close to one another. When queer folks come together and are invited to talk about their experiences, that container holds us.

The second important part is the invitation–who are we going to invite? What I’ve asked the participants of both projects to engage in is deep and sensitive work. Throughout our meetings together, we talked about traumas, our experiences with gender and developed a container of trust. How do we transfer that into inviting witnesses? The difference between an audience and a witness becomes important in this context. Where the event takes place is equally important, choosing not theatres, but locations that would instigate an environment of containment and intimacy. There is a sensitivity within performance art of knowing that the witness holds responsibility, and the spaces that we chose were important in creating that. In Pi*llOry, there wasn’t a huge call out for an audience–we invited queer witnesses, we invited people personally. To witness actively, rather than “You’re here to perform for me,” we’re creating spaces where we’re allowing each other to embody something that’s very personal.

Racquel Rowe, Washing Rice, Pi*llOry Two, Kensington Market, Toronto, 2019. Chris Blanchnot.

Brody:

Thanks for breaking that down on the back end of facilitating Pi*llOry and Epicenter. It’s valuable to document the processes that create events and showcases so that we can continually learn from one another. What you’ve shared makes me think of how these projects that you’re organizing are situated in a rich lineage of queer and trans performance culture: cabaret, drag, music, and all the oral and performative traditions that we have. Historically, who has known that these things are occurring? Who knows where to go, and when? Beyond getting the right people in the room, who shows up can have severe consequences, for example, in the case of police raids of bars and other performance spaces. In Pi*llOry, the iterations happened in Toronto, right?

Holly:

Yeah, it was all in Toronto. Except for the online iteration, which was a collaboration with GLAD Day Bookstore (the queer bookstore in Toronto), because they were administering a micro-grant program for artists to be able to continue their practices during the COVID-19 Pandemic. They were our hub, and they were able to support me with the technical aspects of the online iteration, which I am very thankful for. The artists were all in different places – Santiago Tamayo Soler and myself were in Montreal, Aisha Bentham was in Toronto, and Rahki was in Mexico.

Brody:

From my perspective as someone who began medical transition during the pandemic, I witnessed and participated in a resurgence of trans culture and embodiment that happened during that time, primarily and often by necessity, in online spaces. Both performance-as-research projects we’re discussing had at least one iteration purely online, and while someone might see that pivot as a compromise, I think that it reflects the moment in trans and non-binary culture from which they emerged.

Epicenter appears to be more complex, with iterations happening in different places across the globe. I feel like you built capacity with Pi*llOry and worked on a grander scale with Epicenter. Can you talk more about Epicenter, and break down what it was like to take your approach to different cultural and political contexts?

Holly:

Epicenter is different from Pi*llOry, particularly with how it concerns the witness and act of witnessing. I realized in my own practice: I don’t need a witness to perform. When I perform, I enter into a state of awareness with a specific intention, engaging in a kind of internal listening. I don’t need anybody to witness me to know that I have switched into a state of awareness, turning my attention focus on my own sensations.

Part of the invitation for Epicenter asked the participating artists to likewise turn inwards during performances, to listen to what is happening inside of themselves. This raises a question: do we need witnesses? In Pi*llOry, we would take turns performing one after another, aside from a few durational pieces, but in Epicenter, the works are explicitly durational. We performed for four to six hours alongside one another, engaged in internal listening in a shared space. Even though we performed individually, we came to the realization that we were also each other’s witnesses.

Holly Timpener, One Piece at a Time, Montreal, Epicenter Revolutions Two, 2022. Richard Mugwaneza.

Several Epicenter interactions took place during COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, so the question of witnesses was concerned with safety and minimizing transmission of the virus as well. The first Epicenter took place at the Montreal LGBTQ+ Centre, a large space that allowed for physical distance between performers and attendees. At this iteration, we had invigilators, which is somebody who stays with a performer throughout a durational work to watch out for physical hazards, dangers, and to help maintain our immuno-accessibility protocols.

In second Epicenter iteration, we performed in our own physical spaces: Aquarius Funkk performed in their house in Guadalajara, Grey Piitaapan Muldoon performed in a studio space in Halifax, joey eddy performed in a gallery space, and I performed in a garage. We were connected through a shared video call, not publicly available online, but projected in each place for IRL witnesses to see the different performances. We invited people to attend who we knew and trusted, but it became more about witnessing one another than having external witnesses, or an audience, so to speak. Engaged in intense inward and collective listening, we were not trying to sell seats. It wasn’t part of the process.

Grey Piitaapan Muldoon, Road Songs for Fugitives, Halifax, Epicenter Revolutions Two, 2022. Grey Piitapaan Muldoon.

However, in Poznań, possibly because there are so many people and because I was working out of a queer cafe during my time there, we did promote it more publicly in the cafe itself. If anybody wants to go to a queer hub in Poland, it’s Poznań. One of the reasons I wanted to travel with Epicenter was my curiosity about how people’s lived experiences with politics in different parts of the world have affected their gender identities and gender experiences. The participating artists and I spoke about how we felt safe inviting people from this cafe, and I had been there writing my dissertation, so I got to know some of the regulars, some of whom came to witness each performance. I think this pivot speaks to the reality that queers know how to witness queers. We know how to enter a space and understand that performing requires a great deal of care, and often we know this without being told. It’s a lovely thing about queer community that touches me and has touched both Pi*llOry and Epicenter. It felt like we were extending our family a little bit.

Brody:

The durational aspect of Epicenter is important, where you’re all performing alongside one another for an extended period. There are many art forms that break down the divide between art and life so severely that it can become hard to distinguish between the two, and durational performance is definitely one of them. It creates heightened senses, intense and sometimes painful physical sensations, and a tension between time and the body which likewise occur in different creative, spiritual, and even sexual practices. I’m curious to hear more about the relationship between the subject of internal transformation and its chosen expression in durational performance: what do you think are the ingredients that make it particularly suited for addressing the subject of internal transformation?

Holly:

I think one thing that often gets muddied is durational performance and endurance performance art. Duration has to do with time. There has to be a curiosity about what time will do to your intention. In endurance performance, it is more about pushing boundaries and borders, especially within the body, which time can influence but is not necessarily a foundational element. Over the past few years, it’s rare for me to perform anything that’s longer than four hours. I’m drawn to it because extending time pushes your boundaries of awareness and pushes your capacity to understand and meet yourself. You get bored, you get tired, you get disinterested, and you ask yourself: what is it that is making me keep going?

That is what I think is interesting, when you hit that border of, “Why am I continuing this?” That’s when magic happens, and for myself and some of the participating artists, that’s when internal transformation happens. That’s when you start uncovering new things about yourself. Time is a gift.

I connect internal transformation to gender identity because people who do not conform to binaries of gender are constantly performing different selves to fit into different social spaces, which in turn affects one’s internal sensations. It happens fast, and it’s not necessarily something that always feels pleasant. It’s tiring. It’s not something that you are often able to spend time investigating. Despite how valuable time is for self-discovery, we don’t often ask ourselves: What is this doing to me? What are these internal shifts? How is this affecting my experience of self? To experience the gift of time permits you to uncover aspects of yourself, some of which you’ll want to keep and others you’ll want to leave behind. At the same time, you might find power in meeting the edges of your own boredom, frustration, and exhaustion. It’s not always an amazing, “A-hah!” moment. It can be more like, “I have something inside of me that’s special, that’s mine, that’s unique, that’s powerful.” That can be harnessed for yourself and to support the community of people around you who are going through their own internal transformations. After doing this for five hours, radical empathy for yourself and the community of performers can rise up. Hopefully, that empathy can be transferred into other spaces beyond performance and Epicenter.

Aquarius Funkk, Untitled, Guadalajara, Mexico. Epicenter Revolutions Two, 2022. Sky Vermanei.

Beyond creating a durational performance, Epicenter was about embodying aspects of your gender identity. This was very different than Pi*llOry, where embodied trauma was the subject. In Pi*llOry, the invitation was not to relive, re-perform, or re-traumatize yourself. It was to use the space of performance to pick at and pull apart an aspect of a traumatic experience to intentionally shift it into something new. In Epicenter, each artist’s curiosity created their own performance intentions from their lived experience of gender.

Brody:

What do you think was the result of specifically looking at internal transformations of gender for the participants? It’s likely impossible to summarize with so many different artists, but if you have any examples or highlights to share, I would love to hear them.

Holly:

There was an artist in the Poznań iteration of Epicenter, Pipeq Szczęsnowicz, who performed a work where she had a trunk of clothes in front of her and wore noise-cancelling headphones. With each song that played into her ears, she would change her outfit and dance to the song. They were looking at performing different selves, and how you perform different selves, but rather than in the external world of others’ perceptions, they were celebrating the multiple selves within them that were all beautiful. Once their performance had concluded, they shared with me that they did not want to stop dancing. They did not want it to end. Through the performance, they realized that they did not get to have that amount of joy and fun in other parts of their life. I think for her, through this celebration of herself, she came to honour those parts of herself and recognize the need to find ways to continue that beyond the performance itself.

Pipeq Szczesnowicz, Untitled, Poznan, Poland, Epicenter Six, 2023. Mattia Spich.

Damaris Baker was a performer in the first Epicenter, and Damaris has had a long journey with their physical appearance as a non-binary person. They have a beard while still having a somewhat femme exterior. During COVID, they were diagnosed with breast cancer, so they were really interested in death and how it could relate to an internal listening of gender. In their performance, they had mounds of dirt, cat claws, and hair. They glued the hair onto their body, and they were singing to dirt and bones, shaking with this exterior shell of dirt and hair. They wrote about how duration was a big part of that work, and how it confronted feelings of shame. I remember they shared their intention to add hair to their body to resist others’ discomfort in their interview: “You don’t want to see hair on my body. Well, I’m going to glue more on, and how do you like that?” They told a story about a passerby who had told her that she should stay at home: “Why would you leave the house with that hair on your face?” Gluing hair on her body was a way to help lay that shame to rest.

In the fourth iteration of Epicenter, Eva Gonzales-Ruskiewicz, who performed in San Diego, also talked about experiences with shame. They did this piece where they felted an outline of their body onto pieces of a trans flag, and they decided to be topless. They felt shame during the performance, this feeling of “I’m not trans enough, my body is not going to be seen as trans enough. I’m working with this trans flag, but I have a chest that doesn’t signify trans.” In their reflection and interview, they described how they invited a few close friends and their partner as witnesses, and emphasized how they held space and witnessed as an act of care. This, they felt, helped them transform that shame through feeling held by their community.

Eva Gonzalez, Rewilding, San Diego, CA, Epicenter Four, 2022. Naomi Nadreau.

Those are some wonderful examples of how internal transformations about gender manifested through durational performance in Epicenter. Often, failure or unexpected issues can come up during a performance, and while this may feel uncomfortable at first, working through it and sticking with failure makes it easier to confront failure in everyday life.

Brody:

The examples you’ve relayed make me think of something you shared earlier–queer and trans people want to speak about their experiences, especially in a safe environment. I have a background as a facilitator as well, but primarily in social and community programming where direct conversation and verbal engagement are more common. When I’m facilitating in those spaces, I notice that there are always some attendees who don’t participate or who are not being given the right environment to serve their full presence. They might be having a hard time finding their voice or the right moment to jump in. Hearing about how you utilize performance as an arts-based method for community building and empowerment, creating the conditions for queer and trans people to see and be seen outside of the constraints of language, highlights performance as a more accessible and neurodivergent way to engage groups of people. It sounds like you’ve been able to help people find their power, and that’s an amazing gift to share. I think you should be proud of that.

Holly:

Thank you. Beyond accessibility, it is meaningful that the form of performance we’re engaging in Epicenter and Pi*llOry is not a solo endeavour: it is intentionally collaborative. I was gifted with early experiences of learning about performance art and myself through collaborative settings in workshops and community settings. Sometimes, I think that my performance-as-research projects are a selfish act–I crave that community, I need it, and I’m doing it for myself as well. This doesn’t just go one way. The artists in both projects have given me a space where I get to talk about my experiences and work through traumas, questions, and curiosities. I would never have been able to do that without each and everyone one of the people who have taken part in these projects. I would not be the person I am today without the containers they helped create.

Brody:

In my own life, I’ve often said that creating art has been one of the most healing things I’ve ever done. It far outpaces what formal therapy has ever done for me. It is transformational to create art from inside of yourself, collaborate with others, and have that be witnessed in the world.

You have a project alongside Fierté Montréal (Montréal Pride), the exhibition Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations at Eastern Bloc from August 1st–9th, 2025, with a performance event on the 7th. Can you tell me more about this project and how it extends or adapts your typical working method with Epicenter?

Holly:

Most of the artists in Epicenter are interdisciplinary artists, meaning they work in multiple mediums, including and other than performance art itself. The Epicenter performances were documented through photography, but we lost the documentation for the fifth iteration because the photographer’s roof caved in during a rainstorm, damaging his equipment. I saw it as a blessing in disguise, because it made us rethink documenting the project through photography alone. Obviously, we love having images of our work and need them for grants, funding agencies, and applications, but the performances’ focus on internal transformations raised a question of the appropriateness of a third party creating the documentation. We asked ourselves: How can we flip the traditional script of others documenting trans people, and create our own documentation of our own experiences? On a larger scale, there’s wonderful and challenging conversations to be had about trans people, documentation, and control. For example, the rigorous documentation required to access gender affirming health care.

I’m honoured that the participating artists have chosen to put faith in Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations and use it as an opportunity to continue our conversations about how best to create a record, document, or extension of the five iterations of the project. We all have different ideas and methods for engaging documentation, and these will make up the exhibition at Eastern Bloc in Montreal, including mediums like sound, video, installation, and ephemera. For example, Eva Gonzalez, the artist who used felting in their performance, has subscribed to major newspapers in the United States and has been clipping headlines and articles that talk about trans rights. Eva is creating a hand-drawn film from these materials which will be projected in the gallery, and the clippings will be present for gallery attendees and collaborators alike to create a papier-mâché sculpture that will hang in front of the projection to distort and reframe the headlines.

Another Epicenter artist in Poland, Kai Milačić, used a full-length mirror to paint and continually repaint their reflection during their performance, resulting in this layered depiction of themself and the internal listening they were engaged in. They have continued this process since the iteration in Poland, engaged in daily self-observation and self-portraiture, and these will be part of the exhibition.

Kai Milačić, Transition of the line, Poznan, Poland, Epicenter Six, 2023. Skye Wilk.

Damaris Baker, whose performance featured gluing hair on their body, is going to be doing another participatory action involving dirt and a recording of themself singing, alongside a space for viewers to write down what the sounds bring out of them. While listening, people will be able to interact with dirt and feel their own internal sensations, and maybe even transformations. Freddie Wulf from the Berlin iteration is sending their top surgery band aids to display.

Since August of last year, we’ve been discussing and asking each other: What means and modes of documentation are effective for performance art? How and when can we document performance? Do witnesses alter or influence the nature of documentation? How does documentation create opportunities to reflect, reconsider, or extend performance? Through this process, artists from different iterations of Epicenter have gotten to meet one another over regular online meetings, so it has extended and strengthened our community as well. Eventually, materials from the exhibition will become a publication with writing from each artist about their performances and documentation process, and in their own languages, with English translations. They can use drawings, sketches, or whatever means of communication they want to express how they thought about documentation. It will be another document and archive of trans narratives, experiences and creations, with the artists having ownership and authority to discuss their own experiences, methodologies, and ways of living and creating for other people to come across.

Ruya, Silent Revolution, Poznan, Poland, Epicenter Revolutions Six, 2023. Mattia Spich.

Brody:

Both the exhibition and publication sound fabulous. It’s exciting to hear that the documentation emerging from the durational performances has a kind of durational or time-based element itself, manifesting in acts of collecting, repetition, and revisiting.

You have, alongside all the artists that you’ve worked with, created a performance art community that centres queer and trans experiences. That’s really admirable. Do you have any advice, words of encouragement, or wisdom to share with someone who might want to create a queer performance art community where they live?

Holly:

The first thing I would say is: just do it. Find a group of people that are curious and get weird. Just start. Nobody needs to know how to do performance art because we already do. We’re performing every day. Be brave and silly and find a group of people ready to do the same. Most of these things happen in people’s homes. There are quite a few collectives in Toronto that have happenings in people’s houses, where they invite friends and share small pieces of performance and talk about them.

You can easily find performance scores online. There’s a great book by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who is the founder of La Pocha Nostra, a performance group based in Mexico, creating art and resources on non-hierarchical performance pedagogy. They have a book that I highly recommend, full of scores, exercises, and teachings: La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post Democratic Society (2020).

You can also reach out to artist-run centres in your area and ask them if they know anything happening about performance art. There are often little workshops that happen that might not reach people widely. Ask: Are there performance events happening soon? Do you have any contacts of people who organize performance events? I think the best way to do it is to create opportunities for yourself and others from the ground up. It’s my favourite thing to do.

You can find more of Holly Timpener’s work on their website and Instagram.

Burning in Loops: DIRD’s Animated Apocalypse and Alternative Futures

DIRD, *Mountain of Reincarnation* film still. Photo courtesy of the artists.

By Adi Berardini

In the world of DIRD, narrative glitches behave like corrupted files—flickering, freezing, and repeating themselves. Stories unfold, collapse, and reappear across shifting landscapes, building what they call a cyclical apocalypse: a world where endings are never final, and the possibility of an alternative future flickers in and out of view.

Formed by Rui Shi and Zijing Zhao, DIRD works at the intersection of stop-motion animation, sculpture, and moving image. Their practice is rooted in the logic of animation—an understanding that movement and transformation are not just techniques, but philosophical conditions. “All cinema is animation,”[1] Alan Cholodenko once remarked. DIRD extends this proposition into a world where myths, ruins, and spectral bodies refuse to remain still.

Hand-sculpted forms appear alongside digital models; web-based interactives are layered with hand-painted textures. A single puppet might be sculpted from paper, its fragile limbs flickering in stop-motion, only to be re-imagined as a digital avatar wandering a frozen, browser-based mountain. In this sense, animation is a mechanism for conjuring life and provides a way of activating matter, generating illusion, and testing non-linear time.

DIRD, *Mountain of Flames* film still. 2020-ongoing. Photo courtesy of the artists.

DIRD’s ongoing project Mountain of Flames (2020–ongoing) embodies this philosophy. It builds a burning world shaped by Eastern funerary culture and the legend of Princess Miaoshan, a figure who defies patriarchal authority, dies by fire, and reincarnates as the bodhisattva Guanyin. In DIRD’s retelling, Miaoshan’s body is constructed from fragile paper. She collapses and reassembles in endless loops, as if trapped inside the broken machinery of myth itself.

This myth is dismantled and recomposed, becoming a structure for queer worldbuilding and cyclical regeneration. The project has expanded across multiple works: Mountain of Reincarnation (2020), a browser-based 3D landscape in which viewers must wait through endless loading loops; and Miaoshan (2023), screened at Goldsmiths CCA, where gestures falter and images stutter, producing an unstable visual terrain. In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.

If the apocalypse in DIRD’s cosmology is ongoing, their new work asks: what keeps producing it? Increasingly, they turn to the worlds of videogames, not as fans of gaming culture, but as critical observers of its embedded structures. For DIRD, videogames often encode patriarchal and violent logic: war as the default narrative, technological advancement as a weaponized drive, progress defined through domination.

In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.

Their next project, provisionally titled Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, examines how digital spaces rehearse violence again and again, simulating crisis as both entertainment and control. Battles are repeated, maps are drawn, and borders between self and other are endlessly re-inscribed. In these systems, the apocalypse is a design principle.

DIRD does not seek to replicate gaming aesthetics in a literal sense. Instead, they extract the logics of loading screens, glitches, and respawns, and bend them into queer, feminist, and monstrous imaginaries. If games produce war, DIRD asks how art can produce peace, not through naïve utopia, but through speculative failure, haunted spaces, and monsters that refuse to play by the rules.

Central to this vision is the figure of the monster. In DIRD’s works, monsters are not villains but alternative hybrid bodies. They inhabit the cracks of collapsing worlds, carrying with them new ethics of survival. For the duo, monstrosity is a form of magic: a way of suspending the violence of dominant systems and opening portals into parallel dimensions.

In their upcoming installation, these monsters are imagined as guardians of a counter-world, holding open a protective “enclosure” where war and technological violence lose their grip. Within this fictional spell, destruction is not the end but a threshold. Fiction itself becomes a weapon, or perhaps more accurately, a healing device and an imaginative structure that interrupts violence by inventing other ways of being.

Rather than escapism, it’s a critical use of fantasy, what they call “ruinous worldbuilding.” By constructing spaces that flicker between collapse and possibility, DIRD positions fiction as a necessary tool for confronting the real, where crises of climate, patriarchy, and technology demand alternative visions to resist despair.

Artist photo: Rui Shi (right) and Zijing Zhao (left). Photo courtesy of the artists.

DIRD’s works insist that apocalypse is something we are already inside and not an event waiting in the future. From burned paper bodies to frozen browser mountains, their worlds mirror the sense of living amidst political, ecological, and technological systemic breakdowns. Yet their vision is not nihilistic. In the ruins, they conjure cycles of rebirth, queer spaces of reorientation, and monstrous figures that refuse violence.

In Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, this vision turns explicitly toward peace as an ongoing, fragile practice and a willingness to imagine otherwise. If patriarchal war games train us in repetition, DIRD proposes different loops: flickering, failing, regenerating. They create spaces where endings multiply, and where another kind of arrival might just begin.

To see more of their work, visit Instagram: @ruishi.ruins / @orchidmoths.

[1] Alan Cholodenko and Australian Film Commission, The Illusion of Life (University of Sydney, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1991).

Surveillance Eyes: In Conversation with Harley Morman

Don’t Dream It, Be It

Harley Morman

Southern Alberta Art Gallery

May 11 – June 22, 2024

Interview by Migueltzinta Solís

There’s something about Harley Morman’s work that makes you want to sink your teeth into it. I’ve been close friends with Harley for seven years – in the good times and the bad – and I always look forward to being transported to the colorful, gummy world that is his trans, queer creative practice. We are at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) during Lethbridge Pride, a few hours after riding together in the parade as part of our local queerdo bicycle club. After what I felt were too many cheering children, it feels good to bask in the simmering glow of plastic, rubber, and knitted objects that comprise Harley Morman’s solo exhibition, Don’t Dream It, Be It.

The exhibition space, once a library, is transformed by an overlay of trans-metaphysical subliminality. Coloured tape crisscrosses the hardwood floor, mirrors hang from above on bright plastic chains, nearly life-size Perler bead self-portraits stand sentinel, and lenticular images wiggle and wink as you move through the room. A knitted rope sways from the ceiling, delightful yet foreboding, ending in a sprinkling of rainbow aquarium gravel. A full wall is dedicated to an enigmatic map made from strips of tape which, upon scrutiny, reveals itself to be a play diagram for the exhibition space. At the end of the room, behind the hanging mirrors, a scoreboard with a clock, and a rainbow collage of plastic figurines surveil the visitor. Inhabiting the space, one may feel that a game is in play, and one, in their queerness, might feel a looming sense of anxiety about what the game is, what the rules are, and whether they are getting it “right” or not.

Migueltzinta Solís (MS): Hi, Harley. (laughs)

Harley Morman (HM): Hi, Miguel. (giggles)

MS: My first question is, who are the different Harleys in this show?

HM: There are a lot of different Harleys here. There’s the Harley that is me, that’s my body…

MS: That I’m talking to.

HM: Yes! That is speaking. There’s also a ton of different Harleys. The most literal Harley is the work that is called Megan number 3: Harley. It makes good narrative sense to say it was the last thing I finished for the exhibition. There are three Perler bead works in this show. Each one represents me at a different stage of my transition, which wasn’t the plan at first.

When I made the first Megan, the one that looks like it’s diving for a clock, it’s trying to catch something. That Megan was made during my MFA, for a specific project that was essentially me bouncing around the volleyball or balloon-like heads of teachers who I had worked with during my MFA. I had worked with Perler beads before, and at the time when I made that Megan, in 2016, it represented a new direction in terms of the size and complexity of the pieces in terms of the way I was using and interpreting colour information. I wanted to make more of them.

The second one is from 2019. That was made specifically for the Dunlop Art Gallery in an exhibition of queer art on the prairies. Each one that I make of these gets bigger and more complicated in terms of the pattern. The third one took a long time, much longer than they normally do, even though I’ve gotten quick at it. Although I’m slower than I might have been before 2017 just because of the plaid jacket I’m wearing in the work.

MS: I like this idea of increasing complexity over multiple iterations or replications of Harley. First, I relate to the complexity of embodiment across these different replications of self. In simpler language you could say, “the complexity of gender,” but because of the temporal and kinetic questions here, it’s more than just about gender, which is why I love this work. I’m curious to hear you say more about the kinetic movements or actions that the figures are doing.

HM: Each of the figures represents an evolution of complexity of how I’m working with material. But in terms of the gestures that each of the figures is doing: each one plays off the others but could be understood as – I don’t want to use the word “evolution” – but is a direct response to the others. In the first one, I’m in a diving action pose because originally, I wanted to make it look like I was attempting to catch the heads that were coming at me, that were bouncing all over the place. They were up high and coming at the viewer and at the “me” that was on the wall. I wanted to make it look like that figure was an approximate life-size figure actively interacting with things. But if you look at my pose, the diving pose, it’s very much a responsive pose. I have my hands together, clasped with my wrists flattened, in the way that I [was] taught that you’re supposed to hit a volleyball. I never really knew how to hit a volleyball. It’s watching: that figure is looking up towards stuff but is very much in a ready pose but not in a “go” pose yet.

In the second one, where my hands are up, I was imagining something akin to a volleyball serve– there’s no reason that I’m using volleyball as a metaphor here aside from the fact that it was a sport that as a girl in the Midwest, I was often called upon to do in gym class. It was also a thing that because of my vision problems, I am hopeless at it and always have been. I’m just incapable of seeing things that come at me fast. Anyway, I was thinking of the jumping up action and reaching for something, so it looks a little bit more active. And here in this exhibition, it’s reaching up towards an alarm clock that’s sitting at the top of the wall.

In this third one, I wasn’t sure if it would quite “go” because it’s not an indoor sport: I’m riding a bicycle. The bicycle is rendered photographically except for the outline of the bike, which is in flat colors that are similar colors to the wall. And it’s away from the others. The other two on either side of the scoreboard are a symmetrical set. But this is something else, it’s away and it’s very much watching what’s happening.

MS: I love this hypothetical engagement with sport. (laughs)

HM: It is very much just an imaginary sport. The lines on the floor seem to be fooling people, and that’s what they’re supposed to do, but they’re not based on any sort of official diagram. I’m looking at the scoreboard with the mirrors, and there is a “basketball key,” a word that I only knew when I said that I wanted to make one. I think sport and activity in this show is not a literal reference to actual practices, it’s more a field on which actors play.

MS: As a gay villain, I, of course, love the language of “fooling people.” I love the queer permission you’ve given yourself to define the space into an imaginary sports field.

HM: Most of the time, a lot of the references really core to this show are not visible. And I don’t expect them to be and it’s not necessary. I wanted it to look like a gym. When I was in elementary school, the only reason I would participate in sports activities was when I was forced to. I was always sitting to the side and crafting. No matter where we were, whether we were indoors or outdoors, I was always finger knitting.

MS: Is that what this is over here?

HM: Yeah. Kind of. It’s not literally the finger knitting that I made long ago. So, the finger knitting, you’re using your fingers as the pegs or needles so there’s only four of them. It ends up making super thin and loose rope that doesn’t have a really good use.

MS: In looking at this long rope of finger knitting that attaches to the ceiling with a carabiner and ends on the floor in a pool of…is that aquarium gravel?

HM: It’s aquarium gravel, some plastic gems, and a few beads. I wanted something to be on the ground. I wanted for this knit object to look at least as threatening as the original object felt to me. The aquarium gravel is there as an uncomfortable fall, instead of there being a cushy mat underneath. If you attempted to climb this, you’d fall onto an uncomfortable surface that would be super jabby.

MS: That would probably stick to your skin and leave those little indents.

HM: [The gravel] is its own security since it makes so much noise if you step on it. You can hear it, easily, outside of the gallery.

MS: I saw the diagram of the space on the wall, and the thing that made me realize that it was a diagram of the space – a bird’s eye view of the space – was the gravel there.

HM: The diagram is so provisional and messy looking; I don’t expect people to necessarily know what it’s supposed to be. Because my work tends to be so intricately thought out and polished, the way that this drawing came together was kind of uncomfortable. It’s weird to say that fully intuitive making can be uncomfortable, but it is. When I saw the court lines on the floor, they gave me permission to have the drawing on the wall be as wacky as I wanted it to be. I used a level to make the blue and pink lines on the background, but everything else was done by eye. When I look at it, in one sense it’s kind of a picture of how I’m dizzy, because it’s not straight or even kind of straight in a typical way. The whole thing is a bit rotated in exactly the way things are spinning for me all the time.

…The drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”

MS: I feel like this is a map of how you move as well. I can visualize you moving in this set of blue lines much more easily than I can imagine myself. It represents you offering your own perspective and experience of a space and how you move through it.

HM: I love that. The lines did have a logic when I was making them. I forget what that was, and I don’t think it’s important. The important thing was some of them were meant to represent actual physical trajectories and others, sidelines, looking back and forth.

MS: You described this piece as important as well as uncomfortable.

HM: That is important, oh my gosh. I mean the drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”

MS: I feel like there’s something in here about the difference between the hypothetical and embodied experience, and how it relates to understanding “the rules of the world.”

HM: A lot of my past work has been concerned with the rules and conventions of gallery spaces and institutional spaces. I think part of what I have a hard time articulating is just the fact these are good visual metaphors for the difference between the smooth and the striated.

The Scoreboard is one of the things that I have shown before. It was in the iteration of the show that was at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA). When it was at the AGA, it was much more prominent because of the lighting, and the color of the walls, and the way the space was set up in general. It was essentially the focus of the entire room and it’s not necessarily that prominent here. It reads not as the most important thing that you see upon entering but just as one of many. The Scoreboard was made to only be legible when you stand inside the arc of the mirrors. If you look in a mirror, you could see not only yourself but also the scoreboard and things reflected the right way round. The clock is running the right way in the reflection, you can read the mirrored letters that are on The Scoreboard.

I love when people take selfies in the reflection, so that things are the right way around. Because generally The Scoreboard is incredibly ambiguous – it is not, and I don’t want it to be, apparent what it’s tracking. I think of it actively, and I know it doesn’t necessarily read like this directly because on one level it is very colorful and full of glittery beads and it’s shiny. But I think of it as a threatening piece, in the same way I think of gross, dirty climbing things as also being very threatening just by their existence. It’s just the idea that you might be tracked or that something about your interaction will be seen and could be accounted for.

MS: It’s a looming metric.

HM: Yeah, exactly! I mean in terms of transness, which was obviously a huge thing when I was making it back in 2021, it’s like competition as a bodily metaphor, but also a representation of tracking in terms of the timelines of change, of transition, and of growth and change in general.

MS: I think we both know that within trans experience and trans societies, there is a weird competitiveness. Whose transition is the best, who’s doing it right.

HM: It’s one of the things everyone knows, and nobody likes, but also you end up participating in it. I often find myself, or parts of my brain, echoing this hypercompetitive [sense]…I don’t think I necessarily have good things to say about that. It’s like tracking bad behaviour, bad feelings in general. This is very different from the affect that I think this show has for most people. I want it to, when you really think about it or look at it in the right way, look not happy but kind of threatening and scary.

MS: I definitely see it as sinister. A lot of people are like, “It’s playful”, “It’s a game”, “It’s a fun thing,” and “Kids will love it.”

HM: Yeah, and it is, and kids do absolutely love it. And I love that they love it, but also that’s only one reading of it and it’s not the most interesting reading of it.

MS: I think it’s interesting in the context of recent trans history, how we are from the late 90s, early 2000s, certainly in terms of FTMs and trans men, which is language that isn’t even cool anymore. We had Buck Angel and Chaz Bono and there were these metrics of passing and who had the most masculinization result. And then, of course, more recently there has been a shift away from that but now we have metrics of who has the better politics. It’s like whose is the best gender.

HM: But the gender isn’t necessarily based on hairiness. The gender is like a different, less physical aesthetic, but a politicized aesthetic.

MS: Hypothetical gender. Who has the most evolved gender and self-contextualization.

HM: Oh my god.

MS: Like the metric is different but there’s still a metric, but what even is it?

HM: In a way a person could think of it as being worse because it’s wider, and there are so many more expectations because transition is very much hypervisible at the moment, and because it’s so visible, the one who is undergoing transition is accountable to an even wider group of people.

As I’m standing over here, through the arc of the mirrors I’m looking at the lenticulars over there and thinking about how the stripes look like bars in a way. Some of them, not all of them.

MS: Because my work has been about trans self-imaging, I’m curious about the way the mirror’s been working in here and the way time is part of that. Because there doesn’t seem to be mirrors without clocks in here.

HM: I like the mirrors with the references to time because of how it implicates a person and their body at a specific moment. It’s hard to not realize that you’re a viewer, which I insist on hitting people over the head with. I think there are considerably less mirrors in this show than there are in most of my shows. What are they reflecting? It’s kind of like going back in time, in a way. I feel like it’s important to have mirrors with the lenticular stuff because they do a weird thing with simultaneity and travel.

I’ve heard from some trans people who come into the show and see the lenticulars, that they make them feel weirded out and uncomfortable. Because I started transitioning so late and had already been practicing for years, it was not even a thought that I could or might want to be secretive about it. It seems like the obvious thing to do for me at this point in my life and career, to be completely fine with having my old photos interlaced.

MS: Transness has different generations that are not necessarily attached to chronological time. How I feel you and I are of a similar trans generation even though you started your transition later in life than I did, and our transitions happened within distinct decades of trans history and discourse. And it’s very different than the other generations that are simultaneously unfolding.

HM: Yeah, that makes sense in terms of me because you’re always teasing me by saying how my gender is very anachronistic like my gender is a time period. I’m kind of curious about how my students might interpret the lenticulars. I hope that at least some of them might think that this was naughty. (laughs) Like it was somehow transgressive to show them blending into each other instead of a binary on/off situation.

MS: I certainly find these works to be very transgressive. As a completely immersive space, I sense the question, “Am I doing it right?”, on a societal level. “Is this how it’s done?”

HM: Yes, that exact thing. That nebulous sense of anxiety about “Am I being watched?” and “Is this okay?” is really important.

MS: “Is this how you play the game?” “Am I winning?” “Is this scoring?”

HM: (laughs) Yeah. The fact that it’s in a gallery, in an art space considered in relation to not trans but art communities, which are their own kind of weird hyper-competitiveness.

MS: To go back to lenticulars, and unease, I would say that in their layered-ness, discomfort, and unsettling-ness, they express the embodied experience, that is both uncomfortable and really rich, of being a person stretched across different points of time, mapped through gender pinpoints, kind of like that map over there.

HM: Oh my gosh, I love that. I think that kind of temporal experience of aging and of thinking about yourself…because I think, or hope, everyone would probably think or feel this like they’ve been several different people since they were that age. In the past 25 years, I’ve been a bunch of different people. Some are probably a lot more important than technically whichever gender I might be perceived as. I feel like aside from transness, the depiction of aging might be relatable more generally.

This little best girl and best boy (referring to stickers on the gallery wall display) is one of my favorite things in the show. It’s just one of the scholastic stickers and both exist as separate stickers and all I did was just put them together and they worked perfectly. I feel like the scholastic stickers in general are rich in terms of references and material and lend themselves to turning into lenticulars. This cluster wall doesn’t get a lot of attention, but one of things that I like is the big clock. This wall – the eyes that are at the important points, the twelve, the three and the six, etc, are all eyes from stickers. This wall has just a bunch of other references to surveillance and stuff.

MS: Metrics of performance and surveillance. Can we just touch on that? (Referring to the front page of a notebook with handwriting displayed on wall.)

HS: Yeah, that’s an actual page from a notebook because I said I’m a keeper, I do have all the paperwork I’ve produced throughout school and after that because I keep everything. I feel really justified in it because it’s coming in handy, repeatedly.

MS: Given that the paper refers to Megan’s rules, have you been following Megan’s rules?

HM: I can’t remember what Megan’s rules are. “This is a notebook, my notebook. Don’t bother it or you’ll have to answer to me.” I think that I’ve totally virtually destroyed Megan’s notebook by removing the cover.

MS: “P.S. Have fun”, is that what it says at the bottom?

HM: I think it probably does.

MS: Was there more you wanted to say about this wall?

HM: No, I just wanted to say, “Surveillance eyes!” (Points at lenticulars of eyes.) I just wanted to point them out.

MS: Transness continues to be so surveilled in terms of policy, particularly in Albertan trans and queer school and health policy right now. I think this show expresses the metaphysical experience of that kind of surveillance that is part of trans experience.

HM: Like what are the psychic implications of surveillance that trans people put themselves under before transitioning, or just in general, because of gender feelings.

MS: Yeah totally, think about in medical transition when you go on hormones, you have to do the experimental dose and you self-surveil as part of that. There’s an expectation to self-surveil.

HM: Yeah, it’s a requirement.

For more of Harley’s dizzy delights, follow him on IG: @Harley_Morman.
For more queerdo adventures that include Harley & Migueltzinta, visit his website here.

Farewell Likely General: An Interview with Brooke Manning

Brooke Manning hanging the GenderFail shirt in the announcement post on social media. Photo by Tanja Tiziana, originally for Now Magazine.

By Ashley Culver

On August 13, 2023, Brooke Manning posted to Likely General’s Instagram account a closing announcement. It included a photo of her hanging a GenderFail t-shirt with the text ‘Radical Softness as a Boundless Form of Resistance’ in the storefront window along with five slides of a letter Manning penned sharing her decision rationale, gratitude, reminiscing about the beginning, and outlining her vision for the final two months. “Nothing lasts forever,” she writes, “and that’s what makes everything we touch in life so very remarkable.”

For a decade, Manning tended to Likely General, the independent “artist-focused shop and gallery primarily supporting the expressions of 300+ queer and marginalized artists.” She opened the small business, located at 389 Roncesvalles Avenue in Toronto, in 2013. Later, she began programming a gallery space in the back of the rectangular shop. Likely General grew into a hub of activity with workshops, events, book launches, lectures, and gallery openings unique to the space and the people it attracted, such as poly-potlucks, annual kids art show, iridology, and tarot readings. In a move counter to the capitalist nature of running a business, Likely General donated to numerous local non-profits and activist groups, proving Manning was guided by her own goals and dreams, eager to root into the community.

I met Manning along with her dog, Jane, who often joined her in Likely General, months after she had emptied the shop space. We sat at a picnic table in Trinity Bellwoods Park and chatted as Jane eyed the squirrels. We spent the afternoon talking, until the sun was too low, about growing into ourselves, the grief of closing, running a business with chronic illness, and embedding rituals into life.

Brooke Manning. Headshot by Andrew Blake McGill. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: It’s been awhile since Likely General closed. How are things with you these days?

BM: There’s a bit of dissonance for me, [Likely General] ended, and now, me as a person, I’m moving on to the next thing, and yet, there is the grief. I still receive messages that people miss it. I’m feeling that in waves too. But I’m also feeling the lessening of having to be that space.

AC: What does it mean to receive those messages?

BM: I’m touched. Before there was a little bit of a veil so I couldn’t sink too much into it. I didn’t want the ego of it. But I see that it’s not about me at all. You make something and it becomes bigger than you.

Before I would cry and wonder ‘I am letting you down?’ Now I can hold those things. I see that they see I need to do what I need to do. And also, these are gifts from them to say, ‘Thank you for doing that, you provided this for me,’ which is lovely.

AC: On the website, Likely General is described as “an independent community-minded small business.” What does community mean to you?

BM: I grew up in a small town. I feel like small towns are communities in the way that I went to kindergarten with the people that I went to high school with. It was ingrained in the fabric of my being. Coming here [to Toronto] I see community can be as big as the world. It’s the quality of vibrancy, of connection, and wanting to do something effective not just for yourself but for all that surrounds yourself. There’s a danger in the definition of community, also, because it creates separateness.

Likely General departure show. Photo by Ness Devos. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: How did you bring the queer community into Likely General?

BM: I’ve always been queer. I’ve always known that about myself since I was a little kid. I wasn’t open in the world about it until maybe my early- to mid-twenties. And I’m 39 now. When I opened the shop, in 2013, I had been living with my girlfriend at the time. We got [our dog] Jane together, and we still share her back and forth; it’s a beautiful extended Jane family — she’s 10 now. But even our relationship was so closeted. We had separate rooms, which was important to us for our autonomy, but many people didn’t know we were together.

I was looking at myself and realizing what that meant to me as a queer pansexual femme—being with many other queer people behind doors and then being with cishet men out in the world. And having people make assumptions about heterosexuality or all these things that aren’t on the surface. There was part of me that wanted to claim that for myself in an open space. I came to this conclusion in 2014 or 2015 and I kept thinking I have this space; I want to use it. I want to highlight people in a way that feels important to me. It wasn’t altruistic; I knew it would give me something, too. So, I opened the gallery section of the store to honor artists who are queer, or marginalized, or women. And then I very quickly [realized] the whole store has to be like this.

It’s remarkable and helped me come out in this way. I want to be seen for exactly who I am. There’s a seed inside all of us that desires that so badly—we all want to be watered.

Photo by Ness Devos. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: The experience of coming out is a universal one for so many of us who are queer. Would you share your story?

BM: It surprised people. I came out to my mom at the same time as opening Likely General. I remember we were in Zellers and my mom said “You keep talking about this person all the time. But you don’t say their name… Is it a woman? It’s okay if it is.” It was powerful. She very openly accepted me. In that moment, it was scary, but once it happened, it felt like no big deal, which taught me that I could do this in other ways, in bigger ways. And maybe it might be a big deal. Now I’m in this space where I don’t care what people think about me, which is very cool. It allows you to keep going and keep doing all of these things that you want to do. Like I would change the store all the time, just on a whim.

I realized the quality of asking for help and being honest, not just with myself, but with the community and others.

AC: What surprised you in the 10 years you ran Likely General?

BM: This is personal and it’s very simple: I surprised myself and the people who know me best when I came out of my shell. When the store opened, I was coming out of one of the most depressive episodes of my life. I couldn’t see myself. I was 28, and if you believe in this stuff, you’re entering your Saturn Return, it’s a tumultuous time. And holy crap, mine was tumultuous. Then 10 years later, I look at how I’ve been able to blossom, but also believe in myself, and create a self-belief that wasn’t there before. And with that, help other people find their own and shine on them a little bit, in a way that people shone on me so that I could get there. I didn’t expect that would come from opening a store.

AC: How did your chronic illness shape running the shop?

BM: I realized that I can’t do things alone. And I was the kind of person that has since I was born, done things alone. I’m an only child to a single mother. I realized the quality of asking for help and being honest, not just with myself, but with the community and others.

Something shifted, the pandemic started a conversation about people who are immunocompromised or have an autoimmune disease, [I thought] I’m going to be honest. When I can’t show up for work, I’m not just going to pretend that I’m fine when I’m in so much pain. Instead, I’m going to say, ‘I’m closing today.’

I started to hire employees, which helped greatly. I realized that I couldn’t let people into the parts of me that I kept hidden. But the staff texts, the way that we communicated with each other [ended that]. It was beautiful, like a team. Someone would say, ‘I got my period today and I don’t want to be in public, can anyone work?’ And sometimes nobody could, and I said well, we’re just going to close today. Sometimes I couldn’t walk down the stairs and [I thought] ‘If I can’t walk down the stairs, I can’t be in public.’

It’s the people that hold us, it isn’t the money.

Emblem for Likely General by Alicia Nauta. Photo courtesy of Brooke Manning.

AC: You describe a ritual in which you painted boobs when repainting the gallery space in an Instagram post. Can you tell me more about this?

BM: In the early days, I was constantly wearing all-black and nice shoes. I never changed out of my clothes to paint the gallery white — it was funny to me, the dance of it, the fragility. I wasn’t necessarily careful.

I kept thinking about how many layers of paint were on the wall before I got here. I wanted to write something funny [on the wall] and then I thought I’m going to paint a set of boobs every time. Different every time. Because they are all different every time. I would paint these big things, and then laugh to myself, and then paint over them. I did this 100 times before I told a person. Later, I revealed [this ritual on Instagram] and it made people smile. They would come into the gallery and tell their friends, ‘There are 200 pairs of boobs [under the paint].’

AC: Were there other rituals?

BM: I’m pagan and [that informs] my culture and who I want to be in the world and how I want to honour my life. So, I do things, such as candle work and nature stuff, daily. It was really important to ingrain aspects of that into the store to mark time. Time is important to me because I see it as non-linear.

Another ritual I had was around closing the store at the end of the day. I love metal music and Doom. I find it so happy. I grew up with metal and the metal heads that I hung out with in high school were some of the softest people I’ve ever met. So I would blast metal music after I close the store and do my close-out procedures.

Also, I charged a rod of selenite with a particular person and put it above the door so that when people entered the space, they passed under it—whether it’s a placebo or not, that’s magic, and people would walk into the store and be like, ‘I feel different.’

AC: Now that it’s closed, what legacy do you want for Likely General?

BM: That’s a good question. It’s the question I ask people that I work with at the end of life [as a death doula]. I want people to feel like it gave them something that they didn’t have otherwise, couldn’t see otherwise, or couldn’t find in themselves otherwise, but it was always there. It, you know, shone, something on it. I hope it allows people to see that they can do the thing, too. They can open a store that’s a bit against the grain. It doesn’t have to be about making a million dollars, it can be about making a life for yourself that’s joyful, peaceful, and calm.

Reimagining the Gaps: Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts

Jackman Humanities Institute

September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024

Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, Lan “Florence” Yee, Kama La Mackerel, Jordan King, and Kasra Jalilipour

Curated by Dallas Fellini

Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, *The Pink Pegboard* from Tape Condition: degraded (2016), 2023. Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

By Adi Berardini

I walk into what looks like a 1990s hotel lobby with a black, brown, and weathered gold interior filled with house plants. I walk determinedly to the elevators to head up to the tenth floor of the Jackman Humanities Institute – an interdisciplinary building part of the University of Toronto. In many ways, an exhibition within meeting rooms seems well-suited to queer the space of (potentially boring) meetings. The exhibition Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts, curated by Dallas Fellini, features artists Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, Lan “Florence” Yee, Kama La Mackerel, Jordan King, and Kasra Jalilipour. The show addresses how the colonial archive has omitted queer and trans works from its depths while also being a method of control and surveillance of LGBTQ2S+ artists.

Exiting the elevator, I see a stark white office space with a reception desk. Walking down the hall to the main exhibition space, the installation by Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney immediately stands out. Among a pink wall with perforated holes, there are items such as pink triangle archival buttons saying, “No more shit” and a rendered drawing of the buttons, a bag of gloves, a paddle, drawings of VHS tapes and instructions for their care, and a megaphone with fabric strips forming the shape of a pop-pom. Tools hang below a sign that says “LESBIANS invented the internet” in green text. There’s a printout of the Body Politic issue featuring an essay by Chris Bearchell about lesbian porn.

Created as part of a residency at the ArQuives, Meyer and McKinney address pro-porn versus anti-porn feminism, a long-standing discussion within feminist circles. Some may question if lesbian porn should be kept in archives when lesbian identity has been so sexualized. However, capturing DIY lesbian porn and desire is an important aspect of an archive and snapshot in time. The installation takes a more sex-positive approach and parallels the care for VHS tapes with kinky sex practices. The installation sparks a discussion of the ethics of collecting queer porn and the forces against it, such as the police.

Jordan King, *Untitled*, 2020. Polaroids, 3.5” x 4.5” each. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Further, on the back wall, self-portrait polaroid snapshots–Untitled (2020) by Jordan King–capture burlesque-inspired glamour shots, with King donned in a skin-tight red dress, feathers, and red lipstick. Dallas explained how King is a big fan of the drag performer International Chrysis. King was relocating to New York and showed up to an apartment viewing she found on Craigslist. While looking around, she noticed polaroids of the performer in the apartment. As it turns out, the tenant (and King’s future roommate) was a friend of Chrysis. King recreates the glamorous images she found in the apartment, continuing International Chrysis’ legacy—which could be a coincidence or the pearl string of fate. The original images that served as inspiration are alongside the reiterations. The photos spotlight how, due to institutional failure, the LGBTQ2S+ community ultimately becomes the caretakers and archivists of our own community and how we inherit these images and honour their legacy.

Kama La Mackerel, *Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans Subjectivity in the Postcard*, 2019. Inkjet on silk paper, 24” x 16” each. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Kama La Mackerel’s self-portraiture series Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness: Trans Subjectivity in the Postcard (2019) reflects on the tourist postcards depicting a crafted paradise that erases the native populations, specifically in Mauritius. Trans femmes and women are erased in these colonial depictions of land without a trace of its native inhabitants. The cultural heritage and queerness itself are often shrouded by colonial and heteronormative values instead. La Mackerel poses in front of a vast and beautiful background of fields and mountains, centering and reasserting themselves into the picture. La Mackerel challenges these postcards as a capitalistic tactic to bring tourists and settlers to the land stewarded by the Indigenous population for centuries through the empowering stances before the landscape.

The video Gut Feelings: Fragments of Truth (2021), by artist Kasra Jalilipour, explores the life (and imagined life) of the Qajar era historical figure Zahra Khanum, also known as Tāj al-Saltaneh. The 3D modelling software version of Tāj al-Saltaneh spinning around a vibrant background reimagines the gaps of what the historical archive has erased or omitted. The voiceover is reminiscent of a letter to an old friend. Jalilipour looks at the way that Tāj al-Saltaneh is filtered through Eurocentric and misogynist standards. A meme circulated online (which conflated her and her sister, Esmat) comments with surprise at how she had rejected 13 men who then killed themselves, labelling her as unattractive. Jalilipour is also interested in how her androgyny implies her unattractiveness.

Kasra Jalilipour, *Gut Feelings: Fragments of Truth* and *Gut Feelings: Fragments of Fiction*, 2021. Video, 12:16 and 3:04. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Jalilipour poses the question to AI, what do Iranian women look like? They scroll through image-search feeds that depict white-washed versions of Iranian women in an image search. When they tried recreating al-Saltaneh through a game, they did not have much success, and the game software could not correctly identify her ethnic background or gender. Through the fictional media essay, Jalilipour speculates on Tāj al-Saltaneh’s queerness since she was linked to Queen Maria Anna of Spain. When they tried to google Tāj al-Saltaneh, images of Queen Maria Anna of Spain also came up. They infer a secret romance between the two as well as their frustration that it was easier to recreate Maria Anna in the game with its Eurocentric design features. Jalilipour also reflects on how natural showing affection to other women was historically with awe and admiration.

Suspended from the ceiling, Lan “Florence” Yee’s textile work PROOF (2022-2023) reflects on what classifies a queer image and the labour that lies behind it. In the background are discarded chairs overlaid with the hand-embroidered text PROOF, like a printed photograph proof. Yee asserts that human rights should be inherent and challenges how the archive erases queer and trans narratives through its structure, notably the queer Asian histories and other racialized queer people. Nothing should have to be proven to gain rights and respect from others. They use humour and irony by using the imagery of chairs— perhaps it’s the conversations that happen in these chairs through community organizing that matter most.

Lan “Florence” Yee, *Leaving Space*, 2019. Hand-embroidered nylon thread, tulle, and galvanized steel wire, 10″ x 7.5″ x 15″, set of three boxes. From *Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts*, September 13, 2023–June 21, 2024, Jackman Humanities Institute. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Down the hallway in a meeting room is Yee’s Leaving Space (2019), consisting of sewn, transparent baskets reading “for the unrecordable,” “for the unrecorded,” and “the yet to be recorded.” The work references archival bank boxes, although its soft fabric reminded me of a laundry storage basket, adding a further touch of humour. The fabric sculpture acts as an altar for the voices silenced or looked over by colonial archives but ends on a hopeful note that their voices will still be remembered and recorded.

The exhibit wonderfully explores the personal record-keeping and storytelling that takes place when the colonial archive has suppressed and erased queer voices. Mnemonic Silences, Disappearing Acts looks at the way that archives have not only excluded queer stories but are used as means of surveillance when they do include them. The highlights of the exhibit are the creative approaches artists bring when it comes to using the queer imagination to reimagine the gaps and erasures in the archive.

This review can be found in our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. You can find a copy here.

How to Stare at the Sun

Moira Hayes. *Citrus* 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist.

By Moira Hayes

Of all the things in life that are hard to look at, nothing has plagued me so acutely as the sight of a beautiful woman. When I see an attractive woman, I look away and I try not to look back. I’ve been asking my friends, my family, and random people in bars if they share this affliction. They don’t! So, why?

I’ve asked myself the following questions:

Am I just extremely shy?
Am I comparing myself?
Could it be Catholic guilt?
Do I feel embarrassed that I crave someone unattainable?

The answer is a resounding “Yes” to all of them. I am shy and I am comparing myself. My internalized homophobia, implanted at a young age by the Catholic education system, tricks my brain into believing that other queer people are unattainable entities, constantly out of reach. Light years away.

Step 1: Accept that you love the Sun.

For a long time, I felt like accepting that I was queer was admitting defeat. Yes, everyone who looked at me in high school as the token lesbian was right. Yes, any suspicions from my extended family were proven true. Yes, you got me, you are correct—I’m gay.

Winning is a learned skill that can only be achieved by a seasoned loser.

When I was in high school in the 2010s, queer communities emerged as an unavoidable presence in mainstream media. Huge shows like Glee, Pretty Little Liars, and Teen Wolf had queer characters. The widespread exposure to queerness was groundbreaking. Suddenly, it was very trendy to be gay.

In the showrunners’ attempt to keep up with this trend, queer characters were ushered into narratives to fill this new requirement. Unfortunately, it was also easy for writers to usher in the generational tragedy attached to the queer community, i.e. the AIDs crisis, or centuries of homophobia from both religion and state. Queer characters can’t just be characters, they always come with baggage. How else could the majority of (straight) viewers sympathize with them?

So, it kind of sucked. In her 2021 thesis work, Elizabeth Bradshaw explores this phenomenon in queer narratives:

“Punishing queer characters—through heartbreak, death, or overt punishments—is such a common device used in literature and film that it has earned its own nickname: Bury Your Gays. This trope dictates that when a same-gender love story is present, one of the characters must be destroyed in some way by the end of the story.”¹

Step 2: Get burnt to a crisp for the first time.

The multiverse of acceptance and fan fiction can keep a sad, closeted teenager alive until real-world destruction inevitably grabs hold, but here’s the thing: I didn’t want to be destroyed. I wanted to win, but it didn’t come easy. Winning is a learned skill that can only be achieved by a seasoned loser.

I have lost many times. It turns out that accepting love also comes with accepting heartbreak. My personal queer narratives were less deadly than the fictional ones but were not by any means sunny.

My body of work Hey Sunshine! was conceived in the aftermath of a breakup. While it was initially helpful to attach a single person to the symbol of a Sun, it quickly gained greater meaning. I cast the Sun in my narratives opposite myself to embody everything in life that I cannot control, the actions and opinions of others, bad timing, unavoidable distance, and even the weather.

Moira Hayes. *Spit!* 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist.

I’ve accepted that all I can control are my own actions and reactions. I take responsibility and control of my own autonomy. I can choose to move forward or remain stagnant. Often, this invaluable introspection is achieved through hindsight.

In Spit! I invite destruction, disguised as love, into my life. Whilst damaging myself, I put my relationships with others at risk: my ability to communicate with others is obliterated, I drain all my energy until there’s nothing left, and all the light in my world is gone. By the end of the piece, my dependency on love relies on a single entity, and I’m burnt to a crisp.

Heartbreak sears like a sunburn. It stings until time has soothed it into a memory.

Step 3: Regroup, reflect, and slather yourself in sunscreen.

Self-reflection is one hell of a drug. Let’s talk about beautiful women again, starting with the female gaze.

I grew up experiencing a lot of anxiety around older women because I was always mistaken for a boy. My short hair and aversion to dresses led a lot of women to believe that I had walked into the wrong public washroom. I was ill-equipped as a child to navigate such a situation. (Recall that I am shy.)

I hated when people would question my gender, strangers comparing me to their preconceived images of a woman. (Recall that I am also comparing myself.) I grew contemptuous of the gendered answer because it ultimately aligned me with the perpetrator of my problem: other women.

Then comes the tidal wave of high school, plaid quilts, polo shirts, and a girl shrieking in the change room before gym class that none of us better be lesbians. Oh, good. That’s perfect. Something infinitely worse than being a girl who is routinely mistaken as a boy—being a girl who liked other girls.

Moira Hayes. *Birth.* 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In Birth, a run-on sentence emphasizes the sudden and unexpected rush of falling in love. Detailing a strenuous morning, starting by going to work. The narrative winds into a full-body experience until I answer the call, ushering forward a new possibility of love. Behind the words, runs a telephone cord as a reference to communication while also signifying an umbilical cord.

Despite my gut instinct to look away, brought on by previous hurt and historical evidence that people can be cruel, I choose to pick up the phone. Love isn’t a game, but that’s never stopped me from trying to win.

Step 4: Get burnt again, probably.

Citrus bemoans the heartbreak at the end of a relationship. The narrative in this piece is punctuated with the image of a Sun, “the fruits of my labour, on fire in the heat of your…” The piece is accusatory and the background yellow layer of vinyl wrinkles outward, its words lifting at their edges and repeating themselves to not be forgotten.

I have lost many times.

Moira Hayes. *Hotter than Hell.* 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Step 5: Acquire sunglasses.

I dated someone in university who kept a semi-nude photo of a famous lesbian as her phone lock screen. I admired the boldness, despite the extremity. Not only is it something I would never do, but it’s also something I never considered I could do.

When you type the word Cool into iMessage, the first suggested emoji that comes up is the smiley face wearing sunglasses. The nice thing about sunglasses is that nobody can see where you’re looking, you just look cool.

In Hotter than Hell, I adopt a skeptical view of the Sun’s dramatics. I breeze by the grandiose envisioning of Hell and brush off the Sun’s opinion. I’m over the dramatics of a relationship, the theatre of winning or losing emotionally. I push my sunglasses further up my nose.

Staring into the Sun for extended periods of time will blind you, no doubt. Just plain old looking into the Sun is so intimidating that we invented sunglasses to shield ourselves; it’s self-care. It could be designer or dollar store self-care, but either way you look cool.

How does one stare at the Sun? Exposure therapy with an equal measure of self-preservation.

Here’s what you need:

1 pair of sunglasses for confidence
1 light year (distance and time) for perspective’s sake
1 bottle of SPF 30 sunscreen for pragmatic reasoning
Acceptance of heartbreak, for when the sunsets
Acceptance of yourself, to see yourself through and through and through and through

Good luck!

PSA: Please don’t stare at the sun during a total eclipse without proper eye protection.

This feature can be found in our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. You can find a copy here.

Bradshaw, Elizabeth. The Male Gaze and the Female Gays: Reimagining Queer Narratives in 2021,Texas Scholar Works, 2021, 58. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/44fe4abb-97ed-44d4-a81d-dd8512109074/content ↩︎

The Anti-Autonomy Device: The Hays Code, Tits, and Le$bean Poetry

Joanne Leah. *Skin-Encapsulated Ego.* Photo courtesy of the artist.

By Chimera Mohammadi

Imagine you’re a film censor, dedicated to protecting the morality of American cinema from such threats as “sexual perversion.” Which of the following would you flag as objectionable?

A man is chased through the streets by a group of homeless boys he has sexually assaulted and is cannibalized by them
A cop hunting a gay serial killer turns gay and begins to murder gay men himself
Two adults pursue a Queer romantic relationship

According to the Motion Picture Production Code—A.K.A. the Hays Code—the answer is C.

Now, imagine you’re a content reviewer, working hard to clean smut off social media. Which of the following do you find disturbing and/or sexual enough to warrant erasure?

A person breastfeeding a child
A highly sexualized photo of a woman’s breasts
Anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech and harassment

Quite frequently, the answer is A.

Do these answers seem similar? While the Hays Code [officially] ended in 1968, it still maintains a powerful grip on the media we’re allowed to consume. Censorship, from the Hays Code to social media guidelines, is an anti-autonomy tool that strips women and Queer people of their own stories, replacing them with narratives that perpetuate their objectification and vilification. Queer trauma porn and horror continue to be celebrated in mainstream media, while authentic Queer stories, art, and poetry are erased. Depictions of women’s* bodies dominate art, advertising, and the visual landscape of our culture, but women’s bodies on social media are harshly policed. The seemingly paradoxical and arbitrary facets of modern censorship faced by Queer and women artists can be explained by its use as a tool of oppression.

In 1934, the American film industry established a set of censorship guidelines: the Hays Code. The list—which included “white slavery” and “ridicule of the clergy”—listed number four as “any inference of sex perversion.” This vague phrase served as a catch-all for Queerness, reducing it to any deviation from the norm and an active threat to any viewers who recognize it.

In the decades that followed, Queerness was exhibited near-exclusively as a symptom of villainy. Answer A comes from the 1959 film Suddenly, Last Summer, a box office hit that grossed $9 million despite being a “preposterous and monotonous potpourri of incest, homosexuality, psychiatry, and, so help me, cannibalism” (—the New Yorker). Answer B is the plot of Cruising (dir. Friedkin 1980), which—despite protests by gay activists horrified by its representation of Queerness as a contagious and fatal disease of the mind—saw a box office total of $19.8 million. Movies such as Psycho (1960), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013), and even Tár (2022) are only a few highlights in a long line of films that frame Queer people as the main perpetrators of sexual violence.

For the decades (if not centuries) that Queer people have been the cultural scapegoats of sexual aggression, our voices and creative output have been silenced or hidden. Following his repeated removal from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, Queer artist Gio Black Peter hosted a private exhibition with 15 other censored Queer and female artists in 2018. The majority of the suppressed works displayed Queer/female intimacy and bodies in playful, lighthearted photography. Even non-sexual Queer self-expression is policed; Instagram and Tiktok have repeatedly erased Zoe Leonard’s politically-charged poem, “I want a dyke for president.”

*Alix Marie. Mammography 2, 2017.*30 x 20 cm. Photograph printed on glass. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The same myth that equates Queer people with sexual predators equates women with sexual prey. In most of the films listed above, women are the helpless victims of Queer sexual violence. The camera uses female nudity as a way to reduce women to their bodies, and their bodies to manifestations of desire/temptation—think of a dead Marion Crane lying on the shower floor and the body parts littering Buffalo Bill’s hideout. This is acceptable when the art produced is used to amplify the sexual subjugation of women, but not when it threatens the dominant understanding.When the body of a woman is shown for any purpose aside from heterosexual male gratification or the promotion of unrealistic beauty standards, it becomes objectionable.

Victoria’s Secret boasts 76.3 million followers on Instagram and 3,816 posts, the vast majority of which depict models in lingerie. According to digital watchdog collective Salty, VS even has a hand in shaping Instagram’s female nudity guidelines. But while VS is allowed to display and profit from women’s bodies, artist Clarity Haynes is not. Haynes’s oil paintings of trans and female torsos are not sexualized, but tender, thorough, realistic, and human. Instagram constantly blocks and flags their work, and their account (@/alesbiangaze) has been repeatedly threatened with deactivation. From Mammography 2 by Alix Marie to the Venus of Willendorf (for crying out loud!), non-sexual depictions of women’s bodies are restricted due to their “sexual nature” by Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. But as creators find ways to get around AI policing on social media, could these censorship guidelines be backfiring?

Clarity Haynes, *Mariam*, oil on linen, 58 x 74.5 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and New Discretions.

The Hays Code necessitated the practice of queercoding, the reduction of Queer representation to a subtextual wink at stereotypes, such as a swishy walk, a slight lisp, or the gardenia-scented handkerchief in The Maltese Falcon (1941). We can find similar practices on social media today. Algospeak is the most literal example, a mutated online dialect that obscures ban-worthy words from AI censors with bizarre spelling variations, like “le$bean” for lesbian, “corn” for porn, “leg booty” for LGBT, and “cornucopia” for homophobia. Women post photos under “#fakebody” in an eerie attempt to trick AI into classifying their bodies as objects to get around nudity guidelines. Artist Joanne Leah (@/twofacedkitten on Instagram) is inventing a new eroticism incomprehensible to AI by painting her models in outlandish palettes and decontextualizing their body parts.

We learn more about the true purpose of censorship from what is allowed than from what isn’t. When the Hays code banned Queer protagonists and allowed Queer villains, it told audiences that Queerness and Queer people were evil, perverted, and malevolent. Today, our contradictory social media guidelines tell women that their bodies are not their own, but sexual objects for the consumption of the masses and the exploitation of private companies. However, the anti-autonomy device of censorship is ultimately incapable of true erasure. Just as the Hays Code birthed underground Queer symbology, algorithmic censorship is birthing a new taboo absurdism, often more provocative than what it was initially intended to hide.

*As an AFAB, non-binary person, I know that referring to a quintessential “woman’s body” is reductive. Some non-binary and trans bodies may be perceived as female, and some women’s bodies may not. I’ve opted to use language that reflects the binary ideology under which non-male bodies are policed.

This feature is from our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. To purchase a copy, please visit our online shop.

No Soy El Sol Que Quema: The Sun and Queer Dreaming

No Soy El Sol Que Quema by Andrés Garzon

Good Sport Gallery

August 20th – Sept 3, 2022

By Adi Berardini

No Soy El Sol Que Quema by Andrés Garzon is an exhibition reflecting on religion and internalized homophobia, looking at his role as a brother and a son. Further, it’s a reflection on hiding versus living as your authentic self. Growing up as Jehovah’s Witness in a family that immigrated from Bogotá, Colombia, Garzon’s relationship with religion is a complex one—he felt isolated by the need to hide his true self and the internalized homophobia this created. On the other hand, Andrés explained that the community his family found through Jehovah’s Witness helped him retain his language since the Kingdom Hall he attended and the literature he read was in Spanish. Although it created hurt and divided him, it also created a connection for him and his family to other recent immigrants at the time.

Having a complex relationship with religion is a narrative that many queer people know well. Religion can be like an externalized force, a voice in your head that nags you and tries to convince you that the way you are is somehow inherently “wrong.” An invisible weight that pulls you down. I grew up in an ex-Catholic household—Although my parents aren’t religious, my grandparents were pretty Catholic. Even though it was at a distance, religion and its influence always seemed to have its grasp on me. Enough to want to push my feelings down and repress myself. And I pushed them down further and further. I pushed them down so far that I couldn’t push them down anymore, and they came flooding up. Although to this day, I feel like I’m still chasing the years I lost to denying my feelings and experiences I could never quite reach, at least not solely in my dreams.

Andrés explains how the exhibition is also closely tied to dreams as a form of escape. When he felt he needed to hide himself, he became interested in lucid dreaming and his dreams were like an escape from a reality that often seemed like a nightmare. Andrés is a friend and hearing him say that dreaming was solace from reality was hard to hear. I was upset that someone I care about felt that his dreams were a welcomed escape from reality. But then I realized I’ve been there before, as many other queer people have. The pain and stress of hiding your true self is a weight that no one should bear.

Excerpt from *Mi libro de historias de Amor (My Book of Love Stories)* by Andrés Espitia Garzon. Photo by Abby Vincent, courtesy of the artist.

The accompanying exhibition text Mi libro de historias de Amor (My Book of Love Stories), consists of a mix of former dream logs, poems, and journals from 2015-2021. Its cover references a childhood bible story book, nostalgic for its iconic design and the memories attached to it. The first half is in English, and the second half is in Spanish, translated by his older brother, Diego. One of the texts recounts a time when his mother looked into his eyes and saw nothing—she just wished for him to find a sense of joy.^[1] It made me think back to when I moved from Vancouver and experienced losing the affect in my voice due to an overwhelming sense of dread. I was going through a tough time since I had lost the sense of community that I had before. My mother also realized that something was blocking my happiness. My friendship with Andrés and other relationships in the queer art community here in London eventually alleviated the pain I had felt and brought warmth, much like the sun in Andrés’ paintings and drawings.

*No Soy El Sol Que Quema* by Andrés Garzon at Good Sport Gallery. Photo by Abby Vincent, courtesy of the artist.

Another theme in No Soy El Sol Que Quema is the power of familial love. The imagery of the sun/son is prevalent throughout representing a symbol of safety and home in sunny Colombia and his role as a son. As Andrés explains, the drawing El Hijo Escondido / Hidden Son depicts the hurt that he felt while trying to hide from his family. Andrés explains that in Jehovah’s Witness, being gay is considered shunnable. He feared that by coming out, he would potentially lose the approval of his family that had sacrificed so much for him growing up. The sketch depicts a self-portrait archetype of Andrés curled up, hiding from the world. Conversely, El Hijo Escogido / Chosen Son depicts the figure basking in the sun with joy and fulfillment. When Andrés came out to his family, his family chose him and had left Jehovah’s Witness, their religion for the past 20-so years. As many people in the LGBTQ2S+ community know, there’s also power in chosen family. The drawing celebrates living authentically and the triumph of love over fear and shame.

*No Soy El Sol Que Quema* by Andrés Garzon at Good Sport Gallery. *Loving In The War Years I* and *Loving In The War Years II*. Photo by Abby Vincent, courtesy of the artist.

In Loving In The War Years I two figures are wrestling together with long, dark hair (a signature of Andrés’) and arrows in their legs. The name is a nod to the text of the same name by Mexican feminist Cherrié Moraga, chronicling her coming of age as a lesbian at a time wrought with censorship in Mexico. The arrows are a reference to Saint Sebastian, the shapeshifter of the bible, oscillating from masc to femme depictions in the art historical canon, and one Andrés resonates with. Against the navy blue of night, the figures are reminiscent of Matisse’s La Danse. Andrés says that these figures represent the two archetypes within himself that struggle against one another. The struggle represents the fight toward self-acceptance and the complications of external factors such as religion and the pressure of family acceptance. The painting on the adjacent wall, Loving in the War Years II, depicts the two figures peacefully embracing, with bright yellow stars forming a halo around them, divinely protected. The two paintings also reference night and day—and the stark difference that finding peace and self-acceptance can bring.

Just as the sun can bring warmth, religion and a relationship to God or a higher power can bring peace and comfort. Although just as easily, the sun burns, and religion as an institution has brought pain and toxicity to many. Its force over peoples’ lives has been used as a tool of oppression to gain power (I mean, colonization). No Soy El Sol Que Quema explores finding a relationship with God after leaving organized religion. Personally, tarot has become a spiritual tool that I turn to, engaging with it as a daily ritual.

*El Que Sabe Lo Que Tiene, Sabe Lo Que Debe (Knowing what you owe, is knowing what you have)* detail. Photo by Abby Vincent, courtesy of the artist.

Andrés explains to me how his mother was the family breadwinner before arriving in Canada, while his father kept track of the family finances, and how his parents always made sure food was on the table for him and his siblings. El Que Sabe Lo Que Tiene, Sabe Lo Que Debe (Knowing what you owe, is knowing what you have) consists of bright yellow porcelain coins placed on a plinth, resembling the pentacles of the tarot deck. With permission, I pick them up and they are smooth to the touch, like a rock smoothed from the waves of the ocean. Scattered in between these pentacles are seashells and snail shells, some from nature and some from garage sales. I recognize the golden ratio spiral in a few. Andrés explained that the yellow pentacles are modelled after a pendant given to him by his mother, with the same indent he would often run his fingers over. The pentacles reference the sacrifice his parents gave him and his siblings through their hard work and determination.

After engaging with Andrés’ exhibition No Soy El Sol Que Quema, I think of how queerness itself is sacred. Although it can be painted out as a sin by religion, it’s what has brought me peace and community when I needed it the most. No Soy El Sol Que Quema is a love letter to Andrés’ family and chronicles a journey of self-discovery, with both queerness and spirituality, but on one’s own terms. Andrés’ paintings and drawings are a stark reminder that healing is possible when love is chosen over fear.

[1] Garzon Espitia, Andres. Mi libro de historias de Amor. 2022 . p. 18.

Check out Mi Libro de Historias de Amor (My Book of Love Stories) by Andrés Garzon Espitia. You can also find a digital copy here.

Seeds and Dyes: Queer Tamil Lineages of Art in Scarborough

Vijay Saravanamuthu, *Two Seedlings.* 2021. Film still.

By Vasuki Shanmuganathan

During February 2022, I had the privilege of interviewing emerging artists Vijay Saravanamuthu and Dhiviya Prabaharan about their recent exhibit titled No Vacancy in Scarborough, produced in collaboration with Emily Peltier from Scarborough Arts – on view in Scarborough’s Tamil barbershop SR Beauty Salon, Nov – Feb 2022.^[1]

The exhibition theme contests representations tied to Tamil arrivals (refugees, immigrants, undocumented people, and migrants) as temporary or ahistorical Canada. Re-interpreting these notions, the exhibit centers on narratives of Tamil people bringing with them deep histories and traditions of arts and crafts practices to Turtle Island. No Vacancy in Scarborough invited artists to consider which practices have survived, been inherited, or revived through their families despite forced migration.

The works of Scarborough textile artist Dhiviya Prabaharan titled Shanmugadevi and digital artist Vijay Saravanamuthu titled Two Seedlings highlight cultural production practices passed down through their grandmothers. They continuously explore complex and revelatory narratives about Tamil art forms that have taken root in local neighbourhoods as a result of migration and displacement. Scarborough’s lack of exhibition spaces does not quell the rich heritage of artists in the area nor, as Vijay describes, “how artful living is infused in how we move, our everyday living.”^[2] Historically, the area has been sidelined by Toronto’s concentration of galleries, not to mention the class, race, and economic access barriers visible within the city’s art landscape.

The exhibit took place in a hair salon which is part of a strip mall long occupied by Tamil shop owners but slowly dissipating with transit expansions, gentrification, the rising cost of living, and the impacts of the pandemic. I visited the shop owner, Yoga, who was willing to host the exhibit in the Scarborough neighbourhood of Brimley and Eglinton. He had arrived as a refugee less than a decade ago with his family. In response to the proposed partnership, he shared his belief that Tamil art deserves the kind of recognition that matches its rich history.^[3]

No Vacancy in Scarborough urgently daylights the challenges of charting the survival of Tamil creative practices, familial warmth, and diasporic continuities through revisiting lineages of art and crafts.

To talk about a queer Tamil lineage of art, one must contend with the trauma of conflict and displacement, and the inheritance of practices long lost to time, genocide, and war. Both artists emphasize this common history as significant to understanding their work during our interview. No Vacancy in Scarborough urgently daylights the challenges of charting the survival of Tamil creative practices, familial warmth, and diasporic continuities through revisiting lineages of art and crafts. When the most recent genocide in 2009 took place, old and new generations alike felt deep grief. Displacement means losing connection to the island of Sri Lanka. Displacement has also meant losing knowledge of Tamil art histories and developments. Yet Tamil art in Canada is finding revival of older practices as witnessed by new artists’ lineages and collectives who incorporate these practices in their artworks.

Dhiviya Prabaharan. *Shanmugadevi.* 2021. Batik panels.

Dhiviya Prabaharan’s Shanmugadevi approaches intergenerational relations through an honoring of ancestral creative practices and reclamation of queer connectedness to culture and family. Their batik panels embody a craft-based process of calling in and grieving — repeating the labour-intensive rituals of the past by turning raw cotton fabric into images and patterns tied to natural elements. The exhibit showcased six 15 x 20 batik-resist panels. Prabaharan explains, “This series of work was co-created with the spirit of my ancestor, my late paternal grandmother Shanmugadevi, through the elements of fire and water and its interactions with the batik process. My grandmother was a batik designer, garment worker, and artist. However, because she had passed before I was born, and for many reasons including the war and migration, many of her designs were lost. I grieved this loss deeply, and in feeling and moving it, an opportunity to learn her art was born. This experience has reminded me that I am truly held by my ancestors, the power of trusting in divine timing, and believing that the right people show up at the right time.”^[4]

In contrast, Vijay Saravanamuthu’s short film Two Seedlings seeks to document family histories and art practices between himself and his paati (grandmother) Ranganayaki Chinna Thirucottyappa with visual storytelling using pen and ink drawings and black and white photographs collected on a recent trip back home to Sri Lanka. His paati taught herself how to draw despite the lack of art classes accessible to her on the island by taking remote learning classes using a mail-in critique system in India. Vijay’s work is marked by a sense of visual mourning which forecloses on the totality of loss. Two Seedlings features voiceover and digital weaving as a means to reclaim, “treasured remnants of a life once lived with peace and dignity in pre-1983 Ceylon.”^[5] His relationship to the arts has been influenced by the familial network in initially recording and digitizing existing practices and then adding his digital visual journey which makes use of panning wide sun-filled landscape shots, animated photographs, and voice narration. A second artwork is already in the works as he seeks to turn his intergenerational and collaborative exchange into a durational commentary on the nature of writing one’s history.

He says, “Displaced by the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka, Two Seedlings explores my relationship with my paati and my homeland, knowing both ancestral mothers only through photographs, phone calls, and short visits. Growing up in a family of storytellers, I often listened to old tales and imagined what my grandmother might have looked like as a child, what her childhood on the island might have been like, and how war and displacement have impacted her. Lacking access to paati in ways that many of my peers accessed their grandparents – exchanging gifts at holiday dinners, as cherished keepers of childhood secrets, or as warm hands tucking you into bed – my relationship with paati lived mostly in my imagination.”^[6]

The intent behind the No Vacancy in Scarborough series was to bring together arts organizations, small businesses, and creatives in suburban neighbourhoods who had been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Vijay and Dhiviya are part of a growing group of Tamil artists who seek to contribute to this arts landscape by honoring lived experiences and inherited histories from back home. Given the success of this exhibit, another call for Tamil artists has already been launched for the Golden Mile district of Scarborough.^[7] What can be learned from centering queer Tamil artists and their contributions? A process of looking at older practices critically as they too come from histories tied to caste, Indigeneity, gender, and location but without losing the tender ties that carried them through the generations. This approach invites artists to draw on new and existing intimacies through art entwined to local neighbourhoods.

A few months after the closing of this exhibit, Queer Tamil Collective held the first ever Scarborough Pride Event for Tamils which was a historical moment for the community.^[8] There has also been a proliferation of Tamil artists and collectives exhibiting work in the past two years such as most recently Jeyolyn Christi’s thoduvanam (Contact Photography Festival, May 2022),^[9] Whyishnave Suthagar’s Life Cycles (CDCC Gallery, May 2022),^[10] Josh Vettivelu’s prayers for a word (Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, February – March 2022),^[11] for all, I care (Lakeshore Arts, October – December 2021),^[12] and Tamil aavana kaappaka tittam (The Public Gallery, March – June 2021).^[13] Perhaps it is farsighted to conclude these recent exhibits as an indication of a growing Tamil art movement, but consideration of this possibility is long overdue in Canadian art criticism.

You can also find this review in the second print issue of Femme Art Review on the theme of Queer and Feminist Collaboration.

[1] “No Vacancy in Scarborough: Exhibition Description,” Scarborough Arts, November 2021, accessed 1 July 2022, https://www.scarborougharts.com/sr-beauty

[2] Vijay Saravanamuthu, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, online, 17 February 2022.

[3] Yoga Palaniyandy, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, Scarborough, 23 November 2022.

[4] Dhiviya Prabaharan, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, online, 14 February 2022.

[5] Vijay Saravanamuthu, “Two Seedlings,” 2021, accessed 1 July 2022, https://vimeo.com/545097540.

[6] Vijay Saravanamuthu, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, online, 17 February 2022.

[7] “All that is Golden: Call for Artists,” Scarborough Arts, 25 July 2022, accessed 26 July 2022, https://www.scarborougharts.com/news/call-for-submissions-all-that-is-golden.

[8] Adler, Mike, “Scarborough Pride Toronto event first one ever in Canada for Tamils,” The Toronto Star, 17 June 2022, https://www.thestar.com/local-toronto-scarborough/entertainment/2022/06/17/scarborough-pride-toronto-event-first-one-ever-in-canada-for-tamils.html?utm_source=share-bar&utm_medium=user&utm_campaign=user-share.

[9] “Jeyolyn Christi: thoduvanam,” Contact Photography Festival, accessed 20 July 2022, scotiabankcontactphoto.com/2022/open-call/jeyolyn-christi-thoduvanam.

[10] “Life Cycles: Live Performance by Whyishnave Suthagar,” Critical Distance, accessed 20 July 2022, https://criticaldistance.ca/event/life-cycles-live-performance-by-whyishnave-suthagar.

[11] “prayers for a word (or a lack that builds the world),” Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, accessed 20 July 2022, https://www.vac.ca/josh-vettivelu.

[12] “for all, I care,” Aarati Akkapeddi, Luxvna Uthayakumar, Krish Dineshkumar, Vasuki Shanmuganathan. Accessed 20 June 2022, https://forallicare.ca.; queer Telegu-American artist Aarati Akkapeddi was part of this exhibit comprised of Tamil artists. The group of artists had found affinities in how two related racialized communities on Turtle Island shared similar care practices amidst the pandemic.

[13] Tamil Archive Project, “tamil aavana kaappaka tittam,” The Public Gallery, March 2021, https://thepublicstudio.ca/gallery/tamil-aavana-kaappaka-tittam-தமிழ்-ஆர்கைவ்-ப்ரொஜெக்ட்.