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Celestial Bodies: Expanding Sexuality and Gender. 2023. Campbell River Gallery, Campbell River, BC.
Co-curated with Janelle Pasiechnik
Artists: Cassils, Dayna Danger, Zachari Logan, Vivek Shraya, Rah Eleh, Brandon Hoax, Adrien Crossman.
Celestial Bodies is a group exhibition that examines expanding forms of gender and sexuality through the lens of contemporary Canadian 2SLGBTQ+ artists working across different media.
A celestial body is an aggregation of matter in the universe (such as a planet, star, or nebula) that can be considered a single unit. The exhibition positions this term as an expansive framework for honouring different expressions of sexuality and gender that exceed binaries and pre-existing definitions.
Featuring the work Dayna Danger, Brandon Hoax, Cassils, Adrien Crossman, Rah Eleh, Vivek Shraya, and Zachari Logan, the exhibition holds together an orbit for diverse bodies and subjectivities, considering how we all exist in relation to one another.
Co-curated by Genevieve Flavelle and Jenelle Pasiechnik, Celestial Bodies is a trans-disciplinary celebration of sexuality and gender through the lenses of love, advocacy, erotics, and the right to safety. The first of its kind in Campbell River and North Vancouver Island, this exhibition aims to be a space of visibility and advocacy for 2SLGBTQ+ people.
A Fine Pointed Belonging. 2019. Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Kingston ON. 2019.
Artists: Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli.
A Fine Pointed Belonging is a collaborative exhibition by contemporary artists Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin Nation) and Dayna Danger (Métis/Saulteaux/Polish) curated by Genevieve Flavelle. Drawing on Danger and Njootli's multifaceted practices and friendship, the exhibition explores the negotiation of consensual representation and what is given to be seen. Through collaborative performance, photography, and sculpture-based works, the artists invite viewers to consider what consensual representation can look like for their bodies, identities, and cultures when the pervasive demands of settler colonialism are subverted.
With larger-than-life portraits Dayna Danger questions the line between empowerment and objectification by claiming space. Danger’s current use of BDSM and beaded leather fetish masks depict the intersecting dynamics of sexuality, gender, and power in a consensual and feminist manner. In contrast to Danger’s direct use of the body, Jeneen Frei Njootli often obfuscates the demands of a settler colonial gaze by creating indirect representations of her own body and performance works. By setting limits on what can be viewed, Frei Njootli refuses to be consumed beyond the limits of her consent and affirms her sovereignty.
Building on trust, embodied experience, and cultural knowledge, A Fine Pointed Belonging explores making new belongings, belonging with each other as a kin, and belonging to oneself as a sovereign subject.
If it Makes you Happy (It Can't Be That Bad), Good Sport Gallery, London ON. July 23rd to August 20th, 2016.
Artist: Elise Boudreau Graham
If It Makes You Happy is Maritime born, Montreal based artist Elise Boudreau Graham’s first solo show. If It Makes You Happy explores the tensions of increasingly individualized brands of feminism and queries the ways in which the personal has become political. Aesthetically gesturing to the past, Boudreau Graham uses nostalgia to create a comfortable yet critical space which welcomes viewers to take a moment to relax and reflect on contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, internet activism, emotional labour, and commodified self-care.
Bad Sport a collection of feminist writing and artworks was released in conjunction with this exhibition and is accessible here.
Tough As Nails. 2016. Younger than Beyonce Gallery, Toronto.
Artists: Shellie Zhang, Maddie Alexander, B.G. Osborne, Danny Welsh, Kim Ninkuru.
Tough as Nails brings five emerging Toronto based artists together to flaunt the glamorous side of queer resistance. Seeking to complicate ideas of marginality, Tough as Nails explores the relationship between glamour and agency. Drawing on the long tradition of self-fashioned glamour as a practice of survival and world making for non-normative people, these five artists take up queer glamour as a defiant expression of marginalized identity.
The artists in Tough as Nails refuse, parody, challenge, and complicate conventional notions of what is considered alluring, and valuable. The artists exploit selfies, porn, fashion, interior decorating, and costuming as avenues to manipulate representation. Positioning queer as dodgy, erratic, and always in an unstable state of becoming, yet also as lived experience and historically defiant politic; queer glamour becomes a site of dynamic slippage, undermining, renegotiation, overstatement, and reinstatement. Tough as Nails investigates the idea of queer glamour as site of glittering transgression.
OUT: Queer Looking, Queer Acting Revisited, The Khyber Centre for the Arts, Halifax NS, 2014.
Curated by Robin Metcalfe in collaboration with Emily Davidson, Genevieve Flavelle, Beck Gilmer-Osborne, and Adan Myatt
This exhibition revisited OUT: Queer Looking, Queer Acting: Lesbian and Gay Vernacular, curated by long-time gay activist Robin Metcalfe at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in 1997. Comprised of ephemeral, mostly print materials, the exhibition documented queer activist struggles in Halifax between 1972 and 1997. The exhibition included print multiples, such as posters, handbills, T-shirts, and pins; video and film; performance documentation, including drag shows and political demonstrations and their props; and ways of marking, creating, and animating queer space within urban and architectural contexts. The restaged exhibition also included a sampling of recent materials representing the current wave of Queer activism in Halifax. Activists and artists Emily Davidson, Beck Gilmer-Osborne and Genevieve Flavelle participated in both creating and selecting many of the materials from the present decade. The 144-page catalogue accompanying OUT includes a complete reprint of the 1997 publication, with additional images and texts by Metcalfe, Gilmer-Osborne and Flavelle, and activist Rebecca Rose.
Copies of the reissued catalogue Out: Queer Looking, Queer Acting Revisited are available here.
The Turret Resurrection, The Khyber Centre for the Arts, Halifax NS, 2013.
Created in collaboration with B. G. Osborne, Emily Davidson, & the NSCAD Queer Collective.
The Turret Resurrection project brought the legendary Turret Club, run by the Gay Alliance for Equality from 1976—1982, back to life for the Khyber building's 125 anniversary in 2013. A collaborative undertaking, the NSCAD Queer Collective recreated the bar based on photographs of the original space and programmed three events in the spirit of the Turret; a disco, a cabaret, and a community discussion.
Our reincarnation of the Turret was not exact—the space's architecture had shifted, and we worked from a limited collection of reference images—but we called the bar's spirit back into the gallery and paid it tribute through our reincarnation. As young activists and artists, we were deeply inspired to learn that the bar was run by the Gay Alliance for Equality (GAE), later known as the Gay and Lesbian Association of Nova Scotia (GALA), which used the profits from the bar to fund their activities, including a helpline. The project intended to connect to the living queer history of Halifax through the activation of intergenerational communities. The events—the Sweet Release Disco and the Turret Resurrection Cabaret—were modelled on popular Turret events and brought out different generations of queer and trans communities who formed new intergenerational connections. A handful of the Turret's original organizers and patrons appeared, summoning their memories of the original space from the past, pointing out details such as where the stage used to be and the corner where the lesbians gathered to claim their space in the male-dominated scene. Our recreation included the infamous "Tits and Lipstick" mural, which lesbian feminist activists defaced, as a gesture to the complex and contested histories of 2SLGBTQ+ community spaces. The Turret made the GAE one of the highest-funded gay organizations in Canada, and the activism and community services they funded made the possibility of queer life beyond the gay bar tenable to many.
Queer Gestures: Enacting Utopias at The Gender Pit. 2013. Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax NS.
Curated in collaboration with the NSCAD Queer Collective
Artists: Brandon Brookbank, Elise Boudreau Graham, Karin Cope, Claudia Legg, Kiley May Longboat, Brady MacKinnon, Kyle Martens, Emerson Roach.
Queer Gestures: Enacting Utopias presented work by eight artists engaging with futurity, and utopias. Artists challenged accepted conceptions of queerness and envisioned radical and practical alternative futures. The exhibition was staged in a fictional spaced named the Gender Pit, which was envisioned as an autonomous student-run queer space on NSCAD campus. The Gender Pit was a temporary undertaking through which the DIY political possibilities of having a permanent queer student space were imagined. Centering a politics of resistance and queer imagination, the Gender Pit was a space that brings into conversation activism of the past, present and future. For the week of December 9th to 14th 2013 Gender Pit welcomed the public to a week of programming that include peer support sessions, karaoke, intergenerational community discussions, a poetry cafe, a dance party, punk rock aerobics and yoga classes.