Past

You can find the 2020 Online Exhibitions HERE

All previous physical exhibitions are below.

Femme4Femme is a love letter. Dedicated to the soft femmes, the hard femmes, the femmes of colour, the loud femmes, the femmes with disabilities, the overworked, underpaid, and exhausted femmes. A collaboration between Morgan Sears-­‐Williams and Maddie Alexander, Femme4Femme examines, critiques and honours the existence of queer Femme people, bodies, lives and identities.

The artists explore both the historical and contemporary existence of femme identity through a multi-­‐disciplinary and interactive space. Femme4Femme includes work by Alexander and Sears-­‐Williams accompanied by a constructed environment calling upon queer aesthetics which provoke and invite viewers into their femme-­‐centered living room. Through text, image, sculpture, and environmental installation, the artists reference queer coding, love, lived experiences, cruising, sex, and the intersections of femmephobia or misogyny.

Morgan uses older technologies such as a Rolodex or rotary telephone as an entry point for viewers to engage with the stories of queer femme folks by using interactivity to create a different relationship between object, content and viewer. Personal stories, historical and contemporary events populate the cards in the rolodex, blending time and creating a thread of feminist queer activism and lived experiences challenging the notion that queer feminist activism or femme presence exist within a certain time period. The rotary telephones are used to hold audio conversations speaking as a confessional, a private and intimate space created between the listener and the speaker.

Maddie pulls from pop culture, pornography and queer coding, using oversaturated imagery to explore representation of queer femmes in the media. Alexander explores micro aggressive language in a satirical manner, to break down the subtleties of femmephobia in film and television. The nuances of queer coding are played with in the sculptures, text and found fabrics which speak to the complexities of cruising and dating as a queer femme person. Alexander’s work also explores themes of safer sex practices for queer and trans people.

Maddie and Morgan both explore themes of archiving, documentation, queer bodies, and femme identity. The works interact with each other to display the efforts of archiving queer life from the artist’s perspective, and the importance of visibility and existence as resistance.

Femme4Femme is a multidisciplinary conversation between Maddie and Morgan’s works, both artists investigate contemporary and historical queer narrative, and question the implicit roles expected of queer femmes. While Femme4Femme comments on femme visibility and culture, it also in itself becomes a space of queer femme resistance.

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Morgan Sears-­‐Williams is a white settler of Irish, English and German descent working in Tkaronto on the lands of the the Anishanaabe, the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudensosaunee, and the Huron-­‐Wendat. Morgan is an interdisciplinary artist and holds a BFA in Photography from OCAD University. She is interested in experimenting with image making, installation, publications, and mixed media works as a tool for self-­‐exploration, and defining and re-­‐inventing perceptions of your self. Her practice often explores larger themes of feminist queer histories, collective memory and questioning institutional archiving practices. Recently she has been conducting interventions with analog technologies, such as rotary telephones, and altering perceptions of their usage and stories they hold. She has exhibited her works in Toronto, Kingston and internationally and was the recipient of the Pandora Y. H. Ho Memorial Award and the Artscape Youngplace Career Launcher in 2017.

Maddie Alexander is a queer, trans non-­‐binary artist, arts facilitator, archivist, and educator. Their multidisciplinary practice interrogates experiences of queer sovereignty. They hold a BFA in Photography from OCAD University, and are currently an MFA candidate at NSCAD University. Their work has exhibited locally and internationally and they received the Project 31 Photography Award in 2016. They have participated in multiple residencies, panels, artist talks, and lectures. Their work examines the precarity of queer spaces, and representations of queer and trans experience in pop culture and mass media. They approach this through a community-­‐oriented practice and utilize DIY techniques to produce environmental experiences. Their work pulls from sourced materials, as well as personal narrative to explore themes of desire, failure, connection, and dissonance.

This exhibition is made possible through the financial support of the City of Windsor Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.

Remote Viewing is an expanding collection of stills and video sourced from unprotected web-based surveillance cameras. The cameras exist globally and are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The feeds that I revisit most frequently are are nearly void of human presence. Some scenes have small elements like faraway radio towers or pathways that serve as distant reminders of occupation, marring otherwise empty landscapes. As an Indigenous person who wasn’t raised with traditional teachings I’ve struggled with my relationship to the land and I think often of how I feel more connected to these disparate places than my home territory.

Taylor Jolin is an Ojibwe multidisciplinary artist from Sault Ste. Marie, ON. Her work engages with themes of land and place, non-verbal communication, and surveillance-using these elements as a way of contextualizing overarching investigations about intimacy. Presently she uses digital media and surveillance technologies in an ongoing process of collecting, analyzing and archiving globally sourced visual data. Jolin received her BFA from Algoma University in 2016 and has exhibited extensively locally and across Ontario. She is currently on the board of directors at 180 Projects, a volunteer-run gallery and experimental project space, and is a core member of the Indigenous Women’s Anti-Violence Taskforce and the Northern Indigenous Artist Alliance.

This exhibition is made possible through the financial support of the City of Windsor Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.

The Pond Secrets Are Drying in the Banks is a solo exhibition featuring photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and audio works by North Bay based artist, Alexander Rondeau. The exhibition considers the poetic, subtle impacts of a beaver dam collapse on a former logging site situated on the farm where he grew up in rural Northeastern Ontario. As an aggressively heteronormative space – and conflictingly, a deeply personal space – the beaver dam collapse at a logging site offers a unique opportunity to generate important dialogue about queer ecologies; an interdisciplinary approach to dismantling heteronormative understandings of nature and sexuality. Informed by writing on queer phenomenology, ecological theory, object oriented ontology, abstract bodies, and affect theory, The Pond Secrets Are Drying in the Banks considers the multifaceted socio-regional implications of the logging site and its debri, and a subsequent beaver dam.

Alexander Rondeau is a queer, Francophone, interdisciplinary artist and curator from rural Northeastern Ontario currently based in North Bay. Rondeau holds a BFA in Image Arts: Photography Studies from Ryerson University. His artistic practice is largely lens based hybridizing photography, performance, sculpture, and site specific interventions highlighting the impermanence of queerness as seen through the social and cultural histories embedded in objects, place, and his own body and the accelerated complexities at intersections thereof within rurality. Rondeau has had many exhibitions across Ontario – in 2017, he was a Featured and sponsored artist during the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Shortly after, he participated in the Masters of Art and Design International Artist Residency in Sigulda, Latvia. Other residencies include Art Camp: Artist Residency for Emerging Artists, and the Queer + Trans Artist Residency, both in Toronto, 2016. Rondeau also has an active curatorial practice which centralizes alternative curatorial strategies for marginalized and underrepresented artists in Northern Ontario. In June 2018, he curated a large scale site specific exhibition in a forest featuring 15 artists from across the province. The exhibition centralized issues of identity in a Northern rural context including structural violence against Indigenous women, queer geographies and queer temporalities, and the harmful impacts of resource extraction based industries towards feminine bodies. Since May 2018, he has served as the Program Coordinator at the Near North Mobile Media Lab. Starting September 2019, he will be entering the Criticism & Curatorial Practice graduate program at OCAD University on a full scholarship.

This exhibition is made possible through the financial support of the City of Windsor Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.

VIDEOSTORE is a one night DIY video art festival, based off the wildly successful Bring Your Own Beamer events produced by Rafaël Rozendaal. The festival is currently seeking submissions of video art, and is open to all participants on the condition that they provide their own projector, monitor, installation equipment, etc. Artists must be present for and prepared to install and de-install their work on May 10, 2019. The event will take place in Windsor, ON.

Dana Buzzee’s solo exhibition Punishment Rituals, at LEFT Contemporary, amalgamates coven initiation practices as taboo inspiration for queer-femme BDSM. While witchcraft and BDSM exist as ‘outsider’ interests, they both can be used to create queered spaces for empowered moments of dominance and submission, active and informed consent culture, and a profound understandings of power and control.

Dana Buzzee  is an interdisciplinary installation artist currently based on Treaty 7 Land in Calgary, AB. Buzzee’s artistic practice is an overt autobiographical exploration of queer identity, married with a deep longing to create contemporary visions of post-minimalist sculpture. Since graduating in 2012 from the Alberta College of Art and Design with a BFA in Drawing, Buzzee has maintained a dedicated studio-based practice and sibling-practice of feminist community organizing through arts administration and curatorial work. Buzzee’s work has has been exhibited extensively within Calgary and has been part of several international group shows, including ones in Tampere, Finland; Hamberg, Germany; and Memphis, USA. Buzzee’s recent exhibitions include two solo exhibitions in Calgary: Femme Top of Your Dreams, the inaugural exhibition at The Lily Project Space in 2017, and Bruise Me Softly at Stride Gallery in 2018.

This exhibition is made possible through the financial support of the City of Windsor Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.

In a series of quixotic experiments, In and through all things reaches into objects, attempting to touch the intangible stored within and rippling back through them. Drawing both from handmade Shaker technologies and from objects used by early deep-sea divers, these works propose tools for approaching the metaphysical.
The methods of early deep-sea divers are compelling—in order to go where you cannot go, and see what you cannot see, one is required to embark on a lonely, disorienting descent into dark uncertainty. So a diver would carry with them a lamp, a compass, a dagger, helpful and comforting tools for the void. Echoing a diver’s tools for an expedition into uncertainty, these objects quietly probe for flickering signals in the darkness in a unique expression of faith.
Faith becomes bound up in the production or usage of objects through intent. The potency of intention can be felt rippling back through objects made by the Shakers, for whom woodworking or everyday tasks could be spiritual acts. Not unlike Shaker designs, these works inscribe magic on the banal—holiness and spirit suddenly turns up in everything, spooky action peers out from behind every surface. Flowers pressed in a stranger’s bible. Handmade gloves. The eyes of bees.
Through paradoxical and absurd propositions, In and through all things serves to guide the mind and heart of the viewer towards the invisible and impossible. These works contemplate the object as a traversable bridge, intent shifting material at a quantum level. Looking to both Christian mysticism and quantum theories, they grasp at the murky boundaries of human perception with an earnest, and deeply personal approach.

This exhibition is made possible through the financial support of the City of Windsor Arts, Culture & Heritage Fund.

On September 4, 2018 Arts Commons turned off the 3-channel video work being exhibited by B.G-Osborne in The New Gallery’s +15 Window. The reasons cited being that the work contained “a lot of swearing and nudity” that had garnered “a lot of complaints from concerned patrons.” The installation in full was removed the following week. You can find full details about the actions that led to this censorship in TNG’s statements:

Initial statement: https://mailchi.mp/29a6335977d9/tng-enews-sled-island-collaboration-main-space-and-job-call-1360085?e=3ea1169c5d 

Follow-up statement: https://mailchi.mp/e3fe72570272/tng-enews-alternative-venues-screen-a-thousand-cuts15-window-receptions-cancelled-and-an-invitation-to-an-open-forum 

The video work, “A Thousand Cuts” can now be viewed at three alternative venues: the University of Calgary Art Department (Calgary, AB), Latitude 53 (Edmonton, AB), and Left Contemporary (Windsor, ON). Please contact these organizations to find out viewing hours. We thank these organizations for their support of this important artwork.

B.G-Osborne has also written an open letter in response to this censorship:

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A Thousand Cuts

B.G-Osborne

A Thousand Cuts is an in-progress found-footage video compilation of cisgender actors playing transgender roles in film and television. The work confronts transgender cinematic tropes and the erasure of transgender people in mainstream media. The clips that are selected for the compilation are, more often than not, from films and television series produced for cisgender audiences. By editing, arranging, and locating visual and thematic similarities between certain clips and dialogue, A Thousand Cuts creates new meaning through a crescendolike composition ranging from humorous to violent- but always inauthentic- representations of trans individuals. The large poster included in the exhibition lists the names of all documented murdered transgender people in the past two years. Last year alone, there were over three hundred documented murders of transgender people world-wide. The poster serves as a reminder to the viewership of the common consequence of transgender expression, especially for trans women of colour.

B.G-Osborne is a Transmedia artist from rural Ontario, currently working in Montreal. Their work focuses on exploring and interrogating the potential of gender-variant embodiment to serve as both a tool for gender deconstruction and revision. They graduated as valedictorian from NSCAD University in 2014 with a BFA in Intermedia. Osborne’s ongoing projects seek to address the complexities of trans representation and violence, mental illness, and family secrets/stories. They place great importance in showcasing their work in artist run centres and non-commercial galleries throughout Canada.

List of clips used in the compilation:

Movies:
3 Generations (2015)
20 centímetros (2005)
40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
Ace Ventura Pet Detective (1994)
The Adventures of Sebastian Cole (1998)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
All About My Mother (1999)
ANYTHING (2017)
Beautiful Boxer (2004)
Boys Don’t Cry Oscar Awards Ceremony (2000)
Better than Chocolate (1999)
Breakfast on Pluto (2005)
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
Crocodile Dundee (1986)
The Crying Game (1992)
Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
The Danish Girl (2015)
Desperate Living (1977)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Dressed To Kill (1980)
Ed Wood (1994)
En Soap (2006)
Flawless (1999)
Glen or Glenda (1953)
Hedwig and The Angry Inch (2001)
I want what I want (1972)
In a Year with 13 Moons (1978)
K-11 (2012)
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
La Mala Educacion (2004)
Laurence Anyways (2012)
Ma vie en rose (1997)
M.Butterfly (1993)
Naked Gun 33 1/3 (1994)
Normal (2003)
ROMEOS (2011)
Soldiers Girl (2003)
Soapdish (1991)
TO WONG FOO Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)
Tomboy (2011)
Transamerica (2005)
Trich Doan Phim (Man on high Heels) (2014)
The World According to Garp (1982)
Zoolander 2 (2016)
Different for Girls (1996)
Elvis and Madonna (2010)
The World’s Fastest Indian (2005)

TV Shows:
All My Children, “Zoe: At the Crossroads part II” (2006)
American Horror Story, Season 5 Episode 3 “Mommy” (2015)
The Bold and the Beautiful, Episode 7078 (2016)
Californication, Season 5 Episode 5 “Charlie got a Blowjob from a Tranny Hooker” (2012)
Cold Case, Season 2 Episode 3 “Daniela” (2004)
Cold Case, Season 5 Episode 9 “Boy Crazy” (2007)
Coronation Street: Roy and Haley’s Wedding (1999)
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Season 8 Episode 8, “Identity Crisis” (2002)
Dead of Summer, Season 1 Episode 3 “Mixtape” (2016)
Degrassi, Season 13 Episode 7, “Young Forever” (2013)
The Education of Max Bickford, Season 1 Episode 7 “Revisionism” (2001)
Friends, Season 7 Episode 22 “The one with Chandlers dad” (2001)
The Golden Girls, Season 3 Episode 7 “Strange Bedfellows” (1987)
Hit and Miss, Season 1 Episode 3 (2012)
Hollyoaks, Jason tells Bart it’s over (2010)
The Jeffersons, Season 4 Episode 3 “Once a Friend” (1977)
Just Shoot Me, Season 5 Episode 6 “Brandi You’re a Fine Girl” (2000)
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Season 4 Episode 21 “Fallacy” (2003)
Night Court, Season 3 Episode 6 “Best of Friends” (1985)
Nip/Tuck, Season 3 Episode 14 “Cherry Peck” (2005)
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Season 3 Episode 10 “Mac is a Serial Killer” (2007)
Orphan Black, Season 2 Episode 8 “Variable and Full of Perturbation” (2014)
Penny Dreadful, Season 2 Episode 4 “Evil Spirits in Heavenly Places” (2015)
Pretty Little Liars, Season 6 Finale (2015)
Sex and the City, Season 3 Episode 18 “Cock-A-Doodle-Do” (2000)
Sons of Anarchy, Season 5 Episode 5 “Orcha Shrugged” (2012)
Tales of the City, Part 1 Chapter 7 (1994)
Tales from the Crypt, Season 6 Episode 8 “The Assassin” (1994)
Transparent, Season 1 Episode 1 “Pilot” (2014)
Twin Peaks, Season 2 Episode 11 “Masked Ball” (1990)
Two and a Half Men, Season 1 Episode 18 “An Old Flame with a New Wick” (2004)
Ugly Betty, Romijn and Mabius on Joining the Cast (Interview, 2007)
Wentworth, Season 3 Episode 11 “The Living and The Dead” (2015)
WKRP in Cincinnati, Season 3 Episode 5 “Hotel Oceanview” (1980)

Music Videos:
Arcade Fire “We Exist” (2014)

The artist would like to thank The Canada Council for the Arts for their continued support of this project.

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This exhibition is presented in partnership with The New Gallery (Calgary, AB)

Over time, a well used staircase will form indentations on its steps from consistent use. The persistent presence of a small activity eventually alters the structure of the staircase, changes how we interact with it, and ultimately how we view it. As the persistent presence of queer people has continued throughout history, we see the work of the community wear into the structure of society and make a permanent impression. As young queer people who have grown up seeing huge shifts in politics, dialogues, and acceptance, as well as huge shifts of technology, medicine, and culture, how have our lives and experiences been influenced by these things? How different are we than generations before? How are we similar? What does it mean to be queer in 2018? A Gently Worn Impression seeks to explore the complexity of queer identity and culture, presenting work by queer millennials which creates lines between the past, present, and future.

The exhibition will feature work from Daniel Cardinal McCartney, Ryan Danny Owen, Lucas LaRochelle, Nour Fakih, Nicola Wilting, Brandon Geissmann, Nikki Alex Basset, May G N, Adrienne Crossman, Dana Buzzee, and the Windsor Youth Centre’s Gender-Sexuality Alliance.

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A Gently Worn Impression is presented with support from Windsor Essex Pride Fest.

Windsor-Essex Pride Fest (WEPF) is incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in the Province of Ontario. Governed by a volunteer Board of Directors, WEPF brings together members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, Questioning and Two Spirit (LGBTIQ2S) community, their friends, allies and supporters in celebration of the unique spirit and culture of our community by providing advocacy and producing inclusive and safe events, initiatives and social programs. WEPF strengthens the sense of community and contributes to the vibrancy, health and overall well-being of LGBTIQ2S individuals in Windsor-Essex.

Windsor-Essex Pride Fest’s goal through its QConnect Program is to empower Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans*, Queer, Questioning, Intersex and Two Spirit (LGBTIQ2S) individuals through social and recreation programs and facilitate opportunities for connection and belonging to reduce social isolation. This is done through age-specific activities, peer-facilitated groups, workshops and special events/initiatives.

Members of the LGBTIQ2S community experience unique social isolation compared with other marginalized groups. Research indicates that the individuals in the LGBTTQIA community are 2.5 times more likely to live alone. The lack of peer or social supports, activities, gatherings or other opportunities to engage with peers in the community may cause social isolation that often escalates  into a number of other problems, including homelessness, depression, violence, suicidal ideation, drug and alcohol abuse and dropping out of school for some LGBTIQ2S youth.

http://www.wepridefest.com/

VIDEOSTORE is a one night DIY video art festival, based off the widely successful Bring Your Own Beamer events produced by Rafaël Rozendaal. The festival is currently seeking submissions of video art, and is open to all participants on the condition that they provide their own projector, monitor, installation equipment, etc. Artists must be present for and prepared to install and de-install their work on May 18, 2018. The event will take place in Windsor, ON.

The event will take place for one day at the School of Creative Arts Armouries Building (37 University Ave. E), with installation in the afternoon and a reception in the evening at 8pm. The work will be installed in the building’s public spaces. The work will be de-installed following the reception.

BADLIGHT is memory, blindness and gestures of care. It is what is felt and what is lost.
Rooted heavily in craft theory and ontology, BADLIGHT is the relationship mother and daughter in times of light and of darkness.

Natalie Lauchlan is a daughter. She is an emerging artist from Canada, where her mind still goes to wonder the forests and mountains, no matter where her body is. She collects fragments of text that come to arrange themselves in her memory. She reads the tenderness of objects and transcribes the poetics of space.
Exploring the ephemeral, she is the ghost haunting all her memories.

These works are a continuation of a series of chimeric explorations questioning the threshold between the ‘human’ and ‘natural.’ Through them, I seek stories of interconnectedness, of bodies whose boundaries are permeable and overlap; to memorialize, engage, and bring this permeability into presence.

Sheri Nault is a multi-disciplinary artist of Métis and mixed European descent. Situated within personal and political contexts, their art practice and research are grounded in queer, feminist, and Indigenous world-views. Through their work they strives to elicit a sense of social and ecological responsibility to one another on a damaged planet, exploring the connections between humans and nature. They completed their MFA at York University in 2017, were an Indigenous Practicum Participant in The Banff Centre’s Visual Arts department from 2014 to 2015, and received their BFA from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2012. Recent exhibitions include Kin, the presentation of their thesis work; Entangled Bodies at the Art Gallery of York University (agYU); art( i f)ACTS curated by Belinda Ho-Yan Kwan in response to the agYU collection; and Where the Weather Happens at the Niagara Artists Centre, curated by Jessie Short and Amy Malbeuf. They are a member of the 2017 cohort of the Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency based at Artscape Gibraltar Point (postponed to 2018 due to flooding).

Via a convolution of print and perception The Traverse seeks to make apparent the division between the normative and queer understanding of the self. Providing the choice to move beyond a curtain, standing in for the edge of queer territory, the viewer is confronted by an inverted gaze. An artwork directly expressing its agency, the multitude of eyes and grimacing mouths that compose the interior of the installation enforce the viewer’s position as an outsider in this differentiated place. In the focused gaze beyond its surface the work desires a token of understanding from the viewer, offering a point of empathetic contact through a text offering. This desire, however, is no guarantee of a deciphering taking place.

My transitional intent is geared towards generating new meaning, ways of living, a bodily existence. These modes are supposedly beyond legibility to normative visions and so the forcing an action of traversal (physical, geographical, societal and cultural) becomes essential.

Outcomes in trans living are immune to any attempt at foresight and demand a unique journey and relationship with the subject of change. This relationship and the conclusions drawn from it lie beyond some form of barrier and The Traverse is meant to present that.

May G N is a Trans Albertan Artist that works with new media print technologies to produce work engaging with their personal navigations of territories that span the emotional, physical and societal. Through layering image, text and material, May G N provides scenarios where the decisions of the viewer are interrogated surrounding their relationship with queer identities.