here. - Gladstone Hotel

THAT’S SO GAY
The Gladstone Hotel’s Annual
Contemporary Pride Exhibition
June 9–August 17, 2016
12–5pm daily
TSG: Come Together is curated by
Syrus Marcus Ware
Exhibition Direction by Lukus Toane
Catalogue designed by Allison Chan
1214 Queen Street West, Toronto
416.531.4635
@gladstonehotel
#tsg2016
EXHIBITION HOURS
June 9–August 17, 2016
12–5pm daily
2nd, 3rd, and 4th Floor Public Spaces
OPENING RECEPTION
June 30, 2016
7–10pm, 2nd Floor Gallery
PECHA KUCHA ARTIST TALK
July 21, 2016
6–9pm, 2nd Floor Gallery
Special thanks to
THAT’S SO GAY
The Gladstone Hotel’s Annual
Contemporary Pride Exhibition
THAT’S SO GAY
CURATOR STATEMENT
The 2016 subtitle (Come Together) refers to many things: a call to action
and activism during a year that has witnessed unprecedented coverage of
cross-movement building amongst Indigenous, Black and POC Two-Spirited and LGBTTI2QQ communities, collective struggle and the need to
unify and call for creative responses to transphobic and homophobic violence that is dis-proportionally affecting Indigenous and racialized trans
women. TSG: Come Together highlights the need for artistic engagement
and responses to propel our activisms into a new dimension.The artists
will explore what could be possible if we came together, embracing the
unprecedented surge in cross-community activism bringing understandings of Indigenous Sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, environmental justice
and queer and trans justice together in larger conversation.
Through drawing, painting, photography and mixed media artists Vivek
Shraya, Christopher Rodrigues, Natalie Wood, Kara Sievewright, and Lido
Pimienta will explore intersections of queer and trans history with environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, mixed race communities in
Canada and family life. Artists Radiodress, Humboldt Magnussen, Paddy
Leung and Jenna Reid will create installations using mixed media, textiles
and found objects to explore cultures of resistance, beauty, spirituality
and ritual and their connections to queer and trans identity. Video works
by Evan Ifekoya (UK), Lia La Novia (Mexico) and Naomi Rincón Gallardo
(Germany) will consider regionality, migration and transgender and gender advocacy through creative practice.
— Syrus Marcus Ware
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Evan Ifekoya, Paddy Leung, Humboldt Magnussen, Lia La Novia, Lido
Pimienta, Radiodress, Jenna Reid, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Christopher
Rodrigues, Vivek Shraya, Kara Sievewright, Natalie Wood
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SECOND FLOOR
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D
F
B
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A. Evan Ifekoya
E. Radiodress
B. Paddy Leung (ceiling)
F. Christopher Rodrigues
C. Lia La Novia
G. Kara Sievewright
D. Lido Pimienta
H. Natalie Wood
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THIRD FLOOR
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I. Naomi Rincón Gallardo
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J. Vivek Shraya
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FOURTH FLOOR
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L
E
K
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K. Humboldt Magnussen
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L. Jenna Reid
THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
THE GENDER SONG
Evan Ifekoya
evanifekoya.com |
@evan_ife
The Gender Song is a defiant call to end limiting gender categorization
spun over a dancehall riddim. It is one of four in a series of works that
seek to queery the music video format. Female, he-male, she-male,
don't matter?
Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary
artist who explores the politicization
of culture, society and aesthetics.
Appropriated material from historical
archives and contemporary society
make up the work. By ‘queerying’
popular imagery and utilizing the
props of everyday life, the aim is to
destroy the aura of preciousness
surrounding art. Central to this practice is an exploration into the ways
that collaboration might take place.
Recent exhibitions include All Of Us
Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2015);
Embodied Spaces, Framer-Framed,
De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam (2015),
both curated by Christine Eyene; Studio Voltaire OPEN, London (2015) and
30 years of the Future, Castlefield
Gallery, Manchester (2014). Recent
performances have taken place at
David Roberts Art Foundation and
Tate Modern, London; The Marlborough, Brighton and De Tolhuistuin,
Amsterdam (all 2015).
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MY XXy YEARS
Lia La Novia
The Quinceañera is a Mexican tradition, a big party that most girls
celebrate on their 15th birthdays in Mexico. The Quinceañera celebrates
the end of a girl’s childhood and the beginning of womanhood with a big
party. There are many traditional symbols given to girl by her family to
welcome her new identity as a woman.
With this project, Lia celebrates her own transition, the end of her male
identity in the public space. Through this process, she re-appropriates
this ritual and shares it with the people that become her guests. She is
focused on analyzing how the tradition is an action that makes collectivity
possible and how the transition of gender is an educational process driven
by context.
Lia Garcia (La Novia) is a feminist artist
and transgender woman from Mexico
City and co-founder of the Network of
Mexico Trans Youth, a feminist collective that helps young people transition
while using artistic practices to communicate transgender topics in different
public spaces.
Her artistic interests are focused on
making her own gender transition a
space of affective communication within
her social context. She proposes social
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transformation through affectivities, ritual and celebration, as political actions
of public intervention. Her current research project “Skin feminisms: Gender
transition as an affective, pedagogical,
collective experience” is a proposal that
analyzes the performance as a radical
pedagogy of transformation that transcends the museum space and takes
streets, schools and spaces of complexity to intervene and build alternative
realities and forms of communication.
THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
DANCING WITH DRAGONS
Paddy Leung
Paddy Leung’s latest creation is
heavily inspired by The Lion Dance,
also known as The Chinese Dragon
Dance. Traditionally, the lion’s costumes are performed in beautiful
and colourful textile materials. The
lion’s head (mask) is usually oversized and dragon-like, followed by
a long silky colourful textile that
paddyleung.com |
@paddy_leung
extends into the lion’s body. They
are often performed during Chinese
New Year and other Chinese traditional, cultural, and religious festivals, including important occasions
such as wedding ceremonies, business opening events, and honouring special guests into the Chinese
communities to bring good luck.
Toronto artist Paddy Leung is a fairy of all traits that can magically make
dreams come true. Using paper, glitter, streamers, bling, and confetti, she
has been known to make beautiful installations and sculptures. For this
special occasion, Paddy Leung creates Dancing with Dragons as a visual
interpretation of Chinese traditions through western pop culture influences.
THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
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FLAMBUOYANT
Humboldt Magnussen
@humboldtmagnussen
Humboldt Magnussen is showing two large sculptures paired with a
photograph that discuss strength from the standpoint of the individual
and strength coming from your community.
Flambuoyant uses the term “flamboyant” as a starting point to create a
work that seeks to complicate the notions that feminine/ flaming queer
men are not brave and are weak. Through the physical act of treading
water while lighting a ring of fire around himself, he not only playfully
reinterprets the word flamboyant to mean a flamer that is floating, but he
also seeks to expand the boundaries of the flamboyant stereotype.
The sculpture Safety Net was constructed for the TSG: Come Together
exhibition, using the form of the net to speak about how community is
often a source of safety. In the queer community this is often very true
where like-minded individuals can come together and create a safe space,
while also supporting others that are going out on a limb/in danger/
needing assurance that they are not alone.
Humboldt Magnussen is an emerging
artist/curator from rural Saskatchewan
who recently completed an MFA in
Interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University focusing on performance art
and masculinity studies. His work uses
ornamentation and the insertion of their
own queer body into a hyper masculine
context, in an effort to expand existing
notions of masculinity, into more inclu-
sive ones through humour and parody.
He has exhibited internationally through
several residencies in Finland and
Russia and through an exchange with
Lund University in Sweden. He is the cofounder, along with Marjan Verstappen,
of YTB Gallery, a new nomadic artist
run center in Toronto.
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THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
TRAD(E)ITIONS WALL
Lido Pimienta
@lidopimienta
A series of paintings about the origin of ‘exotic’ fruits and insects in
North America.
The exhibition compares and contrasts the nuances of (cultural) Tradition
and (business) Trade of animals and plants with those of Diaspora that
have been culturally traded and sold throughout history. Compositionally,
the works take direct inspiration from early Western botanical illustrators
such as Michał Boym and Thomas van Rhee. In the same vein, the works will
be displayed with printed annotations and the backstory of each subject.
Lido Pimienta (b.1986) is an Torontobased Colombian born Indigenous
interdisciplinary artist-curator and
musician. She has performed, exhibited, and curated around the world
since 2002. Pimienta’s work explores
the politics of gender, race, motherhood, identity and the construct of
the Canadian landscape in the Latin
American Diaspora and vernacular.
THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
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MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM
Radiodress
An exploration of the sacred geometrical form of the Merkabah/
Ezekiel’s Wheel through a series of
35 collages and short sound works.
Working with a non-linear visual
language composed of social histo-
radiodress.ca
ry, autobiography and auto-fantasy,
Radiodress unfolds this mysterious
shape whose cultural locations run a
rich gamut from Kabbalistic visions
to Afrofuturist cosmology.
Radiodress uses live and recorded talking, singing, yelling and listening to
consider bodies as sites of knowledge, and communication as a political
practice. Her projects have been performed widely in North America, Europe,
South Asia and the Middle East. Radiodress’ most recent project MKV,
exhibited last winter at the Art Gallery of York University. Her radio show,
Republic of Love: art and cultural resistance can be found online at:
radiodress.ca/reenas-anarchosyn
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PISSING ON PITY
Jenna Reid
fieldnotes-byjennareid.com
@fieldnotes_by_jennareid
Through a quick and forceful exhalation I cry out in anguish: “FUCK! ME!”
Weeping to myself I lament aloud, “fuuuuuuuuuck meee.”
With a sultry and inviting whisper I plea for you to “fuck me.”
Playfully yet sternly I demand that you “fuck me!”
Throughout her adult life the bed has been a place of refuge. A site of violence.
A dank, piss-soaked tangled mess of shame. A deeply passionate site of
desire. The bed has been a place of hopeless isolation as well as the intimately
familiar terrain of lovers. While positioned on top of, underneath and tangled
in between the sheets Jenna has experienced pain as trauma, pain as pleasure,
pleasure as pleasure and pleasure as violence.
Through this new work, Pissing on Pity, Jenna explores the ways in which we
make sense of our experiences of pleasure and pain and how they are blurred
and complicated in relation to our histories of violence. While reflecting on
her own sexual encounters and sexuality and how they have been mediated
through the act of being both unknowingly drugged and professionally medicated she opens up the current conversations regarding rape and consent by
placing it in dialogue with the often violent and physically invasive experiences
of being psychiatrized.
Jenna Reid first learned to quilt as a
preteen as a way to connect with her
paternal family. Experiences of grief,
intense nostalgia and a deep respect
for the feminist roots of quilt making
have inspired Jenna to use quilting as
her chosen medium in order to engage
with and express issues of disability
justice. As a mad identified artist, Jenna
understands her own personal practice
as a fibre artist as being intricately
linked to her engagement with and
contribution to the mad and disability
communities around her.
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OCOTEPEC ODYSSEY
Naomi Rincón Gallardo
naomirincongallardo.org
Ocotepec Odyssey is a transdisciplinary research project about radical social
experiences challenging the belief in progress in Mexico in the 1960s to 70s. It
takes its name from a small town in Morelos, whose indigenous communitarian
features inspired philosopher and maverick Catholic priest Ivan Illich. Illich later
founded a centre called CIDOC in Cuernavaca: a gathering point for radical
intellectuals from around the world, whose practitioners questioned the axioms
of modern thinking with alternatives related to liberation theology.
Taking the form of an installation, performance, and sci-fi film retrospective,
Ocotepec Odyssey is a trip that goes from popular feminist pedagogical experiences to experimental, hallucinogenic group therapy and psychoanalysis in monasteries. In this non-linear narrative, stories around Illich and CIDOC are fictionalized; a galactic queer axolotl warns us about the counterproductive effects of
modernity, as a transgender priest reads a mass and lulls to sleep her fetus-monks.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo (North Carolina,
USA. 1979) is based in Mexico City, but
currently living in Vienna. She has a BA
in Visual Arts from La Esmeralda, in
Mexico City. She has also earned an MA
in Education: Culture, Language and
Identity/Crossectoral and Community
Arts at Goldsmiths University of London. She is a candidate for the PhD in
Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Vienna. Under-standing research as an
artful and transdisciplinary fabrication,
her latest work addresses initiatives related to the creation of counter-worlds
in the recent past in Mexico. She uses
irony, masquerade lenses and queer
methodologies to create a place
between radical utopian experiences,
fantasy and crises of beliefs. Rincón
Gallardo integrates her interest in music,
literature, theater games, feminisms,
queer theory and critical pedagogy into
her work. Alongside her artistic work,
she has been involved in institutional
and non-institutional education settings
and community projects, both teaching
and coordinating.
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THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
ISLAND 38
Christopher Rodrigues
christopherrodrigues.com
As the Komagata Maru sailed east, Christopher Rodrigues’ grandparents
sailed west from India; first settling in Kenya, then over three generations
immigrating to England and finally Canada, effectively severing all
Indian and British cultural roots for the gen X’er. Today his family
lives in Vancouver facing a new challenge due to an unprecedented
real estate market; the constant threat of displacement. Island 38 is a
diverse, sustainable floating island that not only speaks to a history of
cultural isolation, but also acts as an artistic remedy to the worries of
displacement, through the creation of virtual land.
Born in Derby, England 1974, Christopher Rodrigues immigrated to Ottawa,
Canada in 1982 and later moved to
New York in 2001. In 2011 he was
awarded his BA in Visual Studies from
the University of Toronto; the same
year saw his first solo show at RARE
Gallery in New York, where he exhibited
nine digital paintings from his planet
series. His evolving conceptual painting practice, while rooted in traditional
painting, explores the fringes of painting where it touches other mediums
both traditional and digital. His work
often uses fantasy and mythology to
explores issues concerning environment and identity. He currently lives
and works in Vancouver, Canada.
Rodrigues has had solo shows in RARE
Gallery, New York and the Pendulum
Gallery in Vancouver. Selected group
shows include the Los Angeles Center
for Digital Art, the Hunterdon Art
Museum, New Jersey and the Rymer
Gallery, Nashville. Locally, his work has
been shown at the Port Moodie Arts
Centre, Surrey Art Gallery, Chopra
Yoga Center, Wil Aballe Art Projects
and the Vivarium Gallery, a windowfront gallery he co-founded and has
been added to private collections of
the Sutton Place Hotel, Jeff Bezos and
the Vancouver General Hospital.
THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
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TRISHA
Vivek Shraya
Trisha is an homage to Vivek Shraya’s mother and the daughter she
wasn’t allowed to want. The series
has been featured in Dazed, BuzzFeed, VICE, Huffington Post, CBC,
The Globe and Mail, The Daily Mail
(UK), and India Today.
vivekshraya.com |
@vivekshraya
Creative direction: Vivek Shraya
Artwork & photography: Karen
Campos Castillo
Makeup: Alanna Chelmick
Hair: Fabio Persico
Clothing in 4, 5 & 8: M. Orbe
Set & wardrobe assistants:
Shemeena Shraya & Adam Holman
#trishaproject
Vivek Shraya is a Toronto-based artist whose body of work includes several
albums, films and books. Her first novel, She of the Mountains, was named one of
The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2014. Her debut collection of poetry, even this
page is white, was released this spring. Vivek has read and performed internationally at shows, festivals and post-secondary institutions, sharing the stage with
Tegan & Sara and Dragonette, and has appeared at NXNE, Word on the Street, and
Yale University. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached.
Vivek is a 2016 Pride Toronto Grand Marshal, a three-time Lambda Literary Award
finalist, a 2015 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award finalist, and a 2015
recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize Honour of Distinction. Vivek’s first children’s picture book, The Boy & the Bindi, will be published by
Arsenal Pulp Press in 2016. Her book on recording artist M.I.A. will be published in
2017 by ECW Press, as part of their Pop Classics series.
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QUEER IN COMMON COUNTRY,
THE CLAM DIGGERS
Kara Sievewright
Kara’s work uses comics to explore
stories inspired by history, resistance, literature, queerness, and the
interactions and sometimes conflict
between humans and non-human
environments. The Clam Diggers,
originally published in Plentitude
Magazine, is an exploration of queer
love, survival and the struggle
against everyday violence. Queer
in Common Country explores the
story of her partner’s breast cancer
diagnosis and treatment and some
makerofnets.ca |
@makerofnets
of the challenges LGBTQIA people
with cancer face including gendered cancer care, fertility options,
the cancer-industrial complex, and
hierarchical medical systems. But it
also looks at the benefits of being
part of a strong and resilient queer
community. Queer in Common
Country will be published in The
Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices
on Health and Health Care by Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2016.
Kara Sievewright is a queer writer, artist, and designer who has published
comics, writing and illustrations in many magazines and anthologies. Her work
has been exhibited nationally and internationally and most recently at the
Komikazen International Reality Comics Festival in Ravenna, Italy. She is a
member of the Graphic History Collective and is currently working on a graphic
novel. She lives in Daajing.giids Llnagaay/Queen Charlotte, Haida Gwaii as a
settler on Haida territory.
THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
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HANGMAN
Natalie Wood
Like the title suggests, the video
references the game Hangman.
It is about the slurs and derogatory
names that we get called—sodomite,
battygirl / boo, ni**ger, etc. and the
thought that what if every time
those words are used it conjures up
and remembers a queer/black/radicalized and racialized person who
is ready to fight against these labels
and painful put downs.
In Black Skin White Masks Fanon
writes, “A man who has a language
consequently possesses the world
expressed and implied by that language,” and in Inventing Reality;
iamnataliewood.blogspot.ca
Physics as Language, Bruce Gregory points out that language allows
us to interpret our experiences and
even the physical world and “how
much of what we see is an optical
illusion—an interpretation fabricated
from our interaction with the world”.
This piece engages with the notion
that our reality is shaped by language and asks us to revolt against
the derogatory and painful labels
and names we get called. It also asks
us to create a new language that
honours us and our experiences.
Natalie Wood is a contemporary multimedia artist and curator who creates
and exhibits artwork that cohabits the areas of art and historical research.
Her work includes the use of recyclable materials, drawing and painting,
printmaking, video, video performance and web-based art.
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THAT’S SO GAY: COME TOGETHER
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Gladstone Hotel’s 11th Annual Juried Textile
and Fibre Arts Exhibition
August 24, 2016–January 9, 2017
NUIT BLANCHE AT THE GLADSTONE HOTEL
October 1, 7PM–7AM
Learn more at front desk.
gladstonehotel.com | [email protected]
gladstonehotel.com