La GNO is temporarily closed
January 28 — March 11, 2023
aberration // apparition brings together a group of queer, trans, and/or two spirit (2QT) identified contemporary artists from across Northern Ontario. Working with various mediums, each of the artists’ pieces offer nuanced, Northern readings of “queer hauntology”: the complicated and varying forces at play in navigating the world as a 2QT person. “Hauntology" (originally coined by Jacques Derrida) refers to the often invisible yet perceptible feeling of a social and cultural past as it lingers into the present. A queer hauntology extends across various layers: in the queer inheritance of loss (moss notably from the AIDS crisis), to the feeling of being surveilled by the heteronormative world precisely for aberrating from the norm. In rural and Northern communities, queerness often appears in glimpses: bright and brilliant, but usually conjured in small numbers or quick to disappear. Such aberrating 2QT Northern dispositions emerge like ghosts, seemingly out of place and out of time; but, importantly, this can also be powerful and inspiring thus allowing 2QT individuals to instead haunt the world they move through, like an apparition. Together, the artists in aberration // apparition offer embodied, Northern perspectives of 2QT hauntings that question and complicate the ghostly nature of queerness.
La GNO is temporarily closed