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 (most 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.
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”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.”
Nadine Arpin
Nadine Arpin (they/them) is a 2Spirit Michif artist. They are a filmmaker, multimedia creative and mentor, living and producing work in Sioux Lookout, Northwestern Ontario. They are interested in telling stories which blur the lines of legend, memory and truth. Their work draws upon traditional Michif philosophy in a contemporary context to create hybrid cinematic and installation experiences.
Artist ProfileCesar Forero
Cesar Forero is a Colombian-born Canadian with a background in architecture, sculpture, painting, and public performance. His installation projects include depictions of human and animal interaction sharing the space with equal level of importance and relevance in the composition. His intent is to create a liminal effect in which the viewer can feel immerged in his art.
Artist ProfileTejhler lb
Tejhler lb (they/them) is an enigmatic force coming from Lac Seul First Nation. They are an artist who focuses mainly on performing, but is multidisciplinary. Tejhler is always looking for new inspiration and ideas in the world around them. inspired by AI, the solar system, Club Kids, and taxidermists, Tejhler describes themselves as a “Star Born Party Gurl” and wants to express a solar system worth of energy through art and performance.
Artist ProfileRay Fox
Northern Ontario based Anishinaabe Visual Artist, Ray Fox, works with a variety of themes in his practice such as memory, cultural and geographic identity, relationship to land, animals, and plant life. He started drawing as a child, raised within a family of many other Manitoulin Island-based Visual Artists. He has been mainly producing work with graphite and charcoal drawings. Painting and printmaking is also part of his practice.
Artist ProfileAlexander Rondeau
Alexander Rondeau is a queer curator, writer, and artist from a rural farming community known as Kerns Township. Rondeau’s research driven curatorial practice is dedicated to championing and developing exhibitions by queer, trans, and two spirit artists in and from the North working around the coalescence of rural aesthetics and visual culture, land-based problematics of gender and sexuality in the North, and (dis)locating rural queerness therein.
Artist ProfileMarni Marriott
Marni Marriott is a visual artist from Temiskaming Shores, Ontario. Her work is focused primarily on the deconstruction of the human figure, which she explores primarily in oil painting, collage, as well as digital and analog photography. Her current body of painterly work explores collage methodologies, quilts and rural craft, pop culture, queer symbolism, and the pagan.
Artist ProfileLucy Wowk
Lucy is curious about the innermost psyche’s relationship with external structures. She is working on better grasping how ethics and aesthetics inform one another. Her practice spans arts-based research, graphic design, writing, and photography—recursively invested in the attachments that move us, or hold us in place.
Artist Profile