The Nuit Rose Festival returns for its fourth spectacular year with the question: What Lies Between Venus and Mars? This year, the art festival that celebrates new queer voices looks to the stars and to the spectrum of queerness. Four Toronto neighbourhoods, the Church-Wellesley Village, Regent Park, Kensington Market, and West Queen West will host Nuit Rose exhibitions, performances and parties. The ArQuives is happy to be one of the main locations of the festival and will be open on June 17th from 7 PM to 12 AM. We will be continuing the exhibit after the night of Nuit Rose for all of Pride until June 27th! Check out our public service hours for viewing. Below are the exhibits and artists we are proud to have at The ArQuives.
Kurt Kraler (he/ him)
Nightlights: “RAGE!” 2017 Vinyl, light 52 × 42 inches The work is a light based window installation comprised of a vinyl transfer with the word “RAGE!” traced from the March 1981 cover of the Body Politic, Issue #71. Released after the police raided four bathhouses in a single night, the Body Politic ignited a powerful call to action amongst Toronto queers to resist police discrimination. Backlit at night, the text becomes an illuminated sign that projects this powerful word of historical significance into the celestial bodies of the night sky. Just as relevant in our current political climate, “Nightlights: ‘RAGE!’” serves as a pertinent reminder of the decades long uprising that Pride marches were founded upon.
Irem Harnak (she/her)
Made This Way 2017 Photography 16 × 20 inches, 7 pieces “A high impact photo-based transmedia project, “Made This Way” uses the art of photography to tell ordinary people’s real life stories of transitioning and challenging gender norms. I believe that we all create ourselves. “Made This Way” is a project about self-discovery, self creation, emerging, and constructing your true self. I have always been an outsider wherever I am, never being able to conform to the ordinary. I have been drawn to the experiences of individuals who challenge social norms. “Made this Way” is aimed at documenting various transgender individuals in their own element, what makes them who they are? What are their hobbies? Do they like animals? Do they play sports? Do they have dates? I seek to explore what it means to be a transgender individual from an authentic, human-to-human perspective detached from the sensationalized celebrity versions we often see in mainstream media.”
Maddie Alexander and Morgan Sears-Williams (she/her and they/them)
Femme4Femme Mixed media installation Through text, image and installation; Maddie Alexander and Morgan Sears-Williams strive to explore both the historical and contemporary existence of femme identity. Alexander’s approach pulls from pop culture and pornography, using oversaturated imagery to explore the way queer femmes are represented in the media. Alexander explores microaggressive language in a satirical manner, to break down the subtleties of femme phobia in film and television. Morgan uses older technologies as an entry point for viewers to interact with the stories of queer folks both historically and contemporarily, with a focus on queer femme identities. By blending time to create a lasting and long thread of feminist queer activism and lived realities, they challenge the notion that queer feminist activism and femme presence exist within a certain time period.
August Kay (she/her)
Neither She nor He 2017 Mixed media 16 x 20 inches, 2 pieces Combining themes and symbols of the stereotypical “masculine” & “feminine”, set in an environment of pure openness and self expression, this multi media set of compositions dispute the received idea of how queer youth “should” act in our downtown home. Planetary imagery remind us of Venus and Mars, complete opposites in terms of cultural connotation, but combined and balanced in visual imagery depicted here. We do not have to fit into one lane of formula for what we choose to identify ourselves and the fluidity most of us are privileged to enjoy is an exciting and promising future of self interpretation.
Samaa Ahmed (she/her)
The Female Cyborg 2017 Mixed media, sculptures of vulvas mounted on canvas and coloured 8½ × 11½ inches Much of my work deals with elements of fantasy and folklore, which I try to recontextualize into my own life experiences. One of the key themes that I play with in my work is the creation of a “Pakistani futurist” (Pakfuturist) identity, whereby I remix traditional colours, textures, and motifs with “high-tech” machinery and galactic imagery. For this exhibition, I created a mixed media work that presents the female body in outer space. This is a self-portraits of sorts. I juxtapose organic shapes with inorganic colours and materials, to create an image of a female cyborg. This piece incorporates multiple aspects of my identity and practice, as a feminist, as a diasporic artist, and as a technologist.
Kevin Gulayets (he/ him)
D3sire 2013 Digital print 16 × 20 inches, 6 pieces A queer digital photo series based on archival film/vhs/dvd sources. The normal transmission of the erotic content was interrupted, disrupted: a digital reading error manipulated the images, the representations. The original stories/contexts/codes became altered, layered, rearranged, recoded, fragmented and maybe even liberated. The new images are different: strange, disorienting, mysterious but still seductive. What was once fixed/defined has become fluid, abstracted. What happens to our sense of identity and community as our interactions move from human to technological?
Robbie Sinclair (he/ him)
fetish boy (of cosmic proportions) 2017 Collage on rag paper 16 x 24 inches, 2 pieces “fetish boy (of cosmic proportions) is a series of collage based works on paper that examine the artist’s sense of falling within the spectrum of Venus and Mars. Its intent is to adjust a pre-existing archive to reflect an inner sense of being pulled throughout the variances of self-representation. If it is to be believed that masculinity derives from Mars and femininity from Venus, fetish boy rejects traditional gender ideas. Instead, it presents the viewer with a queered sense of fetishised desires. These depictions are thought turned fantasy, wherein an alternate reality is created as a result of thea shift in energy between the planets” Come out to see art in Toronto and across the universe! Nuit Rose: Between Venus and Mars is FREE and open to all. Visit www.nuitrose.ca for more information.