Rylan Friday, Detail from The Sound of You Collapsing, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
July 15–August 12, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, July 14, 5–8 PM
Public critique with Elliott Ramsey: Thursday, July 20, 1–2:30PM
Or Gallery
236 E Pender Street
Vancouver BC
Tuesday–Friday: 12–5PM
Saturday 12–5PM
Curated by Nathan Clark
“How does the object appear when it is no longer familiar?”
– Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Queertopias begin where the boundaries of the body end. As they are activated by the individual’s own movements through space, Queertopias bleed outside the boundaries of their own making, immersing themselves into everyday existence to overlap and dispute with what is perceived as familiar, or “normal.” In Search of Queertopias evokes queer intimacy and relationality out of worldbuilding through storytelling, with the body as the threshold between these worlds. Each Queertopia offers a different point of entry to explore how queerness pushes beyond a universalized or objective experience, as an assemblage of diverse and infinite perspectives.
In Search of Queertopias is an immersive experimentation with feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s methodology of disorientation for how one can explore unfamiliar worlds. This exhibition uses disorientation to allow these digital narratives to both invite and refuse the viewer’s own positionality in order to make familiar the complexity and beauty of queer(ed) perspective(s). This exhibition features four artists and a collective—James Albers, Amanda Amour-Lynx, Rylan Friday, Alex Gibson, and Queer Code—whose works begin in spaces which may appear at first familiar, but are soon reminiscent of a dream, or of the uncanny. Each artist uses storytelling tools to guide the viewer through unfamiliar, disorienting, and dreamlike Queertopias. These spaces are opportunities to encounter personal and intimate experiences which are at once collective and individual.
Ultimately, immersive storytelling opens up new ways of seeing and positioning themselves in the world.
Nathan (Nate) Clark (they/ them) is a genderfluid nonbinary second year candidate in the Master of Art History in Critical Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia, where they also received their Bachelor of Art History and Museum Anthropology. Nathan currently works and resides in Vancouver on the stolen and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixwh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. Nathan’s research focuses on the phenomenology and narrative poetics of virtual reality and digital immersive installations and the importance of embodied, affective relations between the viewer and the work of art. They also research digital queerscapes and the disembodiment of users within cyberspaces, and how artists are responding to this “Wild West” of new mediums and artistic processes. The body is the primary point of concern in understanding how we interact with this new “ontological turn.” Nathan will be pursuing their PhD of Art History at the University of Toronto in Fall 2023.
With support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.
