Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances

Opening reception: February 27, 6:00-9:00pm
Curator tour: March 1, 2:00pm

Visibility has come to represent a dominant mode of inclusionary neoliberal politics through which transness is engaged in the mainstream, conflating representation with empowerment. Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances considers the invisible, the illegible, and the opaque as productive alternatives to contemporary trans hypervisibility, a circumstance wherein the realm of the representational risks becoming all that is offered to trans people, rather than material support or true sovereignty. This exhibition revels inthe ineffable and unindexable qualities of transness, allowing disappearance to take on an unexpected political power, possessing a very different type of agency than visibility. In his book Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant asserts that opacity subverts the extractive dimensions of knowing the other. Taking up this premise, the featured artists test the possibilities of opacity to negotiate presentations of transness, especially in relation to the archive. Responding to institutional and state archives as sites of surveillance and control, this exhibition wrestles with desires for access to a record of trans lives while simultaneously seeking alternatives to the archive’s imposing demands for trans legibility. Rather than approaching visibility as an issue to be resolved, these artists consider the potentials of retreating from view, framing opacity as a protective act, archival illegibility as an escape.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) is a Berlin- and London-based artist. They received a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development. Their practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell the stories of Black Trans people. Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and performances at institutions such as SCAD, Savannah (2023); Artnight Dundee (2023); Villa Arson, Nice (2023); Fact, Liverpool (2022); David Kordansky, LA (2022); Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022); Skänes konstförening, Malmö, Sweden (2022); Arebyte Gallery, London (2021); QUAD, Derby, England (2021); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2021); Focal Point Gallery, London (2020); Science Gallery, London (2020); and MU Hybrid Art House, London (2020). Their work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2022); Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich (2019); Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019); and the Barbican, London (2018).

Lucas LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. They have exhibited and lectured internationally, recently at the Guggenheim Museum (USA), Ars Electronica (Austria), Mozilla Festival (UK), Museum of Design Atlanta (USA), MUTEK (Canada), PHI Center (Canada), and Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands).

Joshua Schwebel (he/him) is a Canadian artist based between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and Berlin. Schwebel has been a practicing professional artist since 2009, exhibiting his work across Canada and internationally in exhibitions, residencies, and performative contexts. He was short-listed for the Berlin Art Prize in 2019 and long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2022. Forthcoming is a publication of his long-term project The Employee with Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery.

Chelsea Thompto (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersections of art, trans studies, and technology. She lives and works in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies in the Schoolof Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. She received an MFA and MA in four-dimensional art and an MA in gender and women’s studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada (2023–24), Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U as a Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholar. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023). Lan is a member of JIA Foundation as curator of the Chinatown House MTL. Lan’s artwork is represented by Zalucky Contemporary.

Dallas Fellini is a curator, writer, and artist living and working in Toronto. Their research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies. Dallas is a co-director of the arts publication Silverfish and has curated exhibitions and screenings for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Guelph, Gallery 44, Vtape, Trinity Square Video, Xpace Cultural Centre, Hearth, Riverdale Hub Gallery, and the Jackman Humanities Institute. Dallas is the recipient of the 2024 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.