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Poster – National Portrait Collection

Looking Forward/Looking Back:25 Lives 14 years later. May 11 – June 11

Opening May 11 7.30 – 10:00 PM

National Portrait Collection retrospective looking back at the induction in 1998 of the first 25 people to enter the NPC. Looking towards the future of the NPC. Curator: Karen Stanworth; co-curator: Jessica Parker

January 20 – April 10, 2012
34 Isabella Street

Admission to the Archives Gallery is free.

Public Service Hours for CLGA: Tuesday – Thursday, 7:30 pm – 10:00 pm or by appointment.

Reception: January 20th, 7:30pm with DJ John Caffery (Kids on TV)

Where is the lesbian content? Artist, Onya Hogan-Finlay, presents an explorative and humorous exhibition that unearths lesbian representation in the CLGA. Groupings of lesbian books, periodicals, journals, photos, buttons, paintings from the CLGA National Portrait Collection and ephemera appear along side Onya’s limited edition artist multiples, screen prints, photo collages, ink drawings and videos.

While Canadian Content (Can Con) regulations shape the fabric of Canada culture, Lez Con exposes the often overlooked indexical record of the political, aesthetic and sex lives of lesbians. Much like the museum, LGBTQ archives often reproduce institutional sites of hegemonic masculinity that enjoy the same pervasive conditions of white male privilege that underpin Western historical canons. The works in Lez Con represent a platform for lesbians and the artist-curator to image and represent their own eroticisms, lifestyles, desires, and fantasies through a lesbian-to-lesbian gaze which actively challenges the potential misogynist and conventional heteronormative male consumption of women’s bodies.

A display of the late artist, activist and promoter, Will Munro’s series Lezbro is also included in the exhibition. A selection from Munro’s recent donation to CLGA will be on view, including his vinyl records, posters and a limited edition hand stitched plaid lezbro jacket, all of which asserts his unwavering support of lesbian culture in a gender segregated LGBTQ community that is too often invisible in gay communities. This vitrine emerges alongside and in relationship to the celebration of Munro’s prolific art practice and relentless investment in the creation of queer spaces in Toronto at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) in the WILL MUNRO: HISTORY, GLAMOUR, MAGIC and its extensive off-site programming 11 January – 11 March 2012.

On Dec. 10, 2011, Onya orchestrated a staged tableau vivant at the CLGA on Dec. 10. Friends of the CLGA posed the question: “where’s the lesbian content?” A poster featuring the image was available to the participants and to those who attended the opening on Jan 20, 2012.

Lez Con appears as a satellite exhibition in conjunction with Coming After, an international group exhibition on queer time, curated by Jon Davies at The Power Plant, (10 December, 2011 – 4 March, 2012).

235 Queens Quay West Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, ON

Directly responding to the CLGA’s mission to recover and preserve our histories and give public access to archival materials by and about LGBTQ people, Lez Con offers a glimpse into a relatively under exposed genres and esthetics of lesbian culture and aims to inspire more lesbians to donate their own records, collections, stories and papers to CLGA.

Artist’s Biography

Onya Hogan-Finlay’s projects activate, re-present and re-imagine historical narratives, feminist iconographies and expressions of gender through multi-disciplinary installations, drawing, social and curatorial interventions. Based in Los Angeles, Onya Hogan-Finlay is a Canadian born interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited throughout North America. She earned her BFA at Concordia University and her MFA at the University of Southern California. Hogan-Finlay co-founded the projet MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project, an exhibition of artist books, zines, and independent publications that toured North America in a retrofitted Airstream trailer. Recent collaborations include Ulrike M�ller’s Herstory Inventory, Lesbians on Ecstasy, The Third Leg collective and others. Onya’s drawings have appeared in zines and publications including trans-feminist journal LTTR, Randy, C Magazine, Documenta Magazine No., 2 2007 LIFE! and in The New Museum’s The Younger Than Jesus Artist Directory. Onya was a recent panelist for Pacific Standard Time’s Doin’ It in Public Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building. Her MFA thesis work, My Taste in Men, is the subject of Jack/Judith Halberstam’s essay in Cruising the Archives: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, published by ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, 2011.

Queering the Terrain
an exhibition by Humboldt Magnussen
November 10 – December 22
Opening reception November 10, 2011 7:30pm-10pm
Performance at 8:30pm

Magnussen’s experience as a rural queer in Saskatchewan informs this exhibition of his recent drawings, paintings, and performance. Magnussen masterfully weaves a personal folktale into his work, creating a visual retelling of Canadian queer history, which he uses to explore notions of home, belonging and the role of masculinity while reflecting his study of popular and queer cultures.

Humboldt Magnussen is a queer emerging artist from Saskatchewan who completed his BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. He recently travelled throughout Europe, where he exhibited his work and took courses at the Malmö Art Academy in Sweden and participated in an artistic residency at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, along with ten other Canadian artists, which concluded in an exhibition. He is interested in pop/queer culture as well as Canadian history, and is a multi-disciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, ceramics, performance, and installation. Artists that have influenced his practice include Henry Darger, Alice Neel, Joyce Wieland, along with several important queer artists such as Martin Wong, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and General Idea.

GV and the Glorious Bird
an exhibition by Sholem Krishtalka

September 15 – October 27
Opening reception September 15, 2011 7:30pm-10pm

Krishtalka’s work is an exercise in queered history: a deconstruction of his life, a document of his relationships, and an attempt to create a philosophy from and about queerness. GV and the Glorious Bird is a sweeping epic about Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. Captivated by their strange position in the American 20thcentury, Krishtalka imagines the two as recorders and witnesses whose own stories unfold in a suite of narrative paintings. As with all of his work, he imagines this series as an opera, in which he casts his immediate social circle as its actors.

Bio
Sholem Krishtalka is an artist and writer.  He holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from York University.  He is the art critic for Xtra Magazine and his writing has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Taddle Creek, and CBC Arts Online, in addition to which he is a regular contributor to Ryeberg.com, a curated video blog.  His artwork has been featured in Carte Blanche Volume 2: Painting, a survey of contemporary Canadian painting.  Most recently, he had a solo show in Brooklyn, New York, at Jack the Pelican Presents, where he launched a commissioned folio of prints with ArtInvestor, a Munich-based multiples store and magazine. His paintings were featured in the premiere issue of Headmaster, a queer arts and culture magazine out of Providence, Rhode Island.  He maintains a web-project called Lurking, which can be seen at sholem.tumblr.com.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT – SHOLEM KRISHTALKA

I am inspired by something Gregg Bordowitz said in one of his videos: he wants to map his own private cosmology, to unpack who he is and where he comes from.  This articulated everything I want to do in my own art: I want to unpack who I am, what informs me artistically, socially, intellectually.

My work is an exercise in queered history; chronicles of gays past built from hearsay and gossip, reveling in artifice and inconsistency. My paintings are essentially collages. Out of necessity and convenience, I photograph my models separately, and then assemble the individual elements as need be. I deliberately reference the paintings’ multivalent assemblage: conflicting light sources, differing perspectives, multiple drop shadows and flash flares sit within the same painting. My formal framework mirrors my conceptual framework: in my narratives as in my paintings, the seams and irregularities haunt the proceedings.

The series currently on exhibition at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives is entitled GV and the Glorious Bird. It is an epic, sweeping historical opera about Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. They are touchstones in the construction of my sexual identity, siginificant stars in my cosmological firmament. They are also excellent gossips. I am captivated by their strange position in the American 20th century. Between the two of them, they have encountered almost everyone who has shaped American political and cultural life in the latter half of the 20th century. They have shaped American culture; their writings have molded the American dreamscape. In my opera, I imagine them as witnesses to the 20th century, who wander from location to location, from encounter to encounter, taking their observations and injecting them into the popular dream-life of America in the form of their movies, plays and books.

In this series as with all my other work, I engage and document my community: lovers, friends and my wider social circle are actors in my operas; I have them impersonate and perform Gore or Tennessee, Jackie Kennedy or Anna Magnani. Thus, my paintings also function as a mapping of my community. Moreover, through these performances, via these intimate bodies enacting queer stories, I overlap my life with those of my subjects. I intersect my community, my banal, domestic story with these notorious narratives. Put simply, I camp my queer cosmology.

Camp provides a theoretical bridge between my stars’ world and mine, a means to collapse and fold the iconic into my own personal vernacular, and also to project my persona onto larger public cosmologies.  It is also the perfect tool with which to discuss and interpret my fascination with a specific type of queerness; my work so far demonstrates an obsession with a pre-Stonewall (or at least pre-gay-liberation) iteration of homosexuality. I am drawn to this historical sexual persona as a kind of first principle, and I want to elucidate that in my work. I see my paintings as an idiosyncratic inscription of that particular queer history.

Generally speaking, my work is a deconstruction (or, perhaps more aptly, a reconstruction) of my own life; it is a document of my relationships, and an attempt to create a kind of philosophy of my queerness.

Khush was a love affair from the start: two friends hanging out on a spring day in June, 1987, dreaming up a fun, friendly place where South Asian gay men could meet. By the time the group disbanded a decade later, much more was left in its wake than the two imagined. This exhibition is a show of love for Khush, and the indelible mark it left not only on Toronto, but also on contemporary queer arts, culture and politics.

Andil Gosine’s scholarship and artistic practice engage his research interests in nature, desire and difference with his personal histories of love and movement. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, and was recently Visiting Scholar at the Fashion Institute of Technology (New York).

Special thank you to Khush for its generous financial support.

Khush: A Show of Love runs July 28-September 1, Opening Reception July 28, 2011 7:30pm-10pm

Themes highlighted in the exhibition are further explored in podcasts that will be presented online each Wednesday at www.andilgosine.com/khush:

July 27 & August 3: Carvalho discusses the history and impact of Khush.
August 10: Fab magazine’s 2011 “Gay Sex Survey” is the starting point for a discussion, about racism and intimacy among Toronto’s gay men, with Dunstan Egbert and Vijay Saravanamuthu.
August 17: Revered social justice activist Punam Khosla recalls her early encounter with Khush, leading role in shaping the Desh Pardesh festival of Arts and Culture, and thoughts about the organization’s legacy and relevanace.
August 24: Gosine and Vettivelu in a freewheeling conversation about the exhibition.

Khush: A Show of Love begins with an Opening Reception at the Archives Gallery, 34 Isabella Street, Toronto, on July 28 from 7:30 to 10:00 p.m.
Press Release

Read Xtra!’s interview with the Curator

The CLGA National Portrait Collection honours individuals who have made significant contributions to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans communities of Canada. This year, the Archives will celebrate the induction of three new individuals. Their newly commissioned portraits will be on display in the gallery and will be accompanied by items from the Archives’ collections that illustrate their contributions. A selection of past inductee portraits will also be on display.

Curated by the CLGA Curatorial Committee

The National Portrait Collection runs from May 28 (10-4) – July 14, 2011 with annual showings.

Special thank you to our exhibiton sponsor Howie, Sacks and Henry, LLP.

Click here to view the press release about this year’s inductees.

The Archives Gallery is proud to celebrate the centennial of International Women’s Day (IWD) with an exhibit drawn from its own collection of posters, flyers, photographs, and ephemera. Focusing primarily on IWD activities held

in Toronto from the 1970s to present day, the exhibit traces the rise of the lesbian liberation movement, and its intersection with anti-racist, feminist, and labour activism. It will also illustrate the passion, determination, and sheer inventiveness of women in their struggle for equality.

Opening reception March 3, 2011 7:30pm – 10pm with special guests from the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre.

About the Curators:
Michelle Schwartz is an archivist and writer from Brooklyn, New York. She has been conducting a love affair with Toronto since 2007 and has been a volunteer at the CLGA since 2009.

Roberta Wiseman is an archivist and anthropologist from London, UK.  She has lived in Toronto since 2003 and first began volunteering at the CLGA the same year.

International Women’s Day: Toronto Women and the Struggle for Equality runs March 3 – May 12, 2011.

Admission to the Archives Gallery is free during our regular public service hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 7:30pm-10pm and by appointment.

Special thank you to Alan Miller and Lawrence Bennett for their financial support.

Click Here for the Media Release and Flyer.

Great turn out at International Women’s Day Exhibit
written by Jenna Danchuk (as seen in our April e-Newsletter)

The International Women’s Day Exhibit’s opening night on March 3rd was beautifully received with many guests in attendance. Curators Michelle Schwartz and Roberta Wiseman did a wonderful job at putting together the exhibit and dedicated much time and care to its curation and installation.

The content showcased the wide array of materials included in the CLGA’s collection as well as a diverse history of this annual celebration. The exhibit will be on display until May 12th, so there is still a chance to see this great show. The gallery is open to the public Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 7:30pm to 10pm or by appointment by contacting Elizabeth Bailey, our general manager, at 417-777-2755.

A Solo Exhibition by JJ Levine

Switch is a series of large-scale photo diptychs that present pairs of seemingly different “heterosexual couples” in a portrait studio setting. Upon close inspection, the viewer will recognize that these couples are comprised not of four models, but of two, each portraying a man in one image and a woman in the next. This clever parody of prom-style photographs is intended to challenge the foundations of gender through masquerade and drag. The identified gender of each model is never disclosed.

Exhibition runs: January 13, 2011 – February 24, 2011
Opening Reception Thursday, January 13 7:30pm-10pm