Agender, immunocompromised, and chronically ill with an invisibilized disability, I’m interested in using bodily forms and processes in my work to explore the interior experience of being in a body as a fundamentally unknowable, inarticulable position. I tangle with immunodeficiency as a critical optic and intimacy to engage with the ongoing demands, opportunities, and restraints of pandemic culture. My waypoints are methodologies of fun, the intimacy of address, and access intimacies (a term coined by Mia Mingus).
Currently, I’m working predominantly in comics, print, drawing, sculpture, and painting, as well as video, performance, and poetry. I use object relations theory, magical thinking, critical uncertainty, and the phenomenologies of embodiment as critical guides. On the level of process, I really enjoy materiality and material processes as a playground in my work, and my curiosity is often grounded by questions about slipperiness, stickiness, permeability, squishiness, and scratching, palpating, breathing, bursting, stretching, squeezing, and bouncing.
I have a really wide set of interests and influences that push and inform my work: Medieval art, alternative sensoria, speculative fiction, harm reduction, environmental and social justice, dyke culture, art as a therapeutic process, 17th-century European print culture, zine culture and book arts, the supernatural, and third space theory are a few.
I’m currently working on a comic art manuscript entitled I wouldn’t lie to you, and am the current Michèle Larose- Osler Library artist-in-residence at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University.
Education
2024. Concordia University, BFA in Studio Arts with great distinction. Montreal, QC.
2015. Queen’s University, BA in English Language & Literature. Kingston, ON.
Residencies
2024 Michele Larose-Osler Library Artist-in-Residence at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, QC.
2023 Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Creative Reuse at 4th Space, Montreal, QC. Material exploration with recycling styrofoam waste into castable resin over a 3-month public residency.
2011 Sound Artist-in-Residence. CFRC 101.9 FM, Kingston, ON.
Selected Exhibitions
2023 Sub-text. VAV Gallery, Montreal, QC.
2023 Edging. Ada X Artist-Run Centre, Montreal, QC.
2022 Somatic Intrusions. VAV Gallery. Montreal, QC.
2022 What is Not But Could Be If. Curated by Juan Ortiz Apuy and Kelly Jazvac. Soft Square Gallery, Montreal, QC.
2018 Without Repair. Curated by Robin Alex McDonald. Union Gallery, Kingston, ON.
2017 AccessArt Queen’s. Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Kingston, ON
2015 Member’s Show. Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Kingston, ON.
2015 Distorted Reality Tv. Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre.
Selected Publication
2024 Self portrait (Becoming a Toilet). pub. Entrails Magazine Issue 1. Cover.
2020 Catching Care in the Immunoverse pub. Contemporary Verse 2. 2 page poem.
2018 Needles + Me. “We’re Still Here: Transgender Comic Art Anthology.” Stacked Deck Press. Eds. Tara Avery and Jeanne Thornton. 4 page comic spread. Winner of 2019 Ignatz Award, shortlisted for 2019 Lambda Literary Award.
2018 Transgender Heroes Comic Book. Stacked Deck Press. Eds. Tara Avery and Jeanne Thornton. 2 pages.
Speaking Engagements & Artist Talks
2023 Recycling the Unrecyclable: Polystyrene Resin. Artist talk. 4th Space, Montreal, QC.
2023 Temporal Offerings and Earthly Delights in Freak Parade. Artist talk. Ada X Artist Run Centre, Montreal, QC.
2018 Towards a Transmissible Poetics. Research Performance. Sick Theories Conference at York University and University of Toronto. Toronto, ON.
2016 Guest speaker for GNDS 380, Intimacies and Affinities in the West, Queen’s University.
2015, 2014 Guest panelist for Interdisciplinary Studies 210, Queen’s University. Kingston, ON.
Video Screenings
2015 Colon Envy, wasteAWAY Performance Festival. Chipped Off Performance Collective. Kingston, ON.
2015 Toilet Puppet. Reelout Film + Video Festival. Kingston, ON.
2014 Body Of. Slimebone City Horror Festival. Kingston, ON.
2014 Greenhouse. HAIRLINES Performance Festival. Chipped Off Performance Collective. Kingston, ON.
Additional Experience and Press
Summer 2024-present. Arts editor at Quist Magazine, the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Montreal, QC.
Spring 2024-present. Member at Atelier Circulaire.
March 2024. Facilitator for Clairvoyants, performance event at The Centaur Theatre.
2023-present. Storyscaping workshop facilitator in comics pedagogy for the Quebec Writers Federation.
2022-2024. Staff librarian at the Fine Arts Reading Room.
2017 My performance work was reviewed in TheatreForum. Robin Alex McDonald, “Take Care of Me”: Exploring the Ethics of Care through Performance.
2015 With Turbines Curatorial Collective, I co-curated and organized Utopias, a three-day performance festival of work by Vaginal Davis, Hazel Meyer, and local artists. Kingston, ON.
2015 I performed Take Care of Me, a two-part durational public performance, at the Artel Collective in Kingston, ON.
2010-2014. I was a weekly music programmer at CFRC 101.9FM in Kingston, ON.
2010. I was the sound artist-in-residence at CFRC 101.9 FM in Kingston, ON.
2010-2013. I was a singer and songwriter in Sleuth Bears. Kingston, ON.