José Esteban MuñozAgnes Etherington Art Centre, 2015

Exploring the concept of queer futurity, this exhibition marked the first major exhibition of collaborative work by Toronto-based artists Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. An exuberant revision of sexual identity and domesticity, I’m Not Myself At All featured new video, uncanny oversized soft-sculpture dolls, wallpaper, crochet spider webs, needlepoint, drawings, and paper mache facsimiles. At turns playful and aggrieved, the artists engage with feminist pasts, exploring potentiality, belonging and representation. Through giant paperbacks and green-screen performances, Logue and Mitchell summon key feminist and queer texts into conversation with commonplace rhetoric and everyday life. For example, the exhibition’s central video hunts for possibility within the “lowness” accorded to queers in the status quo; featuring vignettes of artists’ energetic working process and surreal narratives. Taken together, the work longs for a queer future, presenting a vision of an idealized and magical—although hard-won—possible world.

The exhibition catalogue includes essays by queer theorist Heather Love and Sarah E.K. Smith. The publication is available here.

Press coverage in the Queen’s Journal.

For more information please visit the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s website.

Image Credits: I’m Not Myself At All, installation views, Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Photos by Paul Litherland.