Paige Gratland, Glenn Gear, & Daniel Barrow
August 2020.
Paige Gratland (BC), Daniel Barrow (MB), and Glenn Gear (NL) all met during the Intergenerational LGBT Residency at Gibraltar Point, Toronto Island last summer. There they spent two weeks working together, exchanging stories, ideas and images, and saw many commonalities within their bodies of work. They each employ narrative from a distinctly queer perspective and also each infuse their love of narrative into object-making. Specifically, they each make videos and objects that employ a decorative charge, revealing little by little an encoded queer content. The videos and the decorative or wearable objects (whether it be cowboy boots, traditional beading, or miniature t-shirts on mannequins) illustrate intimate scenes of contemplation, sexual freedom, phobias or shameful obsessions.
This residency is in anticipation of a future exhibition in our Main Gallery space.
“After working in community for two weeks this past summer, it seemed obvious that a group exhibition was emerging. We imagined presenting this show in each of our respective home provinces – so that we can each have the opportunity to act as a host for each other and, of course, for the work itself.”
ARTIST STATEMENTS
Paige Gratland
I am a west coast based Canadian artist and filmmaker. My practice moves playfully across mediums (video, printmaking, performance, wearable art and artist multiples) to create pop art through a queer, feminist aesthetic. My process is collaborative and starts from a foundation of friendship and/or fanship, seeking to reveal the complicated negotiations and surprising intimacy born when people work creatively together. With a background in film production (Ryerson University) and 3-D Design (Emily Carr University) I aim to reimagine the codes, symbols and iconography of the dominant visual culture with a spirit of queer reclamation strategies. Ann Dean former director of Art Metropole has described my work to “resonate strongly throughout diverse communities to help build bridges of understanding.
Glenn Gear
Glenn Gear is an interdisciplinary artist of Inuit and Irish ancestry from Nunatsiavut, Labrador. His primary focus is animation (stop-motion, paper collage, experimental) as well as mixed media installation. His work often explores alternative forms of storytelling that embrace personal and cultural connections between land, people, and animals through research-based creation — a layering of meaning derived from photo archives, drawings, collage, and craft techniques, seen through a queer lens and often infused with a subtle sense of humour.
Daniel Barrow
All of the work I create, including sculpture, installation and performance, centers itself on the practice of drawing. Drawing has, since childhood, been my primary mode of expression to pictorialize internal visions and grapple with the external world around myself. I typically use obsolete technologies to present pictorial narratives by merging the methods and cultural histories of cinema, comics, animation, and magic lantern shows. I am best known for creating and adapting comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors.
Gay State Boots, 2013, Leather Boot, by Paige Gratland
TakKik, 2018, part of the exhibit, Tionnhehkwen; Visions of Seeds by Native Immigrant, Montreal, by Glenn Gear
Pyramid 2, 2018, Mixed media sculptural wall piece, Materials: Wood, screen- printed paper, toilet paper, resin, fabric, plastic, by Daniel Barrow
All of this is made possible thanks to our generous core operating sponsors, including Canada Council for the Arts, ArtsNL, The City of St. John’s, and The Cultural Economic Development Program.