Don’t Miss: Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT/blacktransarchive.com, 2020-2022. Interactive archive, duration variable. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Last week upon entering the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery that’s part of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, I was handed a small, sealed envelope with a discreet stamp that reads “Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances”. The xennial side of me is always pleased to get something paper – something “real” – in my hands, and the added mystery of its contents heightened the rush.
Inside was a copy of the exhibition text for Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances, the latest show curated by the 2024 winner of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, Dallas Fellini. An ensuing chapter after Fellini’s incredible last curatorial turn at the Art Museum, Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts, both exhibitions saw the concept of trans visibility used as the springboard of inspiration. Yet where Mnemonic silences…. navigated this theme from viewpoints including reimagining and assertion, Indiscernable thresholds…. employs the notions and representations of concealment and obfuscation to amplify attitudes towards the hollow inclusion of trans people in the artistic canon – and the larger world.
The exhibition text starts: “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 in the ineffable and unindexable qualities of transness, allowing disappearance to take on an unexpected political power, possessing a very different type of agency than visibility.” The works here simmer with tension and in some cases, palpable anger, effectively taking to task systemic erasure and all those who have, purposefully or passively, enabled it.
Berlin-based artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s video game work, WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT/blacktransarchive.com, is a strong example of what the text suggests. Visitors are asked to sit in a chair and select from three options – answering whether they are Black and trans, trans, or cis – to launch a throbbing, visually-striking question-based game that exposes, undoubtedly very uncomfortably for some, the privilege and lack of awareness many people possess when it comes to meaningful allyship and activism.
Other artists featured in the exhibition are Lucas LaRochelle, Joshua Schwebel, Chelsea Thompto, and Lan “Florence” Yee – whose gorgeous printed silk, embroidery and appliqué works drape in quiet contrast to Brathwaite-Shirley’s compellingly defiant presence.
LaRochelle’s 2021 video piece, Sitting here with you in the future, is “co-produced by an artificial intelligence trained to generate speculative trans and queer experiences”, according to the exhibition brochure. Its glitchy, non sequitur flow produces a series of poetic moments that ultimately point to the unknowingness that generates from the feigned interest implicit in “inclusivity” in recent years, as well as the ongoing need for trans people to obscure or flat-out hide their presence and existence.
After seeing both of Fellini’s exhibitions and knowing that they recently completed their Master of Visual Studies, I was curious to hear more about where they want to take their work next. Read on to learn more about Fellini’s practice, the Canadian trans artists they admire, and their upcoming show at the Art Gallery of Guelph.
Now that you’ve completed your MVS, where do you see your curatorial practice going? Will there be a third component to this thematic exploration?
This show and the last one were really experiments in seeking alternatives to the hang ups, or dynamics, that I feel are unproductive within gallery spaces and finding a way around them.
I have a show coming up at the Art Gallery of Guelph opening in September called Some kind of we. It’s an exhibition associated with the Middlebrook Prize, and it’s another opportunity to take up my qualms with the structures that be and think about seeking an alternative. The show is about T4T as not only a romantic and sexual orientation, but also a political orientation; it’s about T4T as a strategy for trans preservation and trans activism, and the community building that has pretty deep roots in a Canadian context.
What I’m always excited about in my work is breaking new ground for trans artists. I'm excited about trans artists whose practices are boundary pushing, and who maybe haven't been exhibited to the extent that I think they should be exhibited. That's always a priority in my practice.
Exhibiting at the Art Gallery of Guelph and at the Art Museum are such great opportunities, but at the end of the day, institutions have their limitations. I know who the audiences are in traditional gallery spaces, and sometimes it doesn't feel good for me to be putting on a show that I see as being for trans people in these environments.
I want to create works that focus on transness – what does it mean to put these shows into spaces where I know they will mostly be attended by cis audiences? Does that mean I have to change the orientation of my show to cater toward that audience? Or can I create shows that cater to and prioritize trans viewers? These are the questions I’m looking at, and this show is me thinking about invisibility and illegibility and opacity as one way that I've responded to the issues that I’ve identified.
Another way that I've been thinking about this is through my upcoming show at the Art Gallery of Guelph. There's going to be a physical show at the gallery, and there's also going to be a distributed exhibition that will be sent out as a piece of mail art; trans people can register to receive this distributed exhibition package. This has to do with the question of accessibility. If gallery spaces don’t have a history of being super inviting to trans people, how can we engage trans people in these works that concern their experiences? That's what's next for me.
Lan “Florence” Yee, various works, 2024. Appliqué on printed fabric (4 x 5 inches) each. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
What do you think your role is as a curator?
I feel lucky to have had so much time to sit with this question. In some ways, this show feels at odds with what I think the role of a curator is. But in other ways, the way I've approached it has allowed for other possibilities to emerge. I am prioritizing a trans visitor's experience when I'm thinking about the show. I'm thinking about what I want to explain, and what I don't think is necessary to explain. It’s absurd to me that it's somewhat unusual that a show about transness would prioritize, or would assume, that a trans person's base level of knowledge is the one that the show should be catered towards.
What’s shifted for me is that I really feel strongly that there are multiple entrance points into a work of art or an exhibition. If there are ways that the trans discourses within the show aren't immediately visible or understandable to some viewers, surely there's still something else for them to take away from it. There are other entry points for them to experience and form a relationship with the works in the show.
I do think curators are educators, but I feel hindered by the assumption that any show that deals with transness should teach someone everything about transness from a base knowledge level of zero. That inhibits me as a trans curator, and I think it inhibits trans artists who are dealing with complex and nuanced discourses in their work.
Chelsea Thompto, Productive Bodies, 2019. Video, 10:13. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Who are some other trans artists whose work you really admire?
There’s such a rich history of trans artistic production in Canada. Unfortunately, a lot of the figures who've contributed significantly to that legacy have not yet received their flowers. My upcoming show at AGG features work by Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, who’ve both done so much important work in terms of activism and artistic output. Mirha-Soleil Ross is really having a moment right now, and her work has been received really positively and enthusiastically not just in Canada but globally; there's been a pronounced peak in interest in exhibiting her films, which is so phenomenal for her. So rarely do trans artists get their flowers while they're still alive. Sybil Lamb and Nina Arsenault are two artists who, in the 2000s and 2010s, made immense contributions to Canadian art and I don't think either of them have the place in Canadian art history that they deserve. Other Canadian artists doing really phenomenal work right now that I really admire are Ayo Tsalithaba, Arielle Twist, Kim Ninkuru, and Marni Marriott.
Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances runs until Saturday, July 27th at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
