Welcome to my homepage. The images and texts presented here are offered as coordinates on the map of an imaginary island or buried treasure.

Jack

On Thursday, June 25^th 2009 a coven of men met in one of the many abandon houses on New York’s historical Governors Island to perform a ritual honoring the island’s rich historical and spiritual life. The event was sponsored by Creative Time and is part of PLOT 09: This World & Nearer Ones­ – a public art exhibition held on the island.

The event was a naked ritual that began at dusk and lasted most of the night. The participants invited the queer spirits of Governor Island to join in an evening of talk, drink, and food. In respect to the dead, there was no live documentation of the event. The ritual objects form an elaborate setting that has been left on display as remnants or markers of the event.

For much of its history Governor Island has existed as a military base of one form or another. Prior to the arrival of Dutch settlers in Manhattan, the island served as a seasonal fishing camp shared by a number of regional Algonquin tribes. In Colonial New York it served as both a strategic fort and as the opulent residence of British governors. Following the Revolution the island continued to serve as a fort, but it has also served as a quarantine colony, as a racetrack and fair grounds, as a military prison, and as a coast guard base. Invocation of the Queer Spirits was a way of acknowledging the homosocial history of the island and the bonds of male love and companionship that are an essential part of the island’s psychic life and history.

Rusty is part of a series that plays with the twin meanings of possession and how our clothes and objects often take on a life of their own.

Weaved into the fibers of Rusty are memories and emotions that will always belong to me. This jacket is me. I can be bought for $750.

Medium: denim jacket, fabric dye, embroidered patches

2009 Toronto - 2007 Dublin: This is a short video loop comprised of drawings that I did in Ireland.

Invocation of the Queer Spirits - Winnipeg

A Collaborative Project with AA Bronson

This third performance of the Queer Spirits Project was sponsored by Plug In ICA and took place at the future site of their new gallery, an abandoned Army Navy store at the corner of Portage and Memorial, adjacent to the Winnipeg Art Gallery. For this performance, AA and I were joined by artists Michael Dudeck and Noam Gonick. On the ground floor of the building we constructed a kind of tent of white nylon. The invocation took place at night by candlelight, and our translucent tent acted as a giant shadow box visible from the street.

Invocation of the Queer Spirits - New Orleans

Invocation of the Queer Spirits is an ongoing collaboration that I am doing with AA Bronson. The New Orleans Invocation was performed on Halloween to coincide with Prospect 1, the city's new art biennial. At midnight, AA and I met along with four other participants - including New Orleans artist, Skylar Fein - in a secret location in the Ninth Ward.

Two months prior to invocation, both AA and I visited New Orleans and met different community members who practice forms of spiritualism as a way of honouring and maintaining their heritage. This included a local voodoo priestess, who gave us a tour of her community’s temple, as well as a representative of the Mardi Gras Indians, who gave us a tour of the Backstreet Museum, which also serves as a community center.

The Queer Spirits project is sponsored by Creative Time. Documentation can be found on their website: www.creativetime.org.

 

The patch is available at Art Metropole (Toronto) and Printed Matter (New York).

The sigil can be written on paper, on your hand or your chest, on the forehead of a lover or wherever you think it will be the most effective. At the white-hot instant of orgasm, consciousness blinks, into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched.

Grant Morrison, "Pop Magic!" The Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult, edited by Richard Metzger, p. 19.

 

The patch is available at Art Metropole (Toronto) and Printed Matter (New York).

The history of the word "faggot" reveals the intimate connection between Gay men, heresy and witchcraft. Both witches and heretics were regularly burned on bundles of sticks called "faggots." In popular speech of the time expressions popped up like "fire and faggots" or "to fry a faggot," suggesting that the victims themselves were called "faggots." "Faggot" even became "the embroidered figure of a faggot , which heretics who had recanted were obliged to wear on their sleeve, as an emblem of what they had merited" (Oxford English Dictionary). The word "Faggot" comes from the Latin fagus, which means beech tree. Fagus in turn derives from the Greek phagos or phegos, which originally meant any tree bearing edible nuts or fruit (in Greek, phagein means "to eat"). In classical Greek, phagos especially refered to oak trees. Burning witches and heretics on bundles of faggots may have originated from a religious link with trees (especially beech and oak) - which were sacred in pre-Christian Europe. The old fairy tree near Domremy where Joan of Arc first heard her voices was a fagus tree.

Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Boston: Fag Rag Books, 1978), p. 12-13

The patch is available at Art Metropole (Toronto) and Printed Matter (New York).

Physella Johnsoni

In only a handful of thermal springs in Banff National Park (BNP) lives an inconspicuous little snail that is found nowhere else in the world. In April 1997, the Banff springs snail (Physella johnsoni) was classified as “threatened” by COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada). In 2000, it was re-assessed and “uplisted” to “endangered”: facing imminent extirpation or extinction. This small snail is the most at-risk wildlife species in Banff National Park. Other at-risk species in Banff include the grizzly bear (Special Concern), woodland caribou (Threatened) and wolverine (Special Concern). This small snail also made history by being the first living mollusc (snails and clams) and among the first invertebrates to be classified by COSEWIC.

Pleasures of Being a Dog (2004)

Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester

An installation tracing the variety of connections between childhood, nature, and gay porn.

The show caused some controversy because of its use of male sexual content. This resulted in a local news report that I find endlessly amusing.

Medium: blankets, pillow cases, chains, clamps, hooks, safety pins.

Art-Throb: The Culture of Obsession

2002 - Montreal

Along with Jo-Anne Balcaen, I curated a show at Galerie Articule that focused on collecting, fandom, and obsession as a form of art making. Daniel Barrow, Cecillia Berkovic, Evergon, Shari Hatt, Keith Orkusz, and Shelley Ouellet were the featured artists.

The Showers

2001 - Montréal

Part of HÔPITAL (a site-specific exhibition held in an abandoned hospital - presented by articule)

Inspired by the Sistine Chapel, I fashioned a grotto in the showers featuring images of the male body combed from gay porn magazines and medical texts.

To add to the visceral sense of the installation, I smeared the walls and the ceiling with several coats of Vaseline.

My goal was to overwhelm viewers with opposing clichés associated with the gay body: beauty and disease, desire and repulsion, commodification and singularity.

Nicky was my first gay friend. He was a true punk who taught me the value of playing by your own rules. He ran around with a pack of wild misfits and strays. They were always fucking each other and getting into the hen house. The dogs were considered an outrage, as they told the townsfolk to stick their morality right up their tight butts. Nicky also liked to run after trucks, barking and snapping at their tires. A local farmer later ran him down. He was truly my best friend.

The Secret of the Old Mill (Montreal 2000)

Debut of my imaginary circus, which now consists of one big-top tent, 20 pillows, 50 plaques, 2 appliquéd blankets, and a small assortment of costumes and props.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)