Queer Lines (For Agnes)

Queer Lines (For Agnes), FADO Performance Art Centre, 2021

In the spring of 2021, I was given the opportunity to make a video performance through a professional at-home residency called  PERFORMANCE RESOLUTION(S) with FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto, Canada).

The “performance resolution” I proposed was to not have a resolution. Instead, I wanted to be in the harshness of those early moments of the pandemic working with time as a medium. I wanted to track pandemic time through a performance-for-the-camera. I wanted to make a performance-painting inspired by the great lesbian painter Agnes Martin. Specifically, I was inspired by her very chill horizontal lines. 

Queer Lines (For Agnes) was inspired by the life and painting of Agnes Martin. At the time, I was thinking a lot about Martin’s contributions towards queering the canon of European art history. I love her horizontal paintings, their meditative qualities and their quiet beauty. So, I decided to make a work responding to Martin’s horizontal lines using the horizontal line as a metaphor of queerness. 

In Queer Lines (For Agnes) I made my own paintbrushes using my hair. I also use other unusual items for painting that reference the body such as a straw, a toothbrush and a shaving brush. In the work, the handmade brushes acted as extensions of my body blurring the boundaries of my body and the painting .  

Queer Lines (For Agnes) also has a soundscape that was recorded during the performance to amplify the sounds of my body, the brushes and the painting surface. When watching the video please turn up the sound for full effect. 

Queer Lines (For Agnes) was screened during the “Online Performance Art Festival”  in 2020 and it was also shown as an exhibition at the RBC Media gallery at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in October 2022.