A Minimal Doubt

10.07.2015 – 31.07.2015
Videofag
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‍Vincent Chevalier (Toronto, ON), Shan Kelley (Montreal,QC), and Andrew McPhail (Hamilton, ON)

A Minimal Doubt explores themes of loss, desire, and slowed-down futurity by placing minimalism in dialogue with the long histories of HIV/AIDS. The exhibition offers cross-sectional readings of poz status and aesthetic value, thinking through a deferral of self-knowledge by drawing upon queered forms of language and text. Unpacking the formalisms that belong to everyday experience, it illustrates unraveling identifications of the queer speaking subject. Here, the title and working concept, “a minimal doubt,” conveys a useful tension. When one states that doubt is minimal, it evokes a sort of implicit hope. At the same time, the phrase points to a kind of productive skepticism whereby the forces of inaction, obsolescence, and ambiguity remain at the center of the discussion. The artists included in this program utilize tactics of deconstruction to interrogate logics of queer representation that depend upon the assumption of a shared script of intergenerational struggle.

Images courtesy of the artists