Origin Story

08.01.24 – 10.27.24
Karsh-Masson Gallery

Aylin Abbasi (Ottawa, ON), Ash Barbu (Ottawa, ON), Nic Cooper (Vancouver, BC), Theo J. Cuthand (Toronto, ON), Kama La Mackerel (Montreal, QC), and Cara Tierney (Ottawa, ON)

Origin Story explores the question of narrative agency within the context of trans storytelling. Pursuing a range of material and conceptual strategies, the artists gather from unresolved pasts and create shared futures. Together, they engage with intersecting histories of trans care, queer activism, and Indigenous worldmaking to illustrate new models of inheritance and unbecoming. Through these considerations, viewers are invited to read transition as a process of continual reinvention. Origin Story traces the dimensions of non-linear time through ideas of circularity, repetition, and multiplicity. The exhibition proposes forms of connection and relations of mutual commitment that express a collective resilience.

Images courtesy of the artists