The Queer Feeling of Tomorrow

17.09.2015 – 13.12.2015
Art Gallery of Guelph, Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators
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Sunil Gupta (London, EN), John Hanning (Brooklyn, NY), Shan Kelley (Montreal, QC), Julia Martin (Ottawa, ON), David Poolman (Toronto, ON), and Laurel Woodcock (Guelph, ON)

The Queer Feeling of Tomorrow explores themes of doubt, resilience, and political agency, proposing a shift in thinking away from the urgent and the spectacular towards the unbalanced and the everyday. Through performances of minor resistance, the artists included in the exhibition study the complex, unspoken, and oftentimes inexplicable excesses of identity and community. The idea of a “queer feeling of tomorrow” suggests the playful uncertainty of our personal and political futures in a supposedly “post AIDS” historical moment. Highlighting primarily text-based narrative works, The Queer Feeling of Tomorrow expresses a double play of optimism and skepticism—a spirit of life affirmation that is at the same time a form of restless doubt. Presented together, these works offer an amalgamation of precarious, obstructed documents, fragmented biographical notes, and emptied out quotations held in the flux of continuous de-contextualization and re-contextualization.

Images courtesy of the Art Gallery of Guelph