Exhibits

Souvenir: Never Just Passing Through

Souvenir: Never Just Passing Through is both a culmination and a beginning, intertwining deep ancestral and personal memories about the place and idea that is the “north” with the more provisional and short-term experiences of visitors and tourists whose relationship with the north is more transitory. As a culmination, it brings together the work made by the inaugural Queer Up North project’s artists for the last time, and as a beginning, it features queer artists living and/or from the north with whom a relationship evolved during the multiple facets of the Queer Up North 2024/25 project – relationships which we hope to maintain and grow.

Queer Up North, a collaboration between the Throbbing Rose Collective and Nipissing Region Curatorial Committee, began with a queer artist residency in August 2024.  For two weeks, sixteen queer artists, mostly from urban centers, stayed in an active hunting and fishing lodge in Temagami, on the shore of Snake Island Lake next to the White Bear Old Growth Forest. We focused on ideas associated with queer ecologies – questioning dominant ways of thinking that divide the world into binaries such a male/female, nature/culture, and natural/unnatural.

During their artistic research many of the artists were given, bought, collected and/or took many “things” (flowers, rocks, pinecones, postcards, scraps of magazines, maps …) that were often incorporated into the artworks themselves. These items stood for many things: sometimes markers of place and memory; sometimes representing an idea; sometimes they became the medium through which the artwork was made; sometimes an element of design. But regardless, in one way or another they acted as souvenirs – tying the work to materiality, to memory and perhaps reflecting the futility of trying to capture a particular time and a place through an object. The extraction and re-purposing of these rocks, flowers, pinecones, maps, postcards, magazines, and other “things” also leads to questions around the ethics of collecting, the impact of humans on the land, the presumptions through which tourists and researchers often relate to places that we are guests in, and the responsibilities that we have to learn customs and protocols of a particular place, especially and including Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to the land. These ideas and questions developed during the course of the QUN project – during the residency and subsequent queer ecology symposiums – often evolving through presentations, workshops and discussions with settler and Indigenous northern queer artists.

These northern queer artists are the featured artists in Souvenir: Never Just Passing Through, and have been invited to reflect on the themes of “souvenir”, both in its function as a noun, and in its reflective form, as the verb to remember. These artists shared their knowledge, lives and artist practices as impacted by their relationship to land and place and also by their identities as queer artists. Two artists from the QUN residency who grew up in the north, and whose lives and memories are formed by northern experiences, but no longer live there (James Fowler and Kristy Boyce) are also included as featured artists.