Out and About
Tough As Nails: Transgressive Queer Glamour at YTB Gallery (Toronto) – April 5 to 23, 2016
Tough As Nails: Transgressive Queer Glamour
Alchemy, drag, flash, haunting, shade, wild, glitter, shame, sex, violence, trash, fame.
Tough as Nails brings five emerging Toronto based artists together to flaunt the glamorous side of queer resistance. Seeking to complicate ideas of marginality, Tough as Nails explores the relationship between glamour and agency. Drawing on the long tradition of self-fashioned glamour as a practice of survival and world making for non-normative people, these five artists take up queer glamour as a defiant expression of marginalized identity.
The artists in Tough as Nails refuse, parody, challenge, and complicate conventional notions of what is considered alluring, and valuable. The artists exploit selfies, porn, fashion, interior decorating, and costuming as avenues to manipulate representation. Positioning queer as dodgy, erratic, and always in an unstable state of becoming, yet also as lived experience and historically defiant politic; queer glamour becomes a site of dynamic slippage, undermining, renegotiation, overstatement, and reinstatement. Tough as Nails investigates the idea of queer glamour as site of glittering transgression.
This exhibitions features work by up and coming Toronto artists, including Beck Gilmer Osborne whose work looks at hyper masculinity through a trans lens, as well as Maddie Alexander who recently made work about the hyper sexualization of lesbians. Curated by Genevieve Flavelle.
Other Artwork By: Kim Ninkuru, Danny Welsh, and Shellie Zhang,
Tuesday, April 5th – Saturday, April 23rd
Opening reception, Friday April 8, 7 – 11 pm
About the Author
Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist with a focus on travel, lifestyle, entertainment, and hospitality. He has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors, and other public personalities. He enjoys discovering delicious eats, tasting spirited treats, and being mesmerized by musical beats. Reach out - bryen@thebuzzmag.ca