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Fruit Salad: Queer and Gender-Critical Videos and Performances

October 26, 2020 - November 9, 2020

blackpowerbarbie, The Clichettes, Marissa Sean Cruz, Maya Ben David, Séamus Gallagher, Jillian Mayer, Lucas Morneau, Tom Rubnitz, Victoria Sin, Ariel Smith, Feather Talia

Curators: Hannah Bridger, Emily Falvey, Lucas Morneau

26 October to 9 November 2020
Owens Art Gallery Picture Window and umbreallaprojects.ca

Fruit Salad features a mélange of videos and filmed performances that explore gender performativity and celebrate masquerade, personas, and other fluid forms of identity. The artists included here use queer and feminist theory to critique gender roles and homophobia embedded in Western culture. Their alter egos and performances function as multivocal tools for the expression of identities that question the social constructs and confines of gender. Drag personas, caricatures, eccentric costuming, and anthropomorphism thus serve as methods to critique and deconstruct discriminatory gender essentialism and its ideals.

Fruit Salad⎯Umbrella Projects’ second video program⎯was organized in response to the erosion of community spaces for LGBTQ2S+ communities at Mount Allison University and in the town of Sackville, New Brunswick. Our first screening, Sweetest Sympathy, was dedicated to Thunder & Lightning, a beloved local hangout and safe space that was forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coinciding with Halloween, Fruit Salad thus seeks to hold space for LGBTQ2S+ and gender non-conforming communities online and on campus through a fun, yet thought-provoking program of campy, gender-critical and queer video art and performances. Simultaneously streamed online and screened in the Owens Art Gallery’s picture window (from dusk to dawn), this program is free to watch for two weeks.

We would like to acknowledge, honour, and pay respect to the traditional owners and custodians—from all four directions—of the land on which we live. It is upon the unceded, ancestral lands of L’nuk (the Mi’kmaq) that the partnership Umbrella Projects has come into existence. While this area is known as Sackville, New Brunswick, it is part of Siknikt, a district of the greater territory of Mi’kma’ki. This territory is covered by the Treaties of Peace and Friendship, which L’nuk, Wolastoqiyik, and Peskotomuhkati first signed with the British Crown in 1726.

Umbrella Projects gratefully acknowledges the support of John Murchie, the Rotary Club of Sackville, the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation, Mount Allison University, the Canada Council for the Arts, the New Brunswick Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture, and the Town of Sackville. We sincerely thank our staff, members, student interns, volunteers, and supporters in the community of Sackville and the broader Atlantic region.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the physical spaces of the Owens Art Gallery are currently closed to the public. To find out more about our online, onscreen, and off-site programs, please visit our mta.ca/owens and umbrellaprojects.ca.