TRIGGER: Drawing the Line in 2015

Excerpt from QAF’s website.

TRIGGER: Drawing the Line in 2015, July 23 – August 7, curated by SD Holman, is the main exhibition of the Queer Arts Festival 2015 in Vancouver. Venue: Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre, 181 Roundhouse Mews (Corner of Davie & Pacific), Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2W3, Canada.

QAF’s curated exhibition honours the 25th anniversary of Kiss & Tell’s legendary exhibition, Drawing the Line. 19 participating artists challenge, provoke and push boundaries. What sets you off?

Artists:
Kiss & Tell: (Lizard Jones, Persimmon Blackbridge, Susan Stewart), Afuwa, Aiyyana Maracle, Amy Dame, Bryan Bone, Claude Perreault, Coral Short, Dana Ayotte, Emilio Rojas, James Diamond, Jonny Sopotiuk, Jono Nobles, Kathy Atkins, Persimmon Blackbridge, Rosamond Norbury, Storme Webber, Suzo Hickey and Toni Latour.

In the article on “Gay and Lesbian Art” in the Oxford Art Online, one exhibition is singled out as best embodying the spirit of queer arts: the 1990 project Drawing the Line by the Vancouver collective Kiss & Tell. In this project, Susan Stewart photographed her colleagues Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones, and women viewers were given markers to draw lines on the walls at the point at which the increasingly explicit imagery became unacceptable to them. Audiences, however, responded in a decidedly non-linear way, and impassioned debates flowered on the walls around the images. Drawing the Line toured internationally and had an enormous influence – it is not uncommon for lesbians of a certain age to say this exhibition “changed my life.”

Twenty-five years later, QAF honours this epochal piece of Canadian queer heritage with a retrospective show of the original images, together with a curated exhibition in which artists are asked for contemporary responses to this pivotal exhibition.

Read more about TRIGGER: Drawing the Line in 2015.