TENDER LIKE A BRUISE

Opening reception: Friday April 4, 7-9pm. 

TENDER LIKE A BRUISE is a collaborative exhibition featuring Eli Nolet and Ardyn Gibbs, two Hamilton-based emerging queer and trans artists whose practices investigate queer affect through new media and material explorations.

Engaging with the tensions of how a bruise can be the outcome of both pain and pleasure in relation to queerness, the exhibition seeks to explore the nuanced politics of the queer body and visibility through a lens of relationality and T4T* care. 

*T4T meaning “trans 4 trans” – used here to refer to a shared understanding and relation to fellow trans people in our lives in which a reciprocal exchange of love, knowledge, and care takes place.

 

Ardyn Gibbs is a Queer and Trans, Settler-Indigenous (Mohawk) Artist, Designer and Arts Worker located on the territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and the Mississauga's of the Credit First Nation otherwise known as Hamilton, Ontario. Using digital new media technologies Ardyn’s work explores the themes of Queer Futurity, Digital Dreaming and Visibility/Legibility of Queer bodies in public spaces. Ardyn is passionate about collective dreaming, place keeping and fostering meaningful connections. Their work is constantly shifting, adapting and growing with the world around them.

Eli Nolet (they/them) is a queer trans settler-Indigenous artist and arts worker from the occupied territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas (otherwise known as Hamilton, Ontario). Their work explores how technology and affective materiality can function as a vessel for the medium of self and queer potentiality. Across their practice, Nolet is interested in investigating the many layered histories of queer culture and desire, and questioning the binaries of visible/invisible, normative/transgressive.