The Formless Body, an exhibit curated by Jarrett Earnest
June 4-July 2, 2022
Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Avenue, Toronto.
Opens: Saturday June 4, 2022 from 12-5pm
The exhibition is in relation to PUBLIC 65—DEVOTION: today’s future becomes tomorrow’s archive. Building off two previous exhibitions, The Young and Evil (David Zwirner, 2019) and Ray Johnson: What A Dump (David Zwirner, 2021)—Earnest has invited artists, poets, scholars, and archivists to reflect on the process and materiality of archival work, and on their dedication to the stories that archives enable. The focus is on the artistic, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual labour itself, attending to the complex problems of Queer life in the wake of the AIDS crisis. PUBLIC 65—DEVOTION: today’s future becomes tomorrow’s archive will be simultaneously published as a hardcover book (forthcoming in 2022), bringing together art, ephemera, scholarship, and recollections around particular practices of Queer archival work.
The Formless Body extends those accounts into space, showing rarely exhibited artworks by Ching Ho Cheng (1946-1989), Darrel Ellis (1958-1992), Robert Flack (1957-2003) Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw, (1958-2006) along with work by other artists who engage with these lineages, such as Adrian Stimson’s re-enactment of Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw’s 1992 performance White Shame (2012), and Matthew Leifheit’s photographs of relics and sites of Queer history. The exhibition includes contemporary and historical paintings, sculpture, photographs, and time-based media. The subject of the exhibition is not just the body, but the spirit and presence of the dead, and the transcendence of death through form.
ARTISTS: Stephen Andrews, Ching Ho Cheng, Alexandra Chowaniec, Christine Davis, Kalale Dalton-Lutale, Darrel Ellis, Robert Flack, Josh T. Franco, Christy Gast, Léonie Guyer, Simone Kearney, Matthew Leifheit, Ian Lewandowski, Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw, Cason Sharpe, Linda Simpson, Adrian Stimson, Tim Whiten
Illustration: Matthew Leifheit, Ching Ho Cheng Stone Eye Study, 2021. Dye sublimation print on aluminum. (16” x 20”)