Fruit Salad: A Series of Queer and Gender Non-Conforming Videos and Performances
26 October to 9 November 2020
On view at the Owens Art Gallery picture window
+ on the Umbrella Projects site
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 non-conforming 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.
Featuring work by:
Blackpowerbarbie
The Clichettes
Marissa Sean Cruz
Maya Ben David
Séamus Gallagher
Jillian Mayer
Victoria Sin
Ariel Smith
Feather Talia
Tom Rubnitz
Curated by Hannah Bridger, Emily Falvey, and Lucas Morneau