The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions

The ArQuives's Digital Exhibitions

Explore highlights from The ArQuives’s collections of personal and organizational papers, artifacts, ephemera and more!

INTRODUCTION

Hon Lu with his cousin, Shanobi Lam, at their cousin’s wedding
Hon Lu with his cousin, Shanobi Lam, at their cousin’s wedding
Photo booth
2009
Los Angeles, California
Inkjet print of a digital image
Gift of Hon Lu
Courtesy of The Family Camera Network and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives
 
This exhibit explores the critical work that queer, trans, and two-spirited family photos do in documenting and creating queer modes of belonging, and how our emotional attachments to queer family photographs have also sustained LGBTQ2+ lives. The show traces how queer, trans and two-spirited people draw on photography to redefine family to include queer kinships outside the heteronormative, nuclear family model. Queering Family Photography considers the social, political, and technological factors that structure queer kinship, and the ways that LGBTQ2+ communities creatively reimagine family, linking public and private spheres together. The images capture fleeting moments of love and desire, as well as generational bonds, which are often fractured by a normalizing state and culture.
 
You can navigate the exhibitiong by clicking through the pages above: Instant Intimacies; Domesticities; Publics; and our film. 

The exhibit features photographs and oral histories collected through The Family Camera Network, a SSHRC-funded public archive that collects and preserves family photographs and their stories (see their webpage here.) It also includes loans from The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, a partner in this project, and from the University of Winnipeg. This exhibit has been curated by Elspeth Brown (lead) and Thy Phu with the assistance of Jennifer Orpana, Sajdeep Soomal, Richard Fung, Mark Kasumovic, Tori Abel, Lucie Handley-Girard, and Sarah Parsons. The exhibit was re-mounted digitally by Zohar Freeman. We acknowledge the support of Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Western University, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and York University. The images here are displayed with the kind permission of most of the individuals represented in the photographs. 

For more information, contact elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca

Photoshoot

                              Photoshoot

                              Unknown photographer
                              Circa 2000
                              Probably Toronto, Ontario
                              Gift of 2-Spirited People of the 1st Nations
                              Courtesy of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives

 

INTRODUCTION