Gender reassignment

Les Grandes Murales challenges us to rethink
queer lifestyles and hetero gender roles

CURIOUS COUPLING: From Alone Time

by SACHA JACKSON

This year, Divers/cité is taking a new message to the streets. Comprised of work by JJ Levine and Jason Hendrickson, Les Grandes Murales is an outdoor photo exhibit set to challenge preconceived notions of the queer identity and lifestyle.

Curated by Aydin Matlabi, a photographer himself, the exhibit uses the two radically different series—Hendrickson’s work focuses on the homes of men at a men-only campground, while Levine’s depict what we perceive as hetero-couples in everyday life—to show us both the private and public domains of the queer experience. More than anything, though, these images ask us to question our own preconceived notions of what the queer lifestyle means.

Levine, who’s been taking photographs since she was a kid and studied photography and interdisciplinary studies in sexuality at Concordia, delves into intimate relationships in her series Alone Time. Using iconic scenes from heterosexual life—couples watching TV, making dinner, reading in bed—Levine questions the stability of gender, identity and aesthetic beauty.

“The idea for Alone Time started with another project I did called Switch, which was a prom-themed studio portrait project that involved fictitious straight couples. This project comes from the same idea of gender fluidity and trying to make visually confusing images. Images that on first glance seem straightforward and, upon closer inspection, become more complicated.”

Using six models, all of which are friends of Levine’s or people in her community (“trust is a really important aspect in my work,” she says), they are transformed through masquerade and drag into visually identifiable (i.e. male and female) gender roles. The catch being that the same person plays each gender in these “hetero” couples.

“I was given the choice to show anything I wanted and the reason I selected this body of work is because I think looking at pictures of straight people will automatically get people’s attention,” Levine says. “It’s not something you’d normally see at Pride.”

Hendrickson, who’s completing his MFA at Concordia, also traverses uncommon ground by presenting us with images of the exterior of summer dwellings at an all-male campground. Through this series of photographs, Hendrickson explores the tents, cabins and summer homes as expressions of the residents and looks at the juxtaposition between the freedom the campsite provides its residents with and also how closely this closed community sometimes mimics communities that are often criticized for promoting exclusion and homogeneity.

For the viewer, both series demand more attention than is immediately obvious and both present new ways of looking and thinking about queer identity, something Levine wanted her work to promote.

“I wanted to show something that would provoke thought and hopefully make people reflect on their own identity, how they perceive gender, or their assumptions about sexuality and sexual relationships. It’s fairly common for people to ask queer couples, ‘So who’s the guy and who’s the girl in the relationship?’ And to look at these images you think, ‘Oh, that’s the guy and that’s the girl,’ till you realize they’re the same person. For me, queerness isn’t just about being gay, it’s about realizing a different way of approaching gender and realizing that there are more genders than just male and female.”

LES GRANDES MURALES AT TERRASSE
STE-CATHERINE/PARC ÉMILIEGAMELIN
FROM JULY 28–AUG. 2,
VERNISSAGE JULY 29, 5 P.M.