Thursday, March 23
2:30 pm (PST)
All ages, FREE
Online, via ZOOM
Join us for a panel discussion with exhibiting artist Lucas Morneau, artist Hazel Meyer, and curator Tak Pham as they discuss topics drawn from Morneau’s exhibition, Queer Newfoundland Hockey League (QNHL). The conversation will touch on both artists' creative practices, homophobia and hegemonic masculinity in our contemporary culture, as well as the persisting issues and institutional legacy of organized sports.
FEATURING
Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Meyer’s work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of sports and recreation. Drawing on archival research, Meyer designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, gender outlaws, leather-dykes—into the performative spaces of athletics.
Lucas Morneau is a queer interdisciplinary artist and curator of English-Newfoundlander and French-Québeçois European settler descent from Ktaqamkuk (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada). They received their Bachelor of Fine Arts at Memorial University, and their Master of Fine Arts at University of Saskatchewan. Working across mediums, but most known for their textile and photographic work, Morneau uses humour to deconstruct and critique hegemonic masculinity, the gender binary, and homophobia in Canadian and Newfoundland culture.
Tak Pham is a Vietnamese contemporary art curator and art critic. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History and Theory of Architecture from Carleton University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University. He has written for espace art actuel, esse arts + opinions, and Canadian Art, among others and curated exhibitions, projects, and public programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Xpace Cultural Centre, Trinity Square Video, and Nuit Blanche Toronto, to name a few. Pham is currently Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina.
Images:
Hazel Meyer and Regie, photo by Cait McKinney
Lucas Morneau, photo by Annie France Noël
Tak Pham, photo by Farihah Shah
THE EXHIBITION
Playfully and provocatively challenging the prevalence of homophobia and hyper-masculinity in the culture of team sports, Lucas Morneau’s Queer Newfoundland Hockey League (QNHL) proposes 14 fictional teams that reclaim, empower, and amplify LGBTQIA2S+ voices. With team names that include the St. John’s Sissies, Bonavista Buggers, and Ferryland Fairies, Morneau subverts pejoratives used against the LGBTQIA2S+ community, paired with places historically associated with senior hockey league teams in Newfoundland and Labrador. Each jersey is hand crocheted and rug-hooked, using craft practices often delegated as “women’s work.”
Lucas Morneau’s Queer Newfoundland Hockey League (QNHL) is curated by Craig Willms and is on view in The Cube from January 14 to April 1, 2023.