This year's Summit (Disrupt and Reconstruct) has given us a platform and the opportunity to express ourselves artistically as a queer couple.

This project was inspired by panelist Kai Jacobsen who presented “Gender Euphoria: What Is It, And How Do We Get More of It?”

This art piece was inspired by the incredible Two-Spirit Gathering on Day One of Summit, which left me feeling so in awe of all the wonderful Two-Spirit people who attended and shared their voices.

I painted a single discarded medical glove – a now-common sight during the pandemic. The outside of the glove is a traditional blue color, with the inside being a different color representative of the HIV+ community.

Among all the important panel discussions and talks about the queer community's health and well-being over the three days of the Summit, I chose six community conversations that touched my inner spirit and raised my curiosity to know more about the knowledge and ideas that the community leaders exchanged during the Summit.

“Choose Love” – Series of 6 art pieces created from Kai Cheng Thom’s presentation

This five-piece series is titled, “Friends of Dorothy”, and was painted in 2015 using acrylics on canvas. These brightly coloured, stylized paintings are portraits of the friends and lovers of the artist, don trupp, lost to HIV/AIDS between 1987 and 2001. With each portrait, don trupp endeavoured to capture the ‘spark’ that made the lives of these men- his friends and his lovers, momentous and unique.

The felt-sense experience of piercing the image causing disruption but leading into the reparative process of mending the image into something new... Ryan visually investigated the duality of harm directed towards and within the Queer community. Symbolization is found in the plants chosen (perceptions: harmful or helpful), how individual/community proceeds forward and focus on the reparative process to find growth/meaning.

In my artwork process, I talked through my thoughts on my own identity, and trying to understand the world around me and why it was so hard to find a path to follow. I worked from no set landscape, and no concept, so that I could bring forth an authentic self-discovery onto the canvas.

There are very few truly natural places left in this world and the hearts of many human beings are cold with apathy. Kai Cheng’s story was a perfect metaphor for our current state of being and the pure simplicity of the solution to all our problems which has always been and will always be love.

The piece uses fragments that tie in drug user agency, psychedelic healing, decolonization, neurodivergence, language barriers and art/science/academic elitism. The piece itself dancing between personal narrative, journalistic reporting and editorial candour present itself as an organism, complex and multifaceted. In this way it represents the summit, its participants, and our movements.

Ibanez-Carras makes some strong points in his conference presentation regarding how queerness has been mainstreamed by the heteronormative and neoliberal legitimization of HIV research... In reflecting on the changing players of HIV activism and research in North America, Jesse brings forward the imagery of AIDs activism of the 80s and early 90s.

Conflict Revolution consists of a 5:54 minute audio composition and a PDF file… these gentle conversations, some during nighttime walks or snowstorms, meandered through self-reflection; the resultant audio piece is a translation into a purposefully obscure artifact that marks the occurrence. That hidden performance, the space between the conversants…is the “reconstruct” aspect of this project.

‘dialogue.’ is a 2-channel video piece that takes on the form of a character exploration skit, written and performed by myself… “how do you feel pressured to perform masculinity from within the queer community?” …pointed towards opened a lot of space for a nuanced discussion about social pressures that are created within queer communities to happen.

This is a statement on hope, connection, and growth for future systems of care that is rooted in my own reflections on growing up in care as a trans Indigenous youth. jaye simpson…spoke of care not being the responsibility of children and envisioning a system where people would work together to support them instead.

This piece, No Binaries No Boxes, is about the ways that research (and society in general) often ask us information about our genders, without involving us in deciding how those questions are asked or what the answers are... This piece challenges us to think beyond binary notions of gender as a society, and also to recognize the ways that sometimes even within 2SLGBTQIA+ community research we continue to put ourselves and our communities in boxes.

Taken together, the presentations begin to co-articulate a provisional queer decoration politics…which led me to conceptualize a series of cosmetic, multicolour pretty-paintings…The implications are profound when queers, architects, engineers and designers, health workers, and inhabitants meet. New forms of life, new living situations, new world designs are possible when this happens.

As a trans man Gender Euphoria has been a struggle for me. Gender as a fluid concept with both light and darkness and how gender roles are applied inspired the colour palette with form drawn from introspection and discovering what makes me me and what makes me happy in my own skin