Main gallery

PAGEANT

February 25 - April 16, 2022

Opening Reception: Friday March 11, 2022

Natalie King

Curated by Ryan Rice

Natalie King. "Miss Gay Ojibwe" (2020). Courtesy of the Artist

Natalie King | Pageant

Pageant is Natalie King’s solo exhibition centred on facets of (re)presentation and presence; a proactive measure to take up space and be seen in a magnificent light with dignity and prominence. King’s paintings parade a dazzling body of work experienced through a lens of pageantry and flamboyance that is presented as an invitation to witness the strength that is drawn from bold Queer Indigenous pride. Poised around the spirited painting Miss Gay Ojibwe, King’s work emanates joy, self-reflection, queerness and Indigeneity. The exhibition imparts King’s colorful palette, which camouflages and teases out binaries embedded in the façade of beauty, to spark conversations of desire, belonging and reverence. Pageant embraces the occasion to display necessary, transformational shifts for societal values and norms to adapt through the intentions to invoke a fluid form of place-making, with a vulnerable sense of world-building that is, at the same time, pleasure-centred and working through dialogues of resistance and joy.

EXHIBITION: February 25 – April 16, 2022

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, March 11, 2022 | 7:00 P.M.


Artist Bio

Natalie King is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe artist, facilitator and member of Timiskaming First Nation. King’s interdisciplinary arts practice ranges from video, painting, sculpture and installation as well as community engagement, curation and arts administration. King is currently a Programming Coordinator at Xpace Cultural Centre in tsí Tkaròn:to.

Often involving portrayals of queer femmes, King’s works are about embracing the ambiguity and multiplicities of identity within the Anishinaabe queer femme experience(s) and futurities. King’s artistic practice engages and operates from a firmly critical, anti-colonial, non-oppressive and future-bound perspective, reclaiming the realities of lived lives through frameworks of desire and survivance.

The artist would like to acknowledge that all works have been made with the support of the Toronto Arts Council.


Curator Bio

Ryan Rice, Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake, is a curator, Associate Professor and the Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at OCAD University. His institutional and independent curatorial career spans 30 years in community, museums, artist run centres and galleries. Rice’s writing on contemporary Onkwehón:we art has been published in numerous periodicals and exhibition catalogues, and he has lectured widely. In 2021, Rice was appointed Curator, Indigenous Art at Onsite Gallery (OCAD) and is currently developing two public art commissions as the Indigenous Public Art Curator with Waterfront Toronto.

Exhibition is generously supported by: