A green so dark it slips into black. A forest crawling with forms that from a distance appear dead, and upon closer inspection are alive but in deeply murky shades. Are they shadows or plants, bodies or trees?
"During the first few months of the pandemic, I had a nightly series of dreams wherein I saw figures from my life-friends, lovers, family, unknown people-appearing and disappearing amongst a thicket of adumbral plants. This space was not malevolent, not sickened or sad, but more hauntingly obscured. Serendipitously during this same period, I came across a postcard of Egon Schiele's Sonnenblumen (1911) painting, with its dense column of sunflowers folding into themselves with the flowers pushed under dark umber green leaves. I pinned it to my studio wall to further ponder the psychological machinations behind my dreams.
Fast-forward a couple of years. I am strolling the ruelle verte closest to my home, when an off-leash dog lunges at me and the dog's owner repeatedly calls me a faggot as he threatens to beat me up. In summer 2024, my partner and I have a carton of eggs thrown at us by sneering teens riding by the LGBT Center on 7thAvenue in downtown Manhattan. These homophobic encounters strike me as offbeat, a relic from the pre-2000s, but they start happening to most queer friends I know with frequency. Anti-trans legislation and gender panic statutes are cropping up all over the United States and trickling into Canada in New Brunswick, Alberta and Manitoba. Since 2020, we have seen an erosion of 2SLGBTQI+ protections in North America and across the globe that crosses the Rubicon of post-Gay Liberation social progress and self-determined personhood. In this new body of quilt and collage work, I am dismally responding to this cultural and political darkening of our times for queer rights.
Those pandemic dreams came back to me, and I started imagining such a forested retreat or escape from all this phobia and vitriol. The garden has always been a place for my seclusion, but lacking one of my own in Montreal, I headed to Mont Royal Park and lesser-kempt wild spaces around the city. I refamiliarized myself with the gloaming-the time of dusk when the veil of nightfall makes distinctions between figure and landscape indiscernible-as a potent moment of uncertainty, danger and erotic possibility.
For the past six years, I have been researching the connections between queer people and plants through the history of herbal medicine. Trawling Medieval herbal manuscripts, Appalachian folk remedies, Indigenous medicine guides, and hippy-era reproductive pamphlets, I have indexed several hundred as having speculative queer uses. But our kinship with herbs is likely deeper. As gay historian Arthur Evans has noted, queer people and witches of the past relied on the healing, psychoactive and poisonous properties of special plants and saw these as a form of trans-species communion. Many of these plants that safeguarded queerfolk, such as oak, elder, angelica or onions, have been stitched as protective charms into this body of work. Emanating as organza background shadows or patchwork protrusions into the foreground, this density of plant talismans obfuscates, entangles and shelters the images of vulnerable bodies lifted from various gay and queer archives from personal and public collections such as Les Archives gaies du Québec or the ArQuives in Toronto.
The Gloaming claims space for nuanced possibilities, acknowledges moments when camouflage and exposure overlap. These works are simultaneously homespun and carnal; they point to the frenetic nature of cruising culture: searching eyes darting, forms emerging in and out of recognition, as in the dating app grid, as in quilted patterns. Many generations of queers have found sanctuary in cruising, which shifts sexual inhibition away from the legal sanction of the home to the street, the park, the woods. Similar to how the darker works surround the free-standing Entanglement series like a falling dusk, I see the gloaming as a thin veil of protective cover that might be necessary to survive these times. Even in darkness-perhaps especially in darkness-queers always find one another, build a counter-wild where pleasure emerges and effloresces." -AM
Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist and fourth-generation quiltmaker whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire and identity politics. His exhibition record includes numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently Entanglements at Northeastern University, and Radical Tradition: Quilts and Social Change at the Toledo Museum of Art. Since 2015, McIntosh has managed Invasive Queer Kudzu, a community storytelling and archive project across the LGBTQ+ Southern United States. He is a 2020 United States Artist Fellow in Craft, and other honors include a 2017 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and two Windgate Fellowships in 2006 and 2015 from the Center for Craft. His current research-creation project, Hot House/Maison Chaude, has been supported by a 2020-2023 SSHRC Insight Development grant. He has held residencies at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Banff Centre, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. His critical writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Surface Design Journal, and the Journal of Modern Craft. He currently lives and works in Montreal, where he is an Associate Professor and Coordinator in the Fibres & Material Practices program at Concordia University.
Installation views credit : Michael Patten
