Gallery hours: 12PM – 9PM weekdays; 11AM – 4PM weekends

QAF’s curated exhibition honours the 25th anniversary of Kiss & Tell’s legendary exhibition, Drawing the Line. 19 participating artists challenge, provoke and push boundaries. What sets you off?

Curated by SD Holman
Artists –

Kiss & Tell: Lizard Jones, Persimmon Blackbridge, Susan Stewart
Afuwa Aiyyana Maracle Amy Dame Bryan Bone Claude Perreault Coral Short Dana Ayotte Emilio Rojas James Diamond Jonny Sopotiuk Jono Nobles Kathy Atkins Persimmon Blackbridge Rosamond Norbury Storme Webber Suzo Hickey Toni Latour

In the article on “Gay and Lesbian Art” in the Oxford Art Online, one exhibition is singled out as best embodying the spirit of queer arts: the 1990 project Drawing the Line by the Vancouver collective Kiss & Tell. In this project, Susan Stewart photographed her colleagues Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones, and women viewers were given markers to draw lines on the walls at the point at which the increasingly explicit imagery became unacceptable to them. Audiences, however, responded in a decidedly non-linear way, and impassioned debates flowered on the walls around the images. Drawing the Line toured internationally and had an enormous influence – it is not uncommon for lesbians of a certain age to say this exhibition “changed my life.”
Twenty-five years later, QAF honours this epochal piece of Canadian queer heritage with a retrospective show of the original images, together with a curated exhibition in which artists are asked for contemporary responses to this pivotal exhibition. In 2015, our lines in the sand are very different than in 1990. In an age when the internet has made pornography ubiquitous, the feminist firebombings of Red Hot Video stores that triggered Drawing the Line now seem very far away. Even the distinction of asking women to write on the walls while men were invited to write in a comments book, relatively simple in 1990, would be unthinkable in today’s queer communities, in which the gender binary is increasingly questioned. However, this is not to say we no longer draw our battle lines: today, it is common in our community for “Trigger Warnings” to be placed prior to texts or performances, to warn viewers of content they might find offensive, uncomfortable, or “triggering” of past trauma. The contemporary artists curated into this show will be asked what Kiss & Tell’s project triggers in them, and how they see themselves pushing boundaries today.

Coming with a friend or 3? Get a QAF Flex-Pass. Go to 4 shows, take a friend to two shows, bring a group to one show – at only $69 for a pass, it’s a screamin’ deal.

This event is scent-reduced, and fully wheelchair accessible. For more information on how to support a scent-reduced event, please visit PeggyMunson.com For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

Co-presented with Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium

Little Sister’s exhibits explicit art by artists in our queer communities.

Artists:
Alex Winter
Jane Eaton Hamilton
jackson photografix
Rebecca Blankert
robin
Ron Kearse
SD Holman
Shakti Sama

Coming with a friend or 3? Get a QAF Flex-Pass. Go to 4 shows, take a friend to two shows, bring a group to one show – at only $69 for a pass, it’s a screamin’ deal.

The Pride in Art Society is a registered charity, and will issue tax receipts for all donations of $20 or more. Please consider adding a donation to your ticket purchase, or donate through ​canadahelps.org.

This event is wheelchair accessible. For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

An open visual art exhibition celebrating queer artists from our communities.

Gallery hours:
12pm – 9pam weekdays;
11am – 4pm weekends

Known as the Pride in Art Community Show, it is a Queer Arts Festival tradition. This longstanding event showcases the talents of emerging and established visual and media artists from within the queer community: leading, fresh, innovative, political, charged, edgy, sexy, and strong. We invite you to share your queer perspectives.

This event is scent-reduced, and fully wheelchair accessible. For more information on how to support a scent-reduced event, please visit PeggyMunson.com For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

Artists: Donal Hebner Andrea Einstoss Dave Jackson Jeannette Sirois Leeanne Wood David Camisa Janeen Hartley Justin Lau Jay Cabalu Jotika Chaudhary Logan Trudeau Sabrina Symington Dzee Louise Benee Rubin Christopher Logan

Community Partner Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium

Literary readings to tantalize and titillate – aka Catherine and Jim’s dirty porn night. Curated by Ray Hsu. Queerotica started in ’99, when SD (Shaira) Holman approached Janine Fuller at Little Sister’s Bookstore saying – hey you wanna do some queer porn readings to support your anti-censorship case at the Supreme Court; if there’s any proceeds we’ll donate it to the Little Sister’s Defense Fund — you in? Janine jumped on it and a hot time was had by all, so hot that the fabulously talented Elaine Miller took on organizing the erotic readings at the festival and branded it Queerotica. When Little Sister’s eventually won their court case (yay) we started giving the proceeds to the artists. This year we’re back with the subtitle Catherine and Jim’s dirty porn night in honour of our Beloved Catherine White Holman and Jim Deva – porn aficionados and great festival supporters. QAF has many steamy years of Queerotica under its belt with past curators including Elaine Miller, Afuwa Granger, Amber Dawn, and Janine Fuller. Artists: Amber Dawn Rian J. Lloyd Polly Anima Christopher Gatchalian Jillian Christmas Leigh MatthewsMonica MeneghettiRachel RoseRay Hsu

ARTIST BIOS:

Amber Dawn
Amber Dawn is a writer living on unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (incorporated Vancouver, Canada). Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir won the 2013 Vancouver Book Award. She is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa, and editor of the anthologies Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire and With A Rough Tongue. Amber Dawn was 2012 winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers. She currently teaches creative writing at Douglas College and the University of British Columbia, as well as volunteer mentors at several community-driven art and healing spaces.

Rian J. Lloyd
Rian is a queer, agender, femme hippie. Ey lives in a communal house in East Van with six fantastic people, where ey holds the title and position of House Flirt. A bicycle mechanic by day, Rian spends eir evenings dancing backwards in high-heels (the sparkly, red kind), or curled up at home with eir snake, a cup of tea, and a good book.

Polly Anima
Though new to writing, Polly has a long history of artistic practice and engagement as a performer, creative producer, vocalist, gallerist, copywriter and art therapist. She regrets not being able to add contemporary dancer to the list, but accepts that ship has sailed.

Christopher Gatchalian
C. E. Gatchalian is a playwright, poet and essayist born and based in Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver). In 2013 he was awarded the prestigious Dayne Oglivie Prize by The Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Jillian Christmas
Jillian Christmas (b. 1983; Canada) Born and raised in Markham, Ontario, Christmas grew up watching videos of performance poets such as C.R. Avery and RC Weslowski before taking to the stage herself in her mid-20s. Since then, Christmas earned titles at Vancouver’s Poetry Slam and Bedrocc Poetry Slam competitions, and will be representing Vancouver at the 2014 World Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. Her work takes many forms, including live poetry performance, poetry/music fusions, and the printed word. Most recently, her work appeared in the anthology The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry.

Leigh Matthews
Leigh Matthews, also known as L, is a novelist, poet, professional vegan and semi-professional queer living in Vancouver, Canada. She has written two novels: The Old Arbutus Tree; and a modern take on lesbian pulp fiction, Don’t Bang the Barista! Leigh was a participating poet in Art Song Lab 2015, and can be found online at http://www.theinkwell.org/ and @thetastyvegan.

Monica Meneghetti
“We are the hinterqueers, carving out lives far away from urban gay meccas, without benefit of rainbows or parades.” ~ Monica Meneghetti, Plenitude Magazine 2015 Having relocated to Vancouver in search of greater freedom of expression, Monica shares her queer erotic work publicly for the first time. She is a multigenre writer with a penchant for cross-disciplinary collaboration. As a teacher and editor, she has a special interest in enabling marginalized voices to be heard.

Rachel Rose
Rachel Rose has published poems, short stories and essays in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Japan. She is the Poet Laureate of Vancouver for 2014-2017, and is currently working on a non-fiction book about police dogs.

Ray Hsu
Ray Hsu (@thewayofray) is author of Anthropy (winner of the Gerald Lampert Award, nominated for the Trillium Book Award in Poetry) and Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon (winner of the Alcuin Award). He taught in a US prison for over two years, has given a TED talk on creativity and education and is co-founder of Art Song Lab.

Coming with a friend or 3? Get a QAF Flex-Pass. Go to 4 shows, take a friend to two shows, bring a group to one show – at only $69 for a pass, it’s a screamin’ deal.   This event is ASL interpreted. To view QAF’s other ASL interpreted events please click HERE. This event is scent-reduced, and fully wheelchair accessible. For more information on how to support a scent-reduced event, please visit PeggyMunson.com For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

Co-presented with Kickstart Disability Arts & Culture

Notorious Vancouver collective Kiss & Tell’s first public appearance together in 13 years. Videos by Lorna Boschman, with talkback moderated by Janine Fuller of Little Sister’s book Store.

Kiss & Tell: Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones, Susan Stewart

By donation – Please support art and pay as much as you can afford!
Buy Tickets / Reserve Seats

Oxford Art Online (Oxford University Press) on Drawing the Line by Kiss & Tell:
“a group of Canadian artists, operating under the name Kiss & Tell, began in 1990 circulating an exhibition of their lesbian erotica, entitled Drawing the Line. Women viewers were given markers and invited to draw the line at the point where they found the pictures disturbing. Many viewers chose to add comments, so each installation turned into a community debate on the nature of sexuality and its representation. In its acknowledgement of the controversy surrounding sexual identity and imagery, this work may best embody the nature of gay and lesbian art. As a category of historical analysis or lived experience, sexual identity is characterized by change and debate. This dynamism should not be interpreted as a sign of weakness or irrelevance, however. On the contrary, it is because sexual identity is crucial to so many artists and audiences that its visual manifestations arouse such passion and creativity.”

Note: Our liquor licensing requires all QAF attendees must carry a valid membership in the Pride in Art Society. You can buy at the door, or save time, purchase your membership online in advance, and pick up your card at the QAF Box Office. Memberships are $0-$5 sliding scale – and each dollar enters you in a prize draw. Having trouble? We’ve been trying a new ticketing service and there are some bugs in the system. If you can’t reserve or it says the show is sold out, please email us at info@prideinart.ca – we are here to help!

Coming with a friend or 3? Get a QAF Flex-Pass. Go to 4 shows, take a friend to two shows, bring a group to one show – at only $69 for a pass, it’s a screamin’ deal.

This event is ASL interpreted. To view QAF’s other ASL interpreted events please click HERE.
This event is scent-reduced, and fully wheelchair accessible. For more information on how to support a scent-reduced event, please visit PeggyMunson.com For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

An evening of fearless queer video art curated by international curator Coral Short. Followed by an open dialogue with artists and curator.

Buy Tickets

Coming with a friend or 3? Get a QAF Flex-Pass. Go to 4 shows, take a friend to two shows, bring a group to one show – At only $69 for a pass, it’s a screamin’ deal.

QAF pass-holders can reserve seats on queerartsfestival.com or Facebook until up to 8 hours before the show. Or live dangerously and show up when the box office opens 30 minutes before showtime. To claim your tickets, please present ID and your valid pass.

Buy a QAF Flex-Pass

The Pride in Art Society is a registered charity, and will issue tax receipts for all donations of $20 or more. Please consider adding a donation to your ticket purchase, or donate through ​canadahelps.org.

This event is ASL interpreted. To view QAF’s other ASL interpreted events please click HERE.
This event is scent-reduced, and fully wheelchair accessible. For more information on how to support a scent-reduced event, please visit PeggyMunson.com For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

Co-presented with the Powell Street Festival
Eleven composers share their inner reflections on outer space in Cosmophony, Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa’s solo piano project inspired by the beauty and mystery of the cosmos.

Praised in the Vancouver Sun as “brilliant” and “unforgettable,” the program opens with Denis Gougeon’s fiercely virtuosic invocation of the sun, Piano-Soleil, launching a journey to each of the planets from Mercury through Neptune, with pieces written especially for Iwaasa by stellar Canadian composers Rodney Sharman, Marci Rabe, Alexander Pechenyuk, Jocelyn Morlock, Chris Kovarik, Jeffrey Ryan, Stefan Udell, and Jennifer Butler. Jordan Nobles’ Fragments, a cluster of brilliant miniatures depicting the Asteroid Belt, nestles between Mars and Jupiter. Pluto, now demoted to dwarf planet status, is replaced by Gliese 581c, a distant planet in the Libra constellation speculated to be able to support Earth-like life. Composer Emily Doolittle’s sparkling depiction expresses a tremulous dream of interstellar travel, shadowed by our fears of environmental collapse.

Lit only by the projections of images of our solar system, Cosmophony creates a breathtaking multi-media spectacle. Released on CD by Redshift Records, Cosmophony was nominated for a Western Canadian Music Association Award.

Praise for Cosmophony:

“A fascinating adventure about unimaginable largeness and gravity, unknowable states, an invitation to wonder.” – Lloyd Dykk, Vancouver Sun “Pianist Iwaasa quite simply pulls no punches, attacking each composer’s work with passion, intensity and the nuanced playing she’s acclaimed for… she manages to instill a sense of dynamic tension and pull to every note.” – The Vancouver Province “The outrageously talented Vancouver pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa has united her favourite composers for this adventurous debut album inspired by the heavens… Iwaasa deftly spans an array of atmospheres with impressive mastery and stylistic clarity” – Musicworks Magazine

Co-Produced with the frank theatre

Sister Mary’s a Dyke?! is a new play by Toronto-based playwright Flerida Peña. It follows Abby, a Catholic school girl who discovers that not everything is at it seems at Crown of Thorns Academy. After falling in love for the first time, Abby is sent on a thrilling mission that sends her beyond the walls of her all-girls school, to St. Peter’s Square. All of Abby’s notions about herself and the church are turned on their head in this coming-of-age, coming-out comedy featuring local actor and musician Kim Villagante, and directed by Jan Derbyshire. Scandal, intrigue, and mile-a-minute FUN are served up in this stellar one-woman show!

Cahoots Theatre Company developed and produced the world premiere of Sister Mary’s a Dyke in Toronto, April 2013.

This show (Aug 2) is ASL interpreted and Pay What You Can.

Buy Tickets / Reserve Seats

Note: Our liquor licensing requires all QAF attendees must carry a valid membership in the Pride in Art Society. You can buy at the door, or save time, purchase your membership online in advance, and pick up your card at the QAF Box Office. Memberships are $0-$5 sliding scale – and each dollar enters you in a prize draw. Having trouble? We’ve been trying a new ticketing service and there are some bugs in the system. If you can’t reserve or it says the show is sold out, please email us at info@prideinart.ca – we are here to help!

Coming with a friend or 3? Get a QAF Flex-Pass. Go to 4 shows, take a friend to two shows, bring a group to one show – at only $69 for a pass, it’s a screamin’ deal.

QAF pass-holders can reserve seats on queerartsfestival.com or Facebook until up to 8 hours before the show. Or live dangerously and show up when the box office opens 30 minutes before showtime. To claim your tickets, please present ID and your valid pass.

Buy a QAF Flex-Pass

This event is ASL interpreted. To view QAF’s other ASL interpreted events please click HERE.

This event is scent-reduced, and fully wheelchair accessible. For more information on how to support a scent-reduced event, please visit PeggyMunson.com For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

A collaboration with Early Music Vancouver

Reginald Mobley, countertenor Alexander Weimann, harpsichord and piano

As was with people of colour, the contribution of gay composers and musicians throughout history has been largely forgotten, hidden, or ignored. And in this “Age of Grindr”, where the “woof” of an app is stronger than the bite of wit, we need to be reminded that we have a responsibility as lay curators of culture. With a sampling music of gay composers from as early as the 18th century, Countertenor Reggie Mobley invites you you join him in standing in the light of a whitewashed past, and expose the spectrum of color that deserves to be seen.

Please join us after the show to meet and chat with the artists.

Photo credit: Liz Linder Photography

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Note: Our liquor licensing requires all QAF attendees must carry a valid membership in the Pride in Art Society. You can buy at the door, or save time, purchase your membership online in advance, and pick up your card at the QAF Box Office. Memberships are $0-$5 sliding scale – and each dollar enters you in a prize draw. Having trouble? We’ve been trying a new ticketing service and there are some bugs in the system. If you can’t reserve or it says the show is sold out, please email us at info@prideinart.ca – we are here to help!

Coming with a friend or 3? Get a QAF Flex-Pass. Go to 4 shows, take a friend to two shows, bring a group to one show – At only $69 for a pass, it’s a screamin’ deal.

QAF pass-holders can reserve seats on queerartsfestival.com or Facebook until up to 8 hours before the show. Or live dangerously and show up when the box office opens 30 minutes before showtime. To claim your tickets, please present ID and your valid pass.

Maximum 2 tickets per pass for this show. Supplies are limited.

Buy QAF Flex-Pass

Reserve Seats

The Pride in Art Society is a registered charity, and will issue tax receipts for all donations of $20 or more. Please consider adding a donation to your ticket purchase, or donate through ​canadahelps.org.

This event is scent-reduced, and fully wheelchair accessible. For more information on how to support a scent-reduced event, please visit PeggyMunson.com

For a full accessibility audit of the space, visit Radical Access Mapping Project.

Meet Singer/Songwriter, SARAH WHEELER, QSONG Head Mentor and sign up for Access to Music Foundation’s Queer Songwriters of a New Generation a FREE 9-week songwriting workshop for queer, trans* and allied youth in the Lower Mainland.

Interested participants can attend a demo of the program, meet our head mentor and sign-up in person.

There are 2 drop-in DEMO sessions left (APRIL 24, and MAY 22, 2015). The Queer Songwriters of a New Generation weekly songwriting sessions start Friday, May 29nd and every Friday following until July 25th.