*Jacob Todd Broussard, Palimpest, 2023. Acrylic and flashe on canvas, 54 x 48 inches. Photo: LFDocumentation. Courtesy of the artist & Towards Gallery.*

If pressed to condense Jacob Todd Broussard’s exhibition Afters at Towards Gallery in Toronto into one word, it would be “citation.” Of course, distilling an exhibition like Broussard’s down to one word would do it a disservice. But at least “citation” hints at the existence of more. Broussard cites photographs and records, ephemeral notes, and Donatello’s David. Even the paintings cite one another, nestled within the same world. The first painting to greet you as you enter the gallery is a scene from a club, dancers frozen in time. One figure stares straight at you as if breaking the fourth wall. The next painting is the view from inside the DJ booth, with the same dancers visible in subtle blues through a window overlooking the club. By citing his own paintings, Broussard primes the viewer for the world-building and time travel to come. This is an exhibition, but it’s also a novel.

The paintings in Afters originate from research Broussard conducted into the Mystic Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette, the longest-running gay Carnival organization in Louisiana. “The Mystic Krewe of Apollo is an organization that was founded in New Orleans in 1969 to foster brotherhood, unity, and equality within the gay community. Every year they stage an annual Bal Masque during the Mardi Gras season,” the exhibition text reads. In his research, Broussard came across a photograph of a masked individual, one which appears in the exhibition in To All Appearances, Palimpsest, and, perhaps, A Prior Owner (all 2023). Through this photographic muse, Broussard has created a mythical life, projecting both a community and introspection onto one image. Is the figure in the paintings the same as the central figure in the photograph? Or is it a lover? A relative? A stranger?

The discovery of a photograph in To All Appearances and A Prior Owner shows eerily similar scenes between first and third person perspectives. The pairing suggests cinematic editing and the creation of a fractured, ambiguous sense of time and space, an effect only heightened by the special kind of attention we give paintings. We can easily imagine Broussard himself finding the photograph, perhaps taking an image of his hand holding it, as the inspiration for the composition of To All Appearances. The moving boxes, a single hand holding the photograph, and the photograph are all in a blueish shadow. Bright orange light bends on the floor. The photograph captures the costumed dancer in mid-step, hands splayed to both sides. The photograph’s corners are rounded, and its palette is black and white. In the third-person view, A Prior Owner, a man in underwear and latex gloves is holding a photograph, unrevealed to the viewer, in both hands—a similarly shaped source of the orange light is seen to be a window. Is it the same photograph? The same room? A bottle of Windex and a Home Depot box feel so familiar it becomes hard to decipher which decade we're in: the 1970s of the rest of the paintings or the present day? Time blurs; space blurs; identity blurs; the real blurs into the imagined.

*Jacob Todd Broussard: Afters, 2023, installation view, Towards Gallery. Photo: LFDocumentation.*

The exhibition text reveals that the dancer in the photograph is Broussard's late second cousin, Gene Dominique, who was an original member of the Mystic Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette. This fact transforms the exhibition from an archival investigation into something that veers between the genres of autofiction or autotheory and historical fiction. Broussard fills his semi-autobiographical paintings with fabricated compositions and historical objects, ephemera, and community in equal measure. “Broussard hypothesizes on an invented archival memory — one made up of what ifs while simultaneously folding himself and his late second cousin into a biomythographic tall-tale,” the exhibition text reads.

In her book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Lauren Fournier defines the use of citation within visual arts as “the tendency for visual artists to render references as physical materials in autobiographical art, a practice related to the performative citations within memoiristic or post-memoiristic writings.” As mentioned, Broussard’s work is ripe with citation, from music to art history, archival photography, and ephemera found in his time researching the queer vernacular Carnival traditions indigenous to south Louisiana.

Fournier goes on to ask: “How do artists’ practices [of citing] transform these texts’ meanings, and what kind of relationships are fostered between the artist’s life, the cited text, the audience, identification, and community?” We can ask a similar question of Broussard’s work. How does Broussard transform or re-imagine texts within the paintings? What new meaning is produced? Most interesting to me is where the “auto” sits within the work. Unlike his contemporaries — queer representational painters such as Salman Toor, Jenna Gribbons, Doron Langberg, and Louis Fratino — Broussard does not use his own life or direct community in his depictions of queer existence. Instead, he shows a fictional community amassed via archival research and citation. The paintings, then, stage a fictional fantasy based on an educated guess of what life might have been like. The connection between Broussard and the archival photograph of his cousin Gene Dominique, as well as the first-person perspective in some of the paintings, subtly introduce the “self” into the work — so subtly, in fact, that you might miss it without reading the exhibition text. Without this personal context — what I think is the most interesting aspect of the project — the works sometimes become detached, frozen in time like film stills. The viewer is left wanting an epilogue: What happens when the camera (or paintbrush) stops rolling? As crafted mythologies, the stories presented in Broussard’s work don’t necessarily feel true to life; instead, they are meant to encapsulate broader, more intangible themes such as community and transformation.

Jacob Todd Broussard, A Prior Owner, 2023. acrylic and flashe on linen over panel, 36 x 24 inches. Photo: LFDocumentation. Courtesy of the artist & Towards Gallery.

In a recent interview, Broussard stated: “After some seismic life changes, I returned to Louisiana to reflect on ideas of transition, metamorphosis, and transformation while landing back on my feet. It only feels appropriate to turn towards Carnivale — a window of time where all fantastical dimensions are possible through a phantasmagoria of mythmaking.” * Here again, interviews like this become necessary to unpack the paintings’ personal dimensions and to grasp the gravity and grief in Broussard’s palimpsest-like renderings of fiction on top of fact. The viewer wonders where else Broussard might be found within the compositions. Is the melancholic person sitting in a chair with a thousand-yard stare in Palimpsest Broussard himself or some depiction of his own emotional life? Is the coyote nestled within the portrait Nuit Transfigurée (2023), a painting that veers into a more overt magical realism, a metaphor for the transitional change that Broussard described happening in his life during the research for this show? These potential readings expand the work, creating a link between past and future that underlines the ideas of ancestral memory, the connections between generations, and bearing resilience into the future.

*The Hooper Prize, “Jacob Todd Broussard,” https://hopperprize.org/jacob-todd-broussard-interview/.

“One of the ways that artists autotheoretically process queer theory’s histories and futures is by reimagining relationships across different generations of queer theorizing,” writes Fournier. Broussard restages the potential lives of the Mystic Krewe through a personal lens. The hazy atmosphere of the paintings — luminous and pigmented, yet slightly unreal — creates cohesion between the medium and the compositions. Both are slightly off-kilter, close to life, but slightly levitating off the ground. Highly pigmented colors reflect the theatrical nature of Broussard’s research subject. A cross-generational conversation about queer community in the South emerges. There is a constant nod to records and music throughout — but the paintings feel too still, too silent to have music playing. They depict moments just before the needle drops or when you’re sitting in the dark right after a record finishes. The people in the paintings appear to daydream, with far-off and piercing stares. Is the viewer daydreaming as well? Filling in the blanks between paintings and fabricating lives for the people depicted? The archival elements cited throughout become Easter eggs, encouraging a voyeuristic exploration of a life lived — maybe.

JACOB TODD BROUSSARD:AFTERS AT TOWARDS GALLERY

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