Through Frosted Glass
Joshua Schwebel, Hiding, 2007–2010. Performance ephemera, dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the artist and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
The works on view in Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in spring 2024 bypass conventions of representation and visibility to instead address the material concerns of trans people. Curator Dallas Fellini deliberately diverges from figurative representation to select works that obfuscate and ignore the corporeal form as the crux of trans storytelling. Playing with opacity, the artists identify and expose the cisgender gaze in its attentiveness and prompt self-reflection of one’s intentions and potential voyeurism. Aesthetic and curatorial interventions intentionally frustrate the cis viewer’s attempt to reconcile a legible (and thus prescriptive) transness, subverting the institutional logics of both the archive and the exhibition.
In 2014, TIME magazine declared a “Transgender Tipping Point”1: a peak in trans self-identification and gender nonconformity through and because of increased representation. In turn, institutions of control and surveillance quickly sought to identify and legislate against a newly observable trans existence. An archival impulse emerged as a response to declarations of the “newness” of trans identities, seeking both to prove a historical existence to the public and a sense of cultural lineage to the community with projects like The ArQuives’s Trans Collections Guide (2020). Historical documentation of trans life, however, includes an overrepresentation of medical and criminal records, positioning the trans subject as specimen or spectacle, subject to a scopophilic regime. In the spirit of philosopher Luce deLire’s declaration that trans exhibitions should “render cis white patriarchal subjectification impossible,” Indiscernible thresholds’s deconstruction of a trans imaginary points the viewer to recognize their disorientation and question their curiosities.2
Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances, 2024, installation view, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Courtesy of the artist and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
The exhibition text is offered in a sealed envelope, thus animating and extending two central premises of the show: strategic withholding and the ubiquity and the enacted violence of breach. Similarly, the glass doors to the gallery are peppered with postcards with Google Street View images and large manila envelopes that, the text alleges, contain documentary traces of Joshua Schwebel’s performance Hiding (2007–10). This documentation blends into the adjacent administrative space, which undiscerning viewers might easily walk past, much like during Schwebel’s performance. Hiding wields the subtlety of perceived absence / invisible presence: Schwebel took out ads in the lost-and-found sections of local newspapers announcing intersections where he would be hiding at a particular time. The public was equipped to engage in surveillance by discovering the artist, hiding in plain sight. Playing on the line between un-discoverability and being caught, the work evokes the precarity of “passing” and the visual pleasure of “seeking,” even with detection carrying significant risk. The installation includes a transcript of a 911 call from an unwitting viewer of Schwebel’s performance, perceived as suspicious lurking; the dispatcher repeatedly asks “Is he Black or white?” This inclusion further clarifies the intersectional conditions of being under surveillance and the predominantly white, cisgender standard of “passing.”
Chelsea Thompto’s Productive Bodies (2019) makes analogous claims about surveillance and the biopolitical control of bodies through colonial projects. Infected with a growing, amorphous darkness, the screen work layers maps of the Mississippi River and medical archival material into vaguely discernable images. From amalgamated soundbites a newscaster’s voice confirms with startling clarity that the slivers of body we see depict facial feminization surgery, a process often informed by Western beauty standards and scientific racism.3 The mind on a scrutinizing search for a satisfactory understanding tries to reconcile fleeting glimpses of a body into a whole, digestible form. This disorientation subverts the cisgender gaze’s preoccupation with the ability to identify trans individuals and determine the “true nature” of a body. Withholding a legible subject, the scopophilic pleasure of identification and delineation as “Other” is denied.
Chelsea Thompto, Fog Lights, 2023. Textured glass, LCD screen, Raspberry PI, code, and 3D printed housing, 2 × 2.5 × 3 inches, duration infinite.
Courtesy of the artist and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Methods of colonial control bleed into Thompto’s three-act series Fog Lights (2023), which brings attention to the precision viewing instruments of military technology and fog’s ability to impede their functionality. Textured glass obscures, to varying degrees, three small screens with text fading into fog, suggesting an instability similar to that of Productive Bodies. The short sentences, pulled from United States military documents, horror fiction, and the artist’s own writing, shuffle through procedural generation, hindering the viewer’s ability to extract a whole or consistent narrative. The inclusion of horror texts alludes to the genre’s propensity to use fog to evoke fear while simultaneously drawing connection to a trans kinship with the concept of monstrosity and unknowability.4 The labor of looking, of squinting to read the text samples, such as “I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity,” is perceptible, physically felt. Encouraging a trans resistance to a digestible legibility, “the fog was peopled with phantoms” dissolves back into its misty obscurity.
The undulating landscapes of Sitting here with you in the future (2021) are the work of QT.bot, an AI trained on user submissions to Lucas LaRochelle’s counter-mapping project, Queering the Map (2017–present), which the artist subtitles with fractured, uncanny narratives. The auto-generation fails to elucidate queer and trans experiences precisely, challenging the cisgender impulse to flatten the experience of gender and sexual minorities into a linear temporality of milestones visible and legible to the cisgender public, such as coming out. Left grasping at phrases onto which a “queer life” can be projected, the cis viewer is denied an imaginary queer, instead forced to contend with queer and trans existence as multiple and irreducible. The concocted phrases, read aloud robotically, range from incoherent (“First kiss with my wife on the beach, we ran into my abusive apartment.”), to poetic (“Where I learned a force of gender. I flirted with the sun. Thank you.”), to antithetical (“I hope you never come out.”). The narrative incoherencies emerge from the wealth of difference in Queering the Map’s submissions, and the fragments allude to the obscured stories of their origins, enacting data opacity for users without being void of output. By blocking the ability to harvest significant data from the site’s submissions, LaRochelle rejects the turn to surveillance that visibility can facilitate. A recent influx of data from users in Gaza prompts the automated voice to say “Palestinians,” offering the piece’s only reference grounded in an actual place.
Lucas LaRochelle, Sitting here with you in the future, 2021. Video (still), 08:20.
Courtesy of the artist and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Surrounding LaRochelle’s video work are walls that appear to be made of revealed wooden studs. They hold Lan “Florence” Yee’s image-textiles, which depict moments captured by the artist and printed on softly flowing silk. Evoking the hidden framework of the home, this wooden framing does little to obstruct one’s view, calling attention to one’s intrusion into the kind of home-like space typically coded with a sense of privacy. Pulling this metaphor further, Yee centers images of domestic features like glass block walls and window blinds, matching their semi-permeability with the diaphanous quality of the fabric. Overlaying the artist’s personal photos, the color-matched embroidery repeatedly spelling out “PROOF” calls into question the validity of “evidence” in archives and manages the tension of wanting to see oneself reflected in them. Alluding to the generative potential of archival lack, a boldly appliquéd 吉 (good luck) seeks to hold space safe for emptiness, nodding to Cantonese folk beliefs that stem from the connection between “empty” and “evil/criminal” as homonyms. The structures and body of work both visualize the prying intensity of the cis gaze, peeking through unfinished wall frames, encountering the vulnerability of two pairs of lovers’ feet extending from the bottom of a duvet or the backside of a work. Despite this openness, the translucency of the textiles withholds narrative certainty, mirroring the decontextualization of archival material.
Following the booming, droning sound creeping through Yee’s breezy glass block curtain, viewers encounter a bold wall text preceding Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE WHO ARE NOT/blacktransarchive.com (2020–22). It reads, in part: “IF YOU DO NOT SUPPORT BLACK TRANS PEOPLE THEN YOU ARE NOT WELCOME IN THIS ROOM,” proposing conditions with the viewer. This contract makes visible the potential of falsified access through dismissal of its terms. Viewers are asked to examine their position prior to entry, the text performing, not as an effective filter, but as a request for honesty that, if ignored, is done so consciously. On the other side of the entry, Brathwaite-Shirley’s interactive game fills the wall and sound encloses you within the space. A request for self-identification as “Black and Trans,” “Trans,” or “Cis” foregrounds race as a contributing factor to the unstable ontology of gender and challenges universalized narratives of trans living. Choice-pathways branch seemingly indefinitely in the gameworld, introducing characters and environments—created through discussions within Brathwaite-Shirley’s community—whose digital textures vibrate beyond representational boundaries, overwhelming in their density. Through their ongoing selections, the viewer assists a Black trans woman travel safely, calling prescient attention to the everyday fears associated with living as oneself in public.
Lan “Florence” Yee in Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances, 2024, installation view, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Courtesy of the artist and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Through varied processes of obstruction, Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances fractures traditional trans narratives and representational practices that too often center cisgender scopophilia. The desire for legibility demands a fixed and comprehensive articulation of gender and self that is not asked of cis people, and in riposte, the exhibition denies the viewer consistency and traceability. As attentive to the cis gaze as they are subject to it, the artists propose that trans visibility is a lesser need than the self-reflection of the cis public. By limiting the voyeuristic impulse, Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances renders cis scopophilia visible and sensed, aiming to unsettle the parts of trans existence that seem familiar
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT/blacktransarchive.com, 2020-2022. Interactive archive, duration variable.
Courtesy of the artist and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” TIME (June 9, 2014), https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/.
Luce deLire, “Beyond Representational Justice,” Texte Zur Kunst 129 (March 2023), https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/129/luce-delire-beyond-representational-justice/.
Chris A. Barcelos, “What Does A Woman Look Like?” review of The Look of a Woman: Facial Feminization Surgery and the Aims of Trans-Medicine, by Eric Plemons, TSQ 7, no. 2 (2020), 296–98.
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ 1 (1994), 237–54.
by McKenna Gray
McKenna Gray (they/he) is a curator and critic based in Tkaronto. Believing that teaching and learning happen concurrently, McKenna’s methodology prioritizes utilizing art as a catalyst for consciousness raising and solidarity. Their work draws on materialist analysis to address issues related to queer and trans communities, access, and labor.
“As attentive to the cis gaze as they are subject to it, the artists propose that trans visibility is a lesser need than the self-reflection of the cis public.”
