James Fowler is a Toronto-based artist, curator, and community organizer whose multidisciplinary practice explores queerness, ecology, and social transformation. Working primarily in painting, textiles, soft sculpture, and performance, James draws from queer culture and lived experience to create visually engaging, critically reflective work.

His long-running painting series—often drawn from aerial views of cities and maps—explores the complicated connections between place and identity. These abstracted landscapes, rendered in acrylic, oil, and gouache on paper, wood, and canvas, borrow from cartography and geometric abstraction to celebrate both urban centers and rural geographies. Whether depicting the grid of a city or the organic lines of a forested lake, James treats landscapes as emotional and cultural terrains, rooted in memory and meaning.

Over the past two decades, James has played a key role in shaping queer visual culture in Canada. He was the founding curator of the 10X10 Photography Project, a decade-long portrait series celebrating LGBTQ Canadians in the arts, and co-curator of the Church Street Mural Project, which transformed ten buildings in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village as part of World Pride 2014.

He is also a founding member of the Throbbing Rose Collective and co-organizer of Queer Up North, a wilderness artist residency that brings LGBTQ+ artists into remote environments to explore queer ecological thinking. His leadership in this area has fostered cross-cultural dialogue, artistic experimentation, and community care at the intersection of queerness and nature.

Recent exhibitions include Catch & Release at Red Head Gallery (2024), Urban Planner at Worth Gallery (2024), and LOOKING at the Trout Museum in Wisconsin (2024–25). His work was also featured in Node at Plan D Gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is currently preparing a large-scale exhibition opening at Red Head Gallery in 2026 that critiques toxic masculinity and the culture of trophy hunting through the lens of queer and ecological mythologies.

Through his curatorial work, James champions inclusivity and intergenerational exchange in the arts. He has spearheaded international artist exchanges, including a Canada–Argentina residency program, and continues to advocate for queer visibility in both urban and rural settings. Whether through his art, curation, or community building, James creates spaces for reflection, resistance, and radical joy.

His work has exhibited in North and South America, and Europe, and is held in numerous private and corporate collections. He studied Film at York University in Toronto and maintains a full-time studio practice.

Commissions available here.
CV available here.

Artist Statement

Canadian art has long revered the landscape as sacred, a site of identity and nationhood. At the same time, traditions of abstraction—particularly in Quebec—have argued that the spirit of Canadian art lies in the mind of the artist and the culture they emerge from. My work sits between these poles: it maps emotional, cultural, and ecological landscapes shaped by queerness, memory, and resistance.

What began as a fascination with aerial views of cities—playfully geometric paintings that borrow from cartography and digital networks—has evolved into a deeper exploration of place and its relationship to identity. I am interested in how we navigate systems both physical and ideological: grids, maps, gender roles, family expectations, bro culture, and the enduring colonial myth of the “untouched” wilderness.

My newer work uses textiles, soft sculpture, and performance to explore queerness and vulnerability through material. Felt rifles, crocheted jockstraps, and stitched banners echo domesticity and drag, pulling from the aesthetics of camp and the codes of masculinity. These works critique the spaces that often exclude us—cabins, clubs, churches, boyhood itself—while imagining new forms of kinship, safety, and expression.

Projects like Catch & Release, Doe & Deery, and The Touch Trees explore rural queer life, ecological kinship, and gender-coded violence through both allegory and intervention. I’m interested in how stories, bodies, and gestures carry meaning across generations and geographies. Whether flying into a new city or walking into a clearing in the woods, there’s always a moment of trying to take it all in—of seeing a place, and yourself, anew.

Ultimately, my work is an act of stitching together: ideas, materials, histories, and futures. It asks what it means to belong—and what new kinds of belonging might emerge at the edge of the grid.

Media

Aug 2022 Northern Artists in Toronto for Old Growth BayToday
Aug 2022 10x10 Celebrates LGBTQ Culture Makers for a Final Year Toronto Star
Jan 2022 Queering The North Richard Fortin Presents
Nov 2021 Episode 11 - James Fowler Art Conversations w/ Lisa Irvine
Sept 2021 Episode 70 - James Fowler Talking To Artists w/ Kate Taylor
Aug 2019 Wonderful Geometric Landscapes O Canada Blog
April 2018 Toronto Artist Celebrates Cities and Towns from Above Toronto Savvy
July 2018 Success Story: Nuit Rose Unbound Community One Foundation
Aug 2017 Beautiful Amazing Mindful Troublemakers CBC Arts
May 2017 The Art of Self Promotion Art Bridges
July 2016 10x10 Returns to the Gladstone Hotel The Purple Scarf Blog
June 2015 Queering Space & Time XTRA Magazine
June 2015 Queering Space Exhibition The ArQuives
Feb 2015 Urban Artist Finds Inspiration in Bancroft Bancroft This Week
Oct 2013 Church Street Mural Project Brings Colour To Toronto’s Village XTRA Magazine
Oct 2013 Church Street Murals Will Welcome World Pride Toronto.com
Aug 2013 Paint Begins for Church Street Murals Project XTRA Magazine
July 2012 10x10 Kicks off Toronto Pride week at the Gladstone Hotel Toronto Life
Feb 2011 Queer Subject Matter in Store for Latest Photo Exhibition Toronto Life
Feb 2008 Let’s Chat Abstract Art Roadside Scholar