James Fowler is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, and community organiser whose practice examines how cultural meaning is made and contested through images, objects, and environments. Working across painting, textiles, soft sculpture, installation, and performance, Fowler investigates how queerness, masculinity, and belonging are shaped by visual culture, social ritual, and relationships to place. His work draws on queer aesthetics, queer ecology, and lived experience to reinterpret symbols associated with landscape, identity, and nationhood, and to ask what other forms of belonging might emerge at the margins of those inherited systems.

Fowler's long-running painting series, often derived from aerial views of cities and cartographic structures, treats landscape as an emotional and cultural terrain shaped by memory, movement, and collective experience. Rendered in acrylic, oil, and gouache on paper, wood, and canvas, these works merge cartography and geometric abstraction to map not just physical spaces but the ideological systems embedded within them.

More recent work moves into textiles, soft sculpture, and installation to examine how masculinity and vulnerability are constructed through objects, rituals, and environments. Felt rifles, crocheted jockstraps, embroidered bandannas, and stitched banners translate symbols of masculinity into soft and tactile materials, drawing from domestic craft traditions, queer signalling systems, and camp aesthetics. Projects such as Catch & Release, Doe and Deery, and The Touch Trees place queer figures and crafted objects inside environments shaped by hunting culture, rural masculinity, and ecological mythology. At the centre of this work are Fowler's cervitaurs: hybrid human-deer figures in crochet, faux taxidermy, and beadwork that use the grammar of the trophy and the fable to ask what the hunt is really about, and who it has always excluded.

Over the past two decades, Fowler has contributed significantly to the development of queer visual culture in Canada. He created and curated the 10x10 Photography Project, a decade-long portrait archive documenting LGBTQ artists and cultural figures across Canada, and co-curated the Church Street Mural Project with Syrus Marcus Ware during World Pride 2014. Fowler is a founding member of the Throbbing Rose Collective, producers of Nuit Rose, and co-organiser of Queer Up North, a wilderness artist residency exploring intersections of queer culture, ecology, and place. He collaborates with curator Pearl Van Geest under the name SweetThings.

Fowler studied Film and Visual Arts in Toronto and North Bay and maintains a full-time studio practice. His work has been exhibited across North and South America and Europe and is held in private and corporate collections.

Commissions available here.
CV available here.

Artist Statement

Canadian art has long treated the landscape as 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 not in the land itself but in the mind of the artist and the culture they inhabit. My work moves between these positions. I think about landscapes as places where cultural memory gathers, and about how those places are experienced differently by queer bodies moving through them.

My practice began with painting. Early works were drawn from aerial views of cities: geometric compositions that borrow from cartography, urban grids, and digital networks. Over time, these paintings became a way to think about how we move through systems both physical and ideological. Maps, infrastructures, gender roles, family expectations, bro culture, and the enduring colonial myth of the untouched wilderness are all kinds of terrain. They all have edges. They all have people who are not supposed to be there.

More recent work incorporates textiles, soft sculpture, and performance to examine how masculinity and vulnerability are constructed through objects, rituals, and environments. Felt rifles, crocheted jockstraps, embroidered bandannas, and stitched banners draw from domestic craft traditions, queer signalling systems, and the aesthetics of camp. Translating symbols of masculinity into soft and tactile materials does not parody them so much as hold them up to the light. What becomes visible is how much effort those symbols require, and how little it takes to make them strange.

Projects such as Catch & Release, Doe and Deery, and The Touch Trees place queer figures and crafted objects inside environments historically shaped by hunting culture, rural masculinity, and ecological mythology. Hybrid cervitaur bodies, textile installations, and constructed scenes create narratives that question how masculinity is rehearsed within spaces like hunting camps, cabins, and other intergenerational homosocial environments. My work does not offer narrative closure. Instead, it examines the cultural systems that sustain patriarchal and toxic forms of masculinity, particularly within homosocial environments.

Across painting, textiles, and installation, I approach art making as a way of reading and rewriting cultural systems. Landscapes, objects, and rituals carry meanings that shift depending on who is looking and who is allowed to belong. Whether mapping a city from above or stepping into a clearing in the forest, I am interested in the moment when a place is seen differently, and when other ways of belonging begin to appear.

My work stitches together materials, histories, and cultural codes, asking what it means to belong, and what other forms of belonging might emerge at the edge of the grid.

Media

Mar 2026 Nuit Rose Returning to Toronto BlogTO
Feb 2026 Wild Wayside at City Space Rochester Institute of Technology
Jan 2025 James Fowler & Pearl Van Geest talk Wild Waysides Richard Fortin Presents on Spotify
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