BARCODE

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! and Obey Your Thirst 2019.

Exhibition: April 1 - 25, 2026
Opening Reception: April 2, 2026, 6-9PM
Red Head Gallery
Suite 115, 401 Richmond St. W. Toronto

BARDCODE is a collection of 70 hand-embroidered bandanas, each coded by colour according to the gay hanky code, a system used by gay men since the 1970s to signal sexual interests and roles, and paired with a corporate advertising slogan.

The work is a critique of corporate sponsorship of LGBTQ Pride and the respectability politics that come with it. As brands compete to align themselves with queer visibility, they simultaneously demand the sanitisation of queer culture, erasing its more transgressive, sex-positive histories in exchange for financial support. BARDCODE makes that erasure visible by placing these two systems of coded desire side by side: the sexual semiotics of the hanky code and the engineered language of consumer branding.

The result is both funny and unsettling, a reminder that the logic of marketing desire and the logic of queer sexual culture are not as far apart as corporate Pride would have us believe.

70 bandanas. Hand embroidered. Each unique. CA$950, available in the Shop.‍ ‍