Your Custom Text Here

Objects As Companions for Travel Through a World That Misreads US

Objects as Companions for Travel Through a World That Misreads Us is a curatorial project developed by SweetThings Collective (Pearl Van Geest and James Fowler) that brings together artists whose work reflects on how queer people move through landscapes, cultures, and social systems that do not always recognize them. The exhibition considers how objects, images, and material practices can function as companions in this movement, carrying memory, orientation, and forms of knowledge that help shape alternative ways of being in the world.

The project builds on earlier SweetThings initiatives such as Queer Up North and Wild Waysides, extending an ongoing interest in queer ecological thinking, cultural exchange, and artist led collaboration. Developed as part of the 2026 Syzygy program, the exhibition brings together Canadian queer and Indigiqueer artists working across sculpture, textiles, vessels, photography, printmaking, and interdisciplinary practices. Their work questions inherited divisions such as human and nature, male and female, and culture and landscape, proposing instead more fluid relationships grounded in lived experience and ecological awareness.

Central to the exhibition is the idea that certain objects accompany us as we move through the world. A woven basket, a carved form, a textile vessel, or a small talisman can hold traces of story, place, and personal history. Within the exhibition these objects are presented not only as artworks but as companions, suggesting how material culture can steady the body, guide movement, and create openings for new forms of imagination.

Artists in the exhibition explore these ideas through a wide range of approaches. Terre Chartrand presents Portals to Survival, a series of burlap baskets embroidered with experiences drawn from time spent hunting on the land. Joey Bruni produces large scale relief prints inspired by the variability of butterfly wings, reflecting queer multiplicity and transformation. Christian Bernard Singer engages queer ecological frameworks to examine consciousness, identity, and time within natural environments. Alana Bartol connects ancestral water divining practices with the environmental pressures of mining through video and sculptural work. Kristy Boyce reimagines legend and communal storytelling through staged photographic portraits, while Walt Segers reflects on early encounters with homophobia and gender conformity, expanding the representation of queer identity. Geoffrey Lok-Fay Cheung examines the ways bodies carry and transform memory through ritual, ceremony, and personal narrative.

SweetThings Collective members James Fowler and Pearl Van Geest also contribute work to the exhibition. Fowler’s practice draws on queer ecological storytelling to question inherited models of masculinity while making space for queer imagination and celebration. Van Geest’s work explores the shifting boundaries between the human and natural worlds, proposing speculative environments where new relationships between bodies, landscapes, and stories can emerge.

Taken together, the exhibition proposes that the objects we make and carry help shape how we travel through the world. They hold traces of experience and possibility, and in doing so affirm the right to construct internal and external worlds on our own terms.