Phase Variations at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery

Opening Preview Feb 19: 2-5pm

February 22 - April 17th: Tuesday - Saturday from 12pm-5pm

Watch for events scheduled in March and April.

Queer history is often overlooked, excluded and erased. When looking for our history we often have to read between the lines and in the margins of official record, looking for resonances, slippages, moments where something is revealed in what isn’t said, revealed in the spaces between what has been recorded. To read queer history we must read queerly.

Phase Variations has been a year(s)-long research project, culminating in a series of performances, exhibition and publication. Created by Lou Sheppard and curated by Robin Metcalfe the project draws on Metcalfe’s archive of queer history in the Atlantic region, exploring the queer ways that we as queer people find our histories, our ancestors, and imagine our futures. Digging through these archives Sheppard reads the collected objects and stories for the spaces and slippages they reveal in the dominant historical record. Can reading the evolution of Canada’s obscenity laws show us how queerness was constructed by the state? Can studying the routes of protests and marches reveal paths of queer movement in the city? Can a lineage be traced in the gestures of dancers caught on tape at pride? 

This research is developed into as a series of graphic scores, which are then performed and installed within the gallery space. The gallery operates as a site for the performances, with purpose built staging, remnants and evidences (gesture traces, audio fragments, etc.) of the work remaining in the space for exhibition. Rather than housing straightforward video/audio documentation of a performance, the gallery will become an affected and affective site- another iteration of the scores themselves.

Phase Variations is borrowed from a biological process undertaken by bacteria to adapt to rapidly changing environments. In music the term points towards phasing- the phenomenon  of of out of synch sound waves resulting in a strumming or throbbing effect, and variations- repeated musical passages in a slightly an altered form. Borrowing from the resonances of these terms Phase Variations gestures to the entangled relationship between score and performance. Considering the archive as one state or iteration of actions and events these Phase Variations become re-performances of archived actions, reading the archive itself as a score. What is an archive, after all, but a collection of notations? Can the re-performance of these actions invite queer and quantum slippages? Can playing a melody now amplify its performances in the past? Can we read our history queerly to see what has been hidden, encoded, and forgotten; what was never recorded in the first place?