Toward a Methexic Queer Media
Tyler Matheson
April 4 – April 12, 2024
Toward a Methexic Queer Media is an interdisciplinary exploration delving into intertwined and intergenerational experiences of queer love, particularly through the elusive medium of queer love songs. The work in this exhibition emerges from Matheson’s previous project, Your Disco Needs You, a karaoke and media installation exhibited at Toronto’s Trinity Square Video as part of A psionic hope, an astonishing dream, curated by Philip Leonard Ocampo. Your Disco Needs You explored the potential of collective queer experiences and dancefloor culture, probing the depths of collective emotions evoked by music associated with queerness, love, loss, and freedom across generations.
Community engagement is integral to both the conceptual and physical properties of Toward a Methexic Queer Media, made evident by the exhibition’s orientation toward participation. Through a public survey, Matheson collected submissions of queer love songs, which serve as the conceptual foundation of the exhibition. Through a combination of video and audio experiments using the contributed songs, Toward a Methexic Queer Media calls the viewer to then participate through acts of viewing, collaboration, performance, and emotional coalescence.
Songs range from Lavender Country’s 1973 song I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You, to Janelle Monáe’s 2023 release, I Only Have Eyes 42, encapsulating and cataloguing the essence of queer love and desire across various markers of difference, generations, and musical genres. Select songs have been animated and abstracted using Butterchurn, a public WebGL implementation of the Milkdrop Visualizer, evoking nostalgia for past eras of media consumption and the experience of burning a love-themed CD mixtape. These video works, named after the songs they visualize—are displayed on both digital television monitors and CRT monitors, further emphasizing the temporal range in the collection of songs used in this exhibition. Before the viewer enters the exhibition, they are greeted by the low hum of backing vocals coming from a 2-hour karaoke video playlist projected on the gallery’s east wall, on repeat. Karaoke versions of songs submitted to the artist’s survey fill the exhibition space. Discovering karaoke in an art gallery can be a strange experience. On one hand, viewers are generally accustomed to quietly participating in an artist’s work often without becoming part of that work. On the other hand, karaoke invites us to engage with, perform, and become part of the work. The viewer can step away from the collective experience of karaoke and into video work displayed on monitors. By putting on headphones, the viewer enters into a singular and subjective experience of love songs that are visualized and looped. Back in Your Head (2024), named after Tegan and Sara’s 2007 single from the renowned sad-gay album The Con, plays on a monitor mounted to a wall covered by various draping fabrics. The fabrics made of chiffon, sequin, lycra, and velvet with iridescent sprinkles engulf two of the gallery walls. The transformation or deco-jamming that this material intervention offers subsequently places the exhibition among a queer visual culture and history. Emblematic of multiple types of performances, stages, and gay bars, the textiles create an environment for the music and work to perform. With its abstract and fantastic movement, and the stage set behind it, the video dances along to the music provided by its participants, a performance of queer collaboration and shared experience.
This exhibition seeks to surpass mere nostalgia, instead aiming to evoke individual experiences of coming of age, forming identity, and experiencing love through music. It invites viewers to engage with their past, present, and future connections and relationships, fostering collaboration through shared experiences of queerness, community, and music.
This exhibition was generously supported by Ontario Arts Council funding.