Libby Leshgold Gallery

As a part of the programming for our upcoming exhibition Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances, Libby Leshgold Gallery invites trans community members to join us for the Trans Opacity Classroom. Taking place at Libby Leshgold Gallery on February 27th, 2025, the Trans Opacity Classroom is a day-long discursive event dedicated to trans gathering and intra-community discourses. The program features an exhibition walkthrough, artist talks, and conversations on strategies of opacity and what they have to offer to trans people, trans archives, and trans art.

Registration for the Trans Opacity Classroom is limited and open exclusively to trans and non-binary people. Current students will be given priority. Please register through eventbrite. You will be required to register your name and provide a few sentences about who you are and why you are interested in attending.

Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art & Design
February 27th, 2025
10:00 AM – 4:15 PM

Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances explores opacity, illegibility, and invisibility as productive alternatives to contemporary trans hypervisibility, a circumstance wherein the realm of the representational risks becoming all that is offered to trans people. Featuring works by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Lucas LaRochelle, Joshua Schwebel, Chelsea Thompto, and Lan “Florence” Yee, this exhibition tests the potentials of opacity to subvert the extractive dimensions of knowing the other. Rather than approaching visibility as an issue to be resolved, these artists consider the potentials of retreating from view, framing opacity as a protective actand archival illegibility as an escape. Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances was originally produced by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Schedule

10:00-10:15
OPENING REMARKS

10:15-11:45
EXHIBITION WALKTHROUGH

Speaker: Dallas Fellini

Curator Dallas Fellini will provide a tour of Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances, followed by a collective conversation on strategies of trans opacity and what they might offer to trans people in a moment of widespread trans hypervisibility.

12:00-1:00
ARTIST ROUNDTABLE ON TRANS OPACITY

Speakers: Lucas LaRochelle, Joshua Schwebel, Chelsea Thompto
Moderator: Dallas Fellini

Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances exhibiting artists will discuss how trans illegibility and opacity manifest in their practices, whether through tactically applied devisualization or subverting expectations of trans bodies and narratives. This roundtable will consider how strategies of opacity and illegibility bear particular significance to trans people and trans artistic practice.

1:00-2:00
CATERED LUNCH

2:00-3:15
ROUNDTABLE: TRANSNESS AND ARTS INSTITUTIONS

Speakers: Kay Higgins, Whess Harman, Maliv Khondaker
Moderator: Vanessa Kwan

Led by Vancouver-based artists, curators, and cultural workers working within both artist-run and institutional contexts, this conversation broaches issues of institutional transphobia, racism,tokenism, and other tribulations of working in the arts while trans, as well as strategies to circumvent institutional terms of trans inclusion.

3:30-4:15
CLOSING COLLECTIVE WRITING EXERCISE

Facilitator: SF Ho

Participants will create a collectively written text that reflects the perspectives and themes that have emerged during the Trans Opacity Classroom. The group will take turns reading lines drawn from archival texts and freeform writing. This text will bear the trace of our time together.

6:00-9:00
PUBLIC OPENING RECEPTION


Speaker Bios

Dallas Fellini is a curator and writer living and working in Toronto. Their research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies. Dallas is a co-director of the arts publication Silverfish and has curated exhibitions and screenings for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Guelph, Gallery 44, Vtape, Trinity Square Video, Xpace Cultural Centre, Hearth, Riverdale Hub Gallery, and the Jackman Humanities Institute. Dallas is the recipient of the 2024 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

Whess Harman is a member of the Carrier Wit’at Nation, a nation amalgamated by the federal government under the Lake Babine Nation and currently resides on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He doesn’t like cops and believes in land sovereignty for Indigenous peoples all across the globe, including Palestine. In his arts practice he works primarily in drawing, text and textiles. As the curator at grunt gallery and occasional editor and contributor to a variety of small publications, he prioritizes emerging queer and BIPOC cultural workers and artists.

Kay Higgins is a cultural worker and artist based in Vancouver on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy ̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish)and səl̓ilw ̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She is co-proprietor (with Kathy Slade) of the press Publication Studio Vancouver and has co-founded and directed several artist-run organizations during her career. Her work has included manufactured publications, handmade artist books, public inscription, photography, and internet-based projects. She has been a curator, editor, factory and warehouse labourer, technology consultant, and candidate for municipal office. She is also one half of the electronic music duo Vomit Fraud (with Brady Cranfield).

SF Ho is a porous object. They live on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy ̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. Operating somewhere between words and whatever words can’t be, their work is informed by feminist methodologies, land-based practices, and grassroots community networks. Ho has presented their art and writing both regionally and internationally. They’ve published a book about love and aliens called George, the Parasite. They’re cultivating a practice of wary sociality, never finishing books, and being sort of boring.

Maliv Khondaker is a robust entity who foolishly believes in some, but not all, platitudes. They are currently an arts and culture worker in the nonprofit sector and grassroots organizing contexts. They have normal human aspirations, like smiling at a cow and quashing their enemies with breaths of fire. Their ancestors and other such blood relations owe a lot to the Poda, Meghna, Jamuna, and Dnipro rivers. Bless you.

Vanessa Kwan (VK) is a curator and artist based on xʷməθkʷəy ̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw ̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories (Vancouver, BC). They have been in artistic leadership roles for more than 20 years, contributing to organizations such as grunt gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Access Gallery, the Powell Street Festival, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and others. They are currently Director + Curator of Galleries and Exhibitions at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Lucas LaRochelle is a designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving, and artificial intelligence. They are the founder of Queering The Map, a community generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. They have exhibited and lectured internationally, recently at the Guggenheim Museum (USA), Ars Electronica (Austria), Mozilla Festival (UK), Museum of Design Atlanta (USA), MUTEK (Canada), PHI Center (Canada), and Onomatopee Projects (Netherlands).

Joshua Schwebel (he/him) is a Canadian artist based between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and Berlin. Schwebel has been a practicing professional artist since 2009, exhibiting his work across Canada and internationally in exhibitions, residencies, and performative contexts. He was short-listed for the Berlin Art Prize in 2019 and long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2022.Forthcoming is a publication of his long-term project The Employee with Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery.

Chelsea Thompto (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersections of art, trans studies, and technology. She lives and works in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. She received an MFA and MA in four-dimensional art and an MA in gender and women’s studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.