Queer Arts Festival!! Visual Arts Exhibition!!

ohmygoodness, i'm so late posting this. i meant to post it before the show even started, and here we are, less than a week until it ends, and i'm finally getting around to it. this is one of the exciting things i mentioned last post - i entered several pieces in an art show back in february, and two of them were accepted! yayy!!

Pride in Art is a local group that has been around for over 10 years. it started out as a visual arts show, presented around the same time as Vancouver Pride each year (which is way later than most cities). 4 or 5 years ago it started to grow into the Queer Arts Festival, allowing spaces for performance arts, music, etc as well as the visual arts. i've been attending the visual arts show for multiple years now, as a dear friend of mine used to be involved and often had pieces in the show, and usually try to make it out to at least one of the other events each year. i originally got involved on a board level earlier this year, but unfortunately realized fairly quickly that it was more of a commitment than my health could handle, and had to step down.

despite that, i was still determined to actually submit something this year. i submitted the Beth Ditto porn pieces, my Dream Lover(s) pillow, and a third piece mixed media needlework piece that i really should post here, titled Queer Health. (now posted)

this year's theme was Queertopia; the Best Place on Earth?, so i tried to tailor my submissions around that in various ways. The Beth Ditto diptych was accepted, and so was the Queer Health sculpture piece. i actually submitted the health piece as an in progress submission, and of course, since i'm me, i was still putting the finishing touches on it the day i had to drop it off.... i swear i learned my lesson about procrastinating this time!

before the show started, the local LGBT newspaper Xtra did a feature on the show, and chose to use the Beth Ditto diptych (retitled My Kind of Porn for the show) as part of the article. this isn't particularly surprising for anyone who's familiar with Xtra and Pink Triangle Press, since the piece is about sex, and everyone knows Xtra's a teensy bit obsessed... ;) but it was still exciting!!


(if you'd like to actually read the article, you can click on it and go to flickr, where it's uploaded the original size, or you can read the article posted on Xtra's site)



in addition to that, the Queer Arts Festival had a large spread in the same issue of the paper, and it included the artist's names!

(again, you can click on it to see it larger - one of the pictures shows a portion of the amazing needle felted pieces by Karina Kalvaitis )



so! that was all exciting!

the show opened on July 27th, and July 28th was the official opening night party. it was, as usual, great fun, full of people that i hadn't seen in ages, and people who i'd just seen. i jokingly say that the QAF visual arts opening is like a queer family reunion every year, though the attendees are generally hotter than at your typical family reunion! this year was a bit subdued, due to the loss of a very special community member last december, but it was still a really important evening.

i posed next to the diptych and couldn't resist making a posing face....


the next one was a little bit more "normal"!

i was teased a bunch about my skirt (which i finished that afternoon) matching the pieces, but i really hadn't thought about that at all! i just really like red and black, which isn't that surprising, really.

my family, who couldn't be there, sent me flowers,


and my sister, who knows me so well, picked out a card with flocked and foiled leopard print!


i talked to a lot of different people, though definitely not everyone that i wished to talk to, and had some really random conversations, but that's pretty par for the course with me anyway! a couple of my closest friends came out to support me, and that was super amazing, especially since everyone in my family was back east at the time.

it was really awesome, and i'm really proud of myself for getting my ass in gear and actually applying. i think next year's theme is Games People Play, and i actually have a larger scale needlework piece that i've been planning in my head for ages that would perfectly fit the theme - perfect motivation! i just haven't decided if i should do it by hand or by machine, considering i already have multiple long term handwork projects on the go..... hmmm....