Longtime contributor to artist-run culture in Canada, Kegan McFadden has cultivated a research-based approach to art production which mines language through queer affect while employing modest means of production. He is in the beginning stages of researching the intersecting legacies of the criminalization of queerness and capital punishment.
Made in response to the Palimpsest Call for Artists, this work stems from the coincidence that the exhibition opens on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Black queer writer James Baldwin (2 August 1924 - 1 December 1987). As an artist engaged with queer histories, I am drawn to how the palimpsest –especially its inherent oxymoron in the obfuscation of, and relentless persistence of, information through lived experience– allows for nuanced readings of various situations. The title of this work is a direct quote from Baldwin’s most infamously queer novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), however the text incorporated in this piece is an excerpt from interview wherein he explains the novel was not so much autobiographical (as it so often was treated), but instead influenced by the writer’s experiences in France.
