Impression numérique à base de colorants sur coton, organza de soie, tissus à motifs vintage, toile, fil, 2024
Since 2020, I’ve researched the intersections of queer people and plants through herbal history. Studying medieval manuscripts and folk remedies, I trace how queers have historically or speculatively used plants as healing, psychoactive, and protective allies. Using archival images from LGBTQIA2S+ collections, such as Archives gaies du Québec, as substrates depicting vulnerability, I’ve layered talismanic shadows of linden, elder, and other species. In this series, The Gloaming, I embrace the ambiguity of darkness—echoing queer cruising’s spaces of camouflage, recognition, and refuge. Like dusk, the series offers cover and possibility: in obscurity, queers have long built counter-wilds where pleasure, care, and resilience take root.
Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist and fourth-generation quiltmaker who mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire, and identity politics. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently Hot House/Maison chaude at FOFA Gallery, The Gloaming at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, and Radical Tradition: Quilts and Social Change at the Toledo Museum of Art. He received a United States Artists Fellowship in 2020. His current research-creation project, Hot House/Maison Chaude, has been supported by the SSHRC Insight Development Grant. He has attended residencies at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Banff Centre, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. His works are in private collections and in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Servais Family Collection in Brussels. He is an associate professor in the Fibres & Material Practices Program at Concordia University.