Presented as part of Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics, a city-wide public art exhibition in Ottawa running from July-November 2019, featuring five new commissions by Ottawa artists at four outdoor locations. The exhibition was the culmination of a year-long commissioning program, which ran simultaneously with the Video in the Public Sphere speaker series – a discursive program featuring international artists and scholars who spoke Knot Project Space and at times ran workshops and seminars on themes related to public art. More info about the project can be found here.
Don’t Believe the Hype!
Don’t Believe the Hype! is a silent looping video projection intended for screening on public surfaces in gay neighbourhoods across Canada. It beckons viewers with sensuous displays of queer public affection paired with scrolling text that both provokes and informs. This site-specific work claims public space for queer intimacy and political imagining at a time when Canadians are being encouraged by both the federal government and LGBT civil society organizations to celebrate the so-called 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality. Critical of the state mythologies and top down benevolence, this piece demands a more critical interpretation of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s 1969 Criminal Code reform that failed to stop the regular brutality, disregard, police violence, arrests, harassment, firings, and bar and bathhouse raids that continue in the wake of the supposed decriminalization of homosexuality. Whose legacy are we celebrating? Whose lives are disappeared by convenient origin myths? What’s the cost of misremembering? And why have so many gays and lesbians been so eager to embrace a demonstrably false anniversary?
Ryan Conrad
Ryan Conrad is artist, activist, and scholar based in Ottawa. He is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Cinema & Media Studies Program at York University where he is working on a manuscript entitled ‘Radical VIHsion: Canadian AIDS Film & Video.’ Previously he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Carleton University with the AIDS Activist History Project. He earned a PhD from the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Society and Culture at Concordia University and an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from the Maine College of Art.
Related Programming
Discussion: Don’t Believe the ’69 Hype! Ryan Conrad, Tom Hooper, Ummni Khan + Darrah Teitel. Aug. 20, 2019.