ALTEREYE WORKS: DESIRE LINES

For the month of August, be sure to come out to Alterego's Cafe on Gottingen Street to see DESIRE LINES, the new exhibition as part of our AlterEye Café Works series by Andrew Quon.

DESIRE LINES presents three images from an ongoing photographic series titled Polymorphous Pleasures, which documents discovery, recovery, and disassembly of barriers created by lived experiences. Embedded in wild spaces using nature's architecture, Andrew presents their contorted body, withholding the gaze from the viewer. This work centres sexuality, otherness, memory, regeneration cycles and impermanence, and documents the temporal degradation and healing of physical and mental landscapes. Although personal in nature this work speaks to a global condition prevalent in reductionist societies.

Recent political history enlisted the natural world to prop up puritanical values which villified certain sexual acts and, by association, identities. "Crimes against nature" is a term still on the books in some parts of North America which exists to criminalize "masturbation, sodomy, and bestiality." The term "cruising" was developed as covert vernacular to mean men having sex with men in hidden yet public, often natural, spaces. Polymorphous Pleasures builds on this theme through the idea of extreme cruising. Andrew's adventures often take them deep into territory humans do not venture. Moving through forest, bog, and dense shrub, bodily injury is frequent, as is exhaustion, and encounters with animals, swarms of biting insects, and ticks.

The hope is that these works encourage the viewer to examine personal and collective ecosystems and engage in a healing journey through connection to nature's power, embracing the possibilities which emerge from this process.

To learn more, kindly contact Andrew directly via Instagram at @chaka.quon.