Curator Genevieve Flavelle

Artwork By: Maddie Alexander, Kim Ninkuru, Beck Gilmer Osborne, Danny Welsh, Shellie Zhang,

Tuesday, April 5th - Saturday, April 23rd
Opening reception, Friday April 8, 7 - 11 pm

Alchemy, drag, flash, haunting, shade, wild, glitter, shame, sex, violence, trash, fame.

Tough as Nails brings five emerging Toronto based artists together to flaunt the glamorous side of queer resistance. Seeking to complicate ideas of marginality, Tough as Nails explores the relationship between glamour and agency. Drawing on the long tradition of self-fashioned glamour as a practice of survival and world making for non-normative people, these five artists take up queer glamour as a defiant expression of marginalized identity.

The artists in Tough as Nails refuse, parody, challenge, and complicate conventional notions of what is considered alluring, and valuable. The artists exploit selfies, porn, fashion, interior decorating, and costuming as avenues to manipulate representation. Positioning queer as dodgy, erratic, and always in an unstable state of becoming, yet also as lived experience and historically defiant politic; queer glamour becomes a site of dynamic slippage, undermining, renegotiation, overstatement, and reinstatement. Tough as Nails investigates the idea of queer glamour as site of glittering transgression.

Season II of YTB Gallery is proudly supported by the Toronto Arts Council, The Daniels Corporation, and Toronto Community Housing.