Aaron McIntosh : The Gloaming

In this new body of quilt and collage work, McIntosh addresses this moment of cultural and political darkening of our times for 2SLGBTQ+ rights. The gloaming- the time of dusk, when the veil of nightfall makes distinctions between figure and landscape indiscernible- is a potent moment of uncertainty, danger and erotic possibility. Images of vulnerable queer men lifted from personal and public erotic archives have been obscured into leafy dark environs and sheltered by shadows of queer protective herbs, pointing to forests, gardens and parks as both a protective retreat from the increasingly public homophobic assaults we witness, as well as uninhibited sites of cruising and communal pleasure.

 

Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist and fourth-generation quiltmaker whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire and identity politics. His exhibition record includes numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently Entanglements at Northeastern University, and Radical Tradition: Quilts and Social Change at the Toledo Museum of Art. Since 2015, McIntosh has managed Invasive Queer Kudzu, a community storytelling and archive project across the LGBTQ+ Southern United States. He is a 2020 United States Artist Fellow in Craft, and other honors include a 2017 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and two Windgate Fellowships in 2006 and 2015 from the Center for Craft. His current research-creation project, Hot House/Maison Chaude, has been supported by a 2020-2023 SSHRC Insight Development grant. He has held residencies at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Banff Centre, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. His critical writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Surface Design Journal, and the Journal of Modern Craft. He currently lives and works in Montreal, where he is an Associate Professor and Coordinator in the Fibres & Material Practices program at Concordia University.