EXHIBITION: CONTACT Photography Festival (Toronto, Canada) May 2025
My work has been selected as a Special Project for CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto, presented in May 2025.
CONTACT Photography Festival Website
“ Since the early 2000s, Canadian artist Jordan King has held onto a collection of Polaroids taken with friends, at nightclubs, onstage, and with her circle of creative collaborators between 1999 and 2004. She found a renewed interest in the format in 2020 upon inheriting from a friend some of the personal effects of legendary 1970s–80s trans drag performer International Chrysis, who was connected to King via a New York City apartment they both at one time occupied, though three decades apart. In March 2020, King shot a series of Polaroids with long-time friend Greg Manuel in this apartment, paying homage to Chrysis and the legacy that she left behind after her untimely death in 1990. Revisiting the series for this unique installation on a billboard in Toronto, King reconsiders the intimacy and instantaneity captured by the unique photographic format, recontextualized within the public sphere.”
Presented by CONTACT in partnership with Gallery 44.
Curated by Gallery 44 Curator Sameen Mahboubi.
BLU-RAY RELEASE: Hookers on Davie
Still: Hookers on Davie (1984) Directors: Janis Cole & Holly Dale. 2025 Re-release
Available for purchase at Vinegar Syndrome and Videomatica (Vancouver)
“At the height of the ’80s, [filmmakers Janis Cole and Holly Dale turned their lens on Vancouver’s Davie Street neighbourhood, a bustling, neon-soaked hub . . . known as “the prostitution capital of Canada.”
Distributor Canadian International Pictures has released this groundbreaking classic in a new 4K restoration that confirms its place among the greatest non-fiction films ever produced in Canada.
For this special edition Blu-Ray release, I contributed a commentary track for Hookers on Davie as well as Cole and Dale’s first two short films, Minimum Charge, No Cover and Cream Soda, speaking about the significance of these works in Canadian film history as well as trans histories.
SCREENING: Hookers on Davie
April 29, 2025 at The Fox Theatre, Toronto, ON
Canadian International Pictures is presenting a special screening of [Hookers on Davie] with filmmakers Janis Cole and Holly Dale in attendance.
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: Gallery 44 Contemporary Photography Gallery
Through December 2025, I’m Artist-In-Residence at Gallery 44 in Toronto.
For the first portion of my residency (February-March) I began digitizing my collection of photographs, posters, flyers, and ephemera from roughly 1999 - 2004. This includes polaroids, photos shot with point and shoot or disposable camera, and hand created/xerox posters for parties, events and performances.
Watch for future updates about in-person artist talks and other public programming and updates in the coming months, OR consider subscribing (form below) for priority invitations sent directly to your inbox.
Status at 1181 Weekly Event Flyer, 2007
PRESENTATION + SCREENING: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives Conference, Valencia, Spain, May 2025
As part of the conference which focuses on “Stirring Queer and Trans Memory: Counterarchives and Peripheries”, I’ll be presenting La Journée Internationale de la Transsexualité (film by Mirha Soleil Ross, distributed by VTape, Distributor of Film and Video works)
“The PERCOL conference ‘Stirring Queer and Trans Memory’ intends to explore counter-archival queer theories and practices as they rise from, and apply to, peripheral locations and experiences. Because of their oblique relationship to official history and their experience of suppression and erasure—and of joyous survival and resistance—LGTBIQ+ communities have long had an affinity with counter-archives: alternative repositories, imaginatively conceived and run, that have sought to counter the various epistemic violences—colonial, cisgender, heteronormative—that subtend standard histories. Counterarchives have brought into play, more or less consciously, queer understandings of non-linear time; have valued the ephemeral, affective and immaterial; and have generated strategies of opacity and illegibility in the development of an emancipatory archival practice.”