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Don't Go Unspoken

Solo Exhibition of work by Jega Delisca

Co-presented with Whippersnapper Gallery

April 22 - May 22, 2021

Part of a new series First Date, showcasing emerging GTA-based 2SLGBTQ+ artists in a solo exhibition. 

​Our inaugural First Date exhibition will feature the work of Scarborough-based artist, Jega Delisca, in the exhibition Don’t Go Unspoken. Don’t Go Unspoken will take place both online on the Glory Hole Gallery website and in-person at Whippersnapper Gallery, with limited, and scheduled viewing, and in-person viewing from the window on Dundas Street. 

Don’t Go Unspoken will also involve an online gouache painting workshop and artist talk by Jega Delisca that will be free to the public on Saturday May 8th, 2021. Stay tuned to Whippersnapper Gallery website and Glory Hole Gallery for ongoing updates! 

First Date, Don’t Go Unspoken, and Jega Delisca’s artist talk and gouache workshop has been generously funded by the Community One Foundation Rainbow Grants for LGBTQ+ artists and collectives. 

Artist Statement About Don’t Go Unspoken By Jega Delisca:

I started painting to deal with the loss of my closest friend Elisha, and I don’t think I could’ve imagined that this grief would offer so much to explore. Elisha in many ways was the co-author to my life up until now, and in the chasm her death left behind, this whole new identity is forming. I’ve been obsessed with looking back and reflecting on the person I was before her and the person I’m becoming after her.

Don’t Go Unspoken is a collection of work reflecting on grief, friendship and childhood. These paintings illuminate the intimate moments between my three close friends, the joys of coming to age with and how and moving forward with grief. 

About The Artist: 

Jega Delisca is an emerging queer Haitian-American Toronto–based painter. His work explores the intimate relationships between him and his community, with close friends, and family his primary subjects.

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Sensing, Feeling, Being 

July 20th-August 15th 2021 

Whippersnapper Gallery + Glory Hole Gallery 

Curatorial Statement: 

Sensing, Feeling, Being is an exhibition that features multi-media and installation works by Jessica Karuhanga, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, and Yara El Safi. Each artist employs various sensorial strategies through the use of food, song, video, and sound to demand the attention of the viewer and detail experiences of neurodiversity, nostalgia, joy, demands of labor, and language reclamation of women, femme, gender non-conforming, and queer people.

Curated by Emily Peltier

Essay by Karina Iskandarsjah

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PEEP/SHOW - BRITTNEY APPLEBY

Co-presented with Whippersnapper Gallery

January 12 - February 12, 2021

where:

Whippersnapper Gallery

594 Dundas St.W

Toronto

Glory Hole Gallery, in partnership with Whippersnapper Gallery, is pleased to present our first exhibition of 2021! Moving into the future of Glory Hole Gallery programming, we are excited to offer a series of exhibitions by 2SLGBTQ+ artists installed at Whippersnapper Gallery, until May 2021.

Peep/Show is a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Brittney Appleby, who is based on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations, otherwise known as Vancouver, BC. Peep/Show features the short film “Paris Model,” with additional stills from the film available for viewing in person at Whippersnapper Gallery. Peep/Show will be available for viewing at the Whippersnapper Gallery from Monday, January 12th 2021-February 12th 2021, and online at www.gloryhole-gallery.com from Janaury 11th-February 12th 2021.

Artist Bio:Brittney Appleby (She/They) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker living on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations, otherwise known as Vancouver, BC. Appleby holds a Diploma in Fine Arts from Langara College and will be graduating with their BFA majoring in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Spring 2021. Their primary focus is in analogue film and photography, as well as performance and installation. Some of the themes they explore in their work are the body, trauma, memory and nostalgia. Appleby is most inspired by the materiality of analogue practices and incorporates their background in painting, drawing and

printmaking into experimental filmmaking.

Please note: Due to COVID-19 restrictions, viewing of Peep/Show will have limited viewing hours. Please stay tuned to the exhibition page on both www.whippersnappergallery.ca and www.gloryhole-gallery.com for updates on gallery hours.

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Screenings: Celling Sex + INVASION

 THURSDAY, 20th February, 2020

​7PM: Celling Sex (followed by a Q&A)

8PM: INVASION

​THE 519

519 CHURCH ST., TORONTO

1st Floor - GLASS LOBBY ROOM

Join us on Thursday, 20th February, for a screening of "Celling Sex" at The 519. There will be a Q&A with the some of the creators of the film: Mesha Maloney, Katie MacEntee, Sarah Flicker, Tess Kendrick

 This is followed by a screening of INVASION, a short film about the Unist’ot’en Camp, Gidimt’en checkpoint and the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who continue colonial violence against Indigenous people.

 --About--

​Celling Sex is a community-based participatory research project. Using cell-phone video-making and interviews, we learn from young women who trade sex about their harm reduction practices and access to health services. The study engaged fifteen straight and queer-identified women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who were between the ages of 19 and 25.

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Transactional sex is one way that people can get a range of commodities, money, food, and gifts in exchange for virtual or real interactions with them and their bodies. Some people actively choose to trade sex, whereas others find themselves in transactional relationships unexpectedly. There are many different names for these relationships: sex work, sugaring, selling nudes, having a sugar daddy, or being in a strange relationship. Young women who trade sex are often invisible to healthcare providers, but they have unique health physical and mental health needs that require attention. They may also fear and experience stigma from friends, family, and healthcare providers, which can limit their access to healthcare.

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Bios:

Mesha Maloney is a visual artist and community worker hailing from Northern Ontario. She facilitates trainings for service providers, youth and law enforcement on domestic human trafficking. She has been featured as an impactful speaker across Canada leading discussions on human trafficking and mental health through her own lived experience.

Katie MacEntee has facilitated cellphilm workshops with communities in Canada, Mozambique, India, South Africa, and Vienna. She is the lead researcher on the Celling Sex project, has written widely on the method and is co-editor of the book, What’s a Cellphilm? Integrating mobile technology into research, teaching and activism (Sense).

Sarah Flicker’s background is in community development, public health, HIV and adolescent development. Sarah is active on a variety of community-based research teams focusing on sexual health with youth in Canada, and most recently, South Africa. She works across methodologies (qualitative, quantitative and arts-based) and seeks to partner with youth, students and allied practitioners on action research agendas.

Tess Kendrick is a second-year master’s student who is currently investigating the educative possibilities of disseminating the products of cellphilming, and participatory methods in community settings. She is interested in seeing how research project findings can be brought into everyday accessible spaces through art and relationship building.

Chrystal:

I've been called a sugar baby, goddess, goldfinger, and even other names that are similar in many ways. You can call me Cryssy. Trading sex or selling sex means that you are in a relationship that is transactional. Our study is so diverse, educational and unique - it has made it very eye-opening to me and I've learnt about a lot about other situations around me. I think the screenings and discussions are very productive and useful for sharing knowledge on this delicate topic.

Lelo:

I’m a queer non binary femme person who really likes vegan gummy bears, yoga and reading books and also I happen to trade in sex! My favourite part of this study is the freedom to exist in this space of challenging societal understandings of transactional and non transactional sex.

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The Screen is a Mirror

Short Films + Artist Panel

Co-presented with Trinity Square Video, and BUMP TV

when:

SATURDAY, 30 MAY 2020, 5-6PM

& again on WEDNESDAY, 3 JUNE 2020, 7-8PM

 where:

https://www.bumptelevision.com

Zoom opening reception for VIDEO FEVER and THE SCREEN IS A MIRROR held on Saturday, 30 MAY 2020, 6:30PM. For details, email karina@trinitysquarevideo.com

Online Exhibition 4-30 JUNE 2020, www.gloryhole-gallery.com

ARTISTS: 

Thirza Cuthand, Jeremy Saya, Umber Majeed, Kim Ninkuru

Curated/Moderated by Karina Iskandarsjah & Emily Peltier

The Screen is a Mirror is a screening event and artist panel about intentional space-making and radical self-love; showcasing works that imagine methods in which queer and racialized identities can be fostered for survival, belonging and flourishing. Artists Thirza Cuthand, Jeremy Saya, Umber Majeed and Kim Ninkuru experiment with self-portraiture, performance, narrative formats, collage and pastiche to express playfully nuanced experiences and desires of love, acceptance, assimilation, freedom, and being unapologetically joyful.

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 Artist bios:

Thirza Cuthand grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. Her work “2 Spirit Dream Catcher Dot Com” uses a Butch NDN “lavalife” lady (performed by director Thirza Cuthand) to promote a website that seduces the viewer into 2 Spirit “snagging and shacking up” with suggestions of nearby pipeline protests to take your date to, and helpful elders who will matchmake you and tell off disrespectful suitors. It’s the culturally appropriate website all single 2 Spirit people wish existed.

​Jeremy Saya is a queer interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto whose practice integrates elements of performance, installation, sound, video and electronics. His academic background in philosophy and social science often informs his work which deals with queerness, the body, identity, vulnerability, ephemerality and interactionism. Jeremy has performed at Ignite Gallery and at Cold Waters Media Arts Symposium & Festival in North Bay, Ontario. He has exhibited at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, White Water Gallery, Beaver Hall Gallery, VSVSVS, and has curated film programs for both the Toronto Queer Film Festival and Images Festival. Jeremy has worked at Vtape, Feminist Art Gallery, Trinity Square Video and currently holds the positions of Programmer and Box Office Manager at Images Festival. In the work “Perfect”, Saya uses video as a tool to process feelings of shame and perfectionism. By using humour, self-reflection and editing, Saya explores the irony of wanting to be the best at embracing imperfection.

​Umber Majeed (b. New York) is a multidisciplinary visual artist. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. In “Still Life” and “Two Fridas”, Majeed speaks to the disconnect she encounters in Western art institutions. As a Muslim woman living in the United States, she takes up the role of the “outsider from the inside”, exploring concepts of existentialism, identity, and self-representation.

​Kim Ninkuru is a multimedia artist from Bujumbura, in Burundi, currently residing in Toronto. She uses performance art, installation, video, spoken word and movement to create pieces that give her the chance to explore and express rage, love, desire, beauty, or pain in relation to her own body and mind. Her work heavily questions our preconceived notions of gender, race, sexuality and class. It is grounded in the firm belief that blackness is past, present and future at any given moment. The video work “Dodo NightClub” comes from a need to imagine safer spaces for black femmes to dance and experience joy late at night. The word “dodo” comes from the french expression “faire dodo” meaning “going to sleep”. In this context, “dodo nightclub��� is the safe place you go to party: your room. 

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Comic and Video Game Character Workshop w. Cleopatria Peterson

10 June 2019, 5-8PM

For NUIT ROSE 2019 Glory Hole Gallery will be hosting it's first community facilitated art workshop at the The 519! Join us on June 10th, 2019 from 5PM-8PM for a FREE facilitated workshop hosted by Cleopatria Peterson! This event is open to individuals who identify as 2SLGBTQ+ of all ages and all levels of artistic and creative experience. Individuals will be guided and given space to develop their own comic book, fantasy, or video game character, in line with this years NUIT ROSE theme "ARCADE." This workshop is completely free, and all art materials will be provided. Light refreshments will also be served. There is LIMITED SPACE for this workshop so we please ask that you RSVP at gloryholegalleryto@gmail.com to participate. Artists who produce works from this workshop will be additionally given the opportunity to exhibit their work in the Glory Hole Gallery gallery spaces for NUIT ROSE 2019, including the NUIT ROSE: Festival + Art Crawl - Arcade which officially opens on June 15th! We can't wait to witness and exhibit your creative talent. ♥ RSVP today, and thank you for your continued support of Glory Hole Gallery, and 2SLGBTQ+ artists. Location and Accessibility The 519 is located half a block north of the Church and Wellesley intersection, on the east side of the street. The 519 is an accessible facility with a ramp, elevator, and all-gender washrooms. --- About the Facilitator Cleopatria Peterson (they/them) is a illustrator, storyteller, and prolific zine-maker based in Toronto, Canada. They graduated from Ryerson University's Fashion Communication program and are currently in their third year at OCAD for Publications. Their work focuses on themes of nature, healing trauma and community. They are the co-founder of Old Growth Press and are determined to change the publishing landscape. They are available for commissions, projects and workshops. Feel free to get in touch. Visit their website today for more of their works, zines, illustrations, publications, and more! https://www.cleopatria.ca/

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Ghosts and Matter

SCREENING + ARTIST PANEL

31 OCTOBER 2019, 6-8 PM

EXHIBITION

18 OCTOBER - 24 NOVEMBER 2019

Co-presented with Trinity Square Video

Works by Gloria Swain, Fallon Simard, Mariam Magsi, and Aaron Moore

Curated by Karina Iskandarsjah

“Haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality that we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.” - Avery F. Gordon

Ghosts and Matter is a screening of video works that consider the role of haunting as a mode of knowledge and drive for social and personal transformation. Ghosts and Matter frames the confluence movement of time and the ways we interact with what haunts us: trauma, difficult histories, memories. For some, haunting can mean an individual’s experience of tragedy or violence. For others, it can be a matter of severed or silenced ancestral links caused by exile, genocide or erasure through assimilation -- a reminder that personal histories are often entwined with intense political subjects. In conjunction with the screening, the artists have provided film stills, drawings, and artefacts that will be exhibited in Glory Hole Gallery from 18 October - 24 November.

Works by Gloria Swain, Fallon Simard, Mariam Magsi and Aaron Moore prompts a reframing of haunting and trauma as a socio-political/psychological state that urges initiatives for healing and connection. The selected works help us address the following questions: How does haunting become an agent of interruption and transformation? What does cultural and intergenerational trauma look and feel like? How can haunting keep our senses open to emergent and unknown forms of belonging, connectivity, intimacy, and the unintentional, indeterminate slippages of coexistence?

CONTENT WARNING: this event presents artworks and discussions that reflect on sensitive topics such as the history of slavery, state violence, death, grief and sexual assault.

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Artist Bios:

Gloria Swain is a multidisciplinary Black artist and activist. Her work stimulates an understanding of Black women’s suffrage and survival, mental health and intergenerational trauma. Swain believes in storytelling as an important tool for preserving cultural history, using photography, performance, and painting to express lived experiences of racism, sexism, classism and ageism, as well as connecting with violent, erased, and unwritten histories.

Fallon Simard is an Anishinaabe artist and scholar from Couchiching First Nation from the Grand Council of Treaty #3 Territory. Fallon’s work interrogates state violence and mental health in so far as it is perpetuated on to Indigenous bodies, with a practice comprised of video, sound and animation. He holds a Masters of Art from the Interdisciplinary Masters in Art, Media, and Design Program from OCAD University.

Mariam Magsi is a Pakistani-Canadian contemporary artist working in photography, performance, video, sound, installation, documentary, poetry and other arts. Magsi holds an MFA from OCAD University in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design. Magsi's practice focuses on cultural research, intersectional feminism, South Asian diaspora, contemporary Islam, gender, sexuality and migration.

Aaron Moore is a Northern Irish born artist whose use of aesthetics aims to toy with viewers preconceived methods of engaging with images. Through presenting gestures, objects and pictures which try to de-concretize our view of reality, he aims to unhinge colonial and imperial modes of understanding. He graduated from OCAD University in 2017 after being awarded the OCADu Photography Medal.

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Curator/Moderator Bio:

Karina Iskandarsjah is an Indonesian visual artist and curator from Singapore whose work explores non-dominant histories, hybridity, intersectionality and the experience of geographically displaced individuals. Karina is currently a Programming & Outreach Assistant at Trinity Square Video and part of the small, dedicated team that runs Glory Hole Gallery.

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About the Works 

REincarnation: Water Is Life by Gloria Swain

“Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious concept that the non-physical essence of a living being starts a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death. I have frequent dreams about a woman who stares into the bright blue sky and cold blue waters. When she turns her head, I notice she bears a striking resemblance to me. And I wonder if my love and fear of water relates to my unknown unspoken ancestral histories. 

This work questions my own unknown history, my invisible identity due to racism, my questionable relationship to this land as a descendant of stolen Black bodies and whether my dreams are inherited memories. This work inquires whether we have been here before and if we are reincarnations of lost ancestors.”

Land Becomes Ghost by Fallon Simard

In Land Becomes Ghost (2016), screenshots of news articles and protest advertisements about the Site C Dam repeat in a cycle with an anxiety-provoking soundtrack. Television static obscures the images as the title of the work reminds us that lands that people have lived on and made a living working with will soon be a distant memory. Simard’s work is firmly situated within a strong history in Canada of experimental Indigenous video art. Their experimental, politically charged work gets to the heart of issues of Indigenous sovereignty and struggle. (Cuthand, Thirza. Excerpt from Canadian Art.)

I CAN’T BREATHE by Mariam Magsi

“The moment my mother passed away at the hospital, I began to frantically collect all of the objects that surrounded her. Some of these objects were hospital property, such as clothing, oxygen masks, syringes, bandages and tubes. Most of these mundane objects would be considered discarded items, but for me they are deeply symbolic. These found objects hold traces and imprints of my mother’s body.

The 40 days spent at the hospital were traumatic, physically and emotionally taxing and extremely challenging. As the trauma is still fresh, the vivid memories from invasive medical procedures performed on my mother’s body keep playing over and over like a film in my mind. Often, these vivid visits from traumatic memories cause panic attacks and inability to breathe. Unguarded and unprotected by my mother, the first feminist I knew, my own mortality looms in front of me. After all, one of the last things we’ll learn from our parents is how to die.”

Like a Beaten Dog, Shaking as a Shadow Crosses Overhead by Aaron Moore

“In the landscape of moving-image, conversations of trauma, especially sexual traumas, are often limited to the moment of their happening. But trauma fractures memories, and shards of it are sent back and forward in time, sticking like splinters. It shifts in size and shape, and squeezes its way between the mundane and the frightening. Trauma acts as a liquid, water-logging memories leaving them heavy and stuck. While all the time shifting and turning the ground beneath. 

Like a Beaten Dog, Shaking as a Shadow Crosses Overhead exists as a narrative video piece and series of drawings/photographs/sound works both depicting and becoming a part of my own complex process of healing. A process that spans multiple psychological dimensions of time. This perpetually unfinished work seeks to act as a reminder that the process of healing will never be done.”

Thanks to the support of:

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Kat Pruss: She Had Many

19 September - 14 October, 2019

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Pictures of Pursuit

1-30 July, 2019

​Pictures of Pursuit is an exhibition of recent works by Callahan Bracken, Josie Eccleston, Vincy Lim, and Jesse Wardell. It focuses on intentional space-making for the private and public manifestations of queer desire and belonging. Through drawing, printmaking, and miniature installation, the artists explicitly assert their queer identities, projecting a multiplicity of unbounded subjects: memory, devotion, fantasy, attachment, passion.

“LOVE is a strategy, medium, site and scene. Love is an act. Love is not a quantifiable element able to be parsed between politics and poetics for it constantly transforms the definitions of those very terms ... Queer love exemplifies itself by its lack of singular object relations and an insistence on unstable and mutable boundaries … The theatre of queer love employs politics, poetics and aesthetics in equal measure. Queering love transforms the vocabulary with which we address our object, and ensuing acts need not be translated … Queer love is not economical and that is political. Love as a medium is part of an economy of resistance, ecstatic resistance I would say, provoking questions of memory and tactics. What does love want? Is it always discursive or sometimes outside of rational economies of getting and giving?”

Emily Roysdon - “Now, Then and Love: Questions of Agency in Contemporary Practice” (2006)

This exhibition is made possible through the generous contribution from the Community One Foundation Rainbow Grant.

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Queer Virus | Solo Exhibition by Dee Stoicescu

10 August - 3 September, 2019

Glory Hole Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of works by artist Dee Stoicescu, Queer Virus: Radical Sick Queer Softness and Romanian Diasporic Identity. Through the use of superimposed and layered imagery of the artists home, the hospital, medical terminology, and Romanian language Stoicescu affirms and asserts their own individualized experience as a queer person living with HIV, and in doing so questions and de-centres the pathologization of HIV/AIDS by society and medical professionals in both the past, and present. About the Artist Dee is a queer emerging artist living in Tkaronto, Ontario. Their photographic work plays with(in) the entanglement of their embodied identities: HIV+, AIDS survivor, chronically sick, mad, gender-fluid, non-binary, and Romanian diasporic subjectivity. Their multi-media practices include collage-making, curating, photography, jewelry-making, and creative writing. The methods featured in the Queer Virus exhibit include sentimental material objects found in/around their familial homes in Canada and Romania, free photo editing software, online translation tools, online searches for microscopic HIV viruses, and playfully phantasmic shadows cast by the setting/rising sun. They hold a Bachelor’s (Hons.) Degree in Women and Gender Studies from York University. Dee is the author and content creator of Viral Tendencies (viraltendencies.wordpress.com), a literary blog dedicated to their intimate experiences as a queer, intersectional feminist living and loving with HIV. Their writing grapples with, overlaps, and contemplates themes of immigration, living at/crossing borders, ‘lost’ ancestral language, reclaimed ‘infectious’ queer sexuality, poverty, and living with anxiety and depression. Dee is also the curator of Ruse Dream Vintage (est. 2012), an online vintage collection featuring finds ranging from the 1930’s to the early 2000’s. Follow Dee on Instagram @viraltendencies and Facebook at Dee Stoicescu This exhibition is made possible by generous funding contributions by Toronto Arts Council.

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Butterfly Hands

Works by Mary Chen, Kelly Lui, Lily Yunru, and May Truong

Co-presented with Tea Base

June 01-12, 2019

Glory Hole Gallery is proud to present Butterfly Hands, a showcase of photographs that features massage parlour workers and their hands captured by Mary Chen, Kelly Lui, Lily Yunru, and May Truong. Co-presented with Tea Base, this show is in support of Butterfly: a local support network for the rights of Asian and migrant sex workers and Holistic Practitioners Alliance. Featured in this show are also artworks made by the workers themselves and guests who were asked to trace, cut, and decorate the shape of their hands in solidarity. 

The City of Toronto is currently discussing new regulations in regards to holistic centre licensing that will affect over 2200 migrant workers who could lose their jobs and livelihoods. The current proposal largely misrepresents migrant workers as trafficked victims despite hundreds of individuals having expressed that they are neither trafficked victims nor traffickers. Butterfly Hands responds to the misrepresentation by uplifting the workers who take pride in their jobs which provide financial stability and support for their families.

Glory Hole Gallery, Tea Base, Butterfly, and the artists involved stand together to raise the voices of massage parlour workers and all sex workers to help protect their right to safe and dignified employment conditions. 

For more information: https://www.butterflysw.org/campaign

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The W(hole) Picture

29 September - 11 October 2018

Join us in celebrating Nuit Blanche Toronto 2018 with the first-ever collaboration between the CLGA (Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives) and Glory Hole Gallery.

Featuring works by Karina Iskandarsjah, Fallon Simard, Markus Starkiss, Lisa Myers, Megan Feheley, Eric Chengyang, and John Fitzpatrick

Projects featured at both the Canadia Lesbian and Gay Archives at 34 Isabella street and Glory Hole Gallery at 499 Church Street!

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Purdah | Shui   11 May 2018

Please join us on the opening May 11th from 6pm-9pm at Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church Street to view the art and for a special artist talk between Magsi and Chengyang, moderated by curator Emily Peltier. Purdah | Shui is a duo exhibition by Mariam Magsi (top row) and Eric Chengyang (bottom row). The title consists of two non-English words separated by a line representing both a barrier and a mirror, as well as a parallel and a reflection. Purdah is a word of Persian origin. It means to veil, to seclude oneself from others, to wear enveloping clothing, or curtains. Purdah can also be intellectualized as concealment or hiding, much like how the candidates in my work hide their orientations or drape a Purdah over their lives. In this series, the type of Purdah used is the burqa veil. Shui, pronounced as "shuay", means water, and it refers to the Chinese idiom: drifting clouds and flowing water (xing-yun liu-shui; 行云流水). The term describes a spontaneous and freeform style, aura, or aesthetics. While the two works stand independently and reflect each artist's unique background correspondingly, the overall display at the Glory Hole Gallery serves as a metaphor for water reflection.