![\"Brookbank-Martens_PEEL\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO06_Flavelle_Brookbank-Martens_PEEL-scaled.jpg\")
Peel<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
![\"Brookbank-Martens_PEEL\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO06_Flavelle_Brookbank-Martens_PEEL3-scaled.jpg\")
Pee<\/em>l, detail, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Kyle Alden Martens and Brandon Brookbank are young artists who frequently collaborate by merging Martens\u2019s performative, sculptural, and media-based practice with Brookbank\u2019s photography practice. In 2015, the duo created the installation Peel<\/em> at The Fruit Stand, their Halifax home and gallery. Focusing on creating bodies in-between legible identities, they inserted images of human skin into obviously non-human objects\u200a\u2014\u200aover-sized decorative paper fruits. The paper fruits open to reveal compositions of close-cropped photographs of human skin, disrupting the recognizable sexual and gendered characteristics of human bodies and unfolding something strange. Martens and Brookbank open one kind of body to reveal another\u200a\u2014\u200ayet what is actually disclosed? A fruit is often peeled before consumption. To peel back or strip down implies making something bare, making it vulnerable in its denuding. In Peel<\/em>, the white flesh within the fruits is bare but only partially legible. Veins pressing against epidermis, creases between limbs, and a lone nipple signify that the fruits\u2019 inner flesh is human. Human and non-human merge as the cores of the folding fruits become new hybrid orifices. Installed at various heights and angles of opening or closing, the paper fruits evade their original designation as decorative objects to become the fallen progeny of strange trees or invasive species as they mysteriously multiply forth across the white gallery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The play on language in the work is obvious; \u201cfruit\u201dis an outdated, almost quaint, slur for men who love men. Martens and Brookbank slip the human back into a term intended to strip queer bodies of their humanity. The photographed forms are in fact the artists\u2019 own bodies, and the work references their experiences of being queer men. Yet their identities are removed through the paring down of the photographs of their skin into the segments of fruits. The fruits are not recognizably queer, or even gendered, as the work lacks go-to body-based signifiers such as genitals, or relational signifiers such as couplings or the gaze. An obvious phallus, the banana reveals only an unidentifiable expanse of translucent skin. The queerness that the work evokes is a visual queerness, a making-strange, a visual play that unsettles the normative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ulrike M\u00fcller, an established queer artist working with abstraction, argues that the ways in which \u201csexuality\u201d is socially understood and conventionally represented constrain expression and limit readings of artworks made by queer artists. She has stated that she wants to resist obvious sexual readings of her work, desiring \u201csomething so much more than this\u200a\u2014\u200aa better sexiness\u200a\u2014\u200abut also to think harder, feel deeper, and see differently.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Ulrike M\u00fcller in conversation with Harmony Hammond, \u201cEditors and Fugitives,\u201d in Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices,<\/em> ed. Christiane Erharter et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 152.<\/span> M\u00fcller alludes to how extremities become fused with specific meaning, making it difficult to see differently. By fragmenting images of their bodies beyond recognition, and purposefully avoiding gendered or sexual signifiers, Martens and Brookbank evade what viewers might traditionally expect to see of gay men. Yet the conceptual play of the work hinges on sexual identity and its pejorative policing. The visual play of human \u201cfruits\u201d merging with actual fruits is integral to understanding what the artists are attempting to do. By creating a hybrid form in between language and representation, they disrupt the nebulous regulated relationships among genders, sexualities, behaviours, and socio-cultural roles. The work is an attempt not to move beyond bodies or identities entirely, but to expand viewers\u2019 capacities for seeing gender and identities differently. This project of seeing bodies\u200a\u2014\u200aspecifically, sexualized ones\u200a\u2014\u200aotherwise feels in line with M\u00fcller\u2019s search for a \u201cbetter sexiness\u201d as an expression of desire beyond codified and consumable representation. The piecing apart of human forms and their fused meanings moves the viewer away from immediate recognition and the politics of visibility to embrace a visual queerness open to mutable interpretations of desire and personhood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The reference to personhood in Peel<\/em> is produced through direct representation of human skin and is thus still directly tied to the human body. Returning to my original question of what makes an object read as human, I want to turn to another collaborative installation work that references the human from a different angle. In 2013, as Melanie Thibodeau and Juli Majer were installing their thesis works side by side at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, they realized that their work was visually similar. Rather than clearly delineating their respective artworks, the artists decided to combine them into the promiscuous installation Soft Stay\/Safe Play. <\/em>What makes the combined works compatible is not only the colour palettes of Thibodeau\u2019s soft sculptures and Majer\u2019s ceramic objects but their visual queerness. Similar to Martens and Brookbank\u2019s work, Thibodeau and Majer\u2019s installation references sexuality\u2019s visual reliance on bodies and couplings. The work includes parts of the human body, including genitals\u200a\u2014\u200ayet in their over- and undersized sculptural forms they are made strange. A deep-green fun-fur vulva opens to expose a yellow vinyl orifice, a dome progresses into a long silver-nail-tipped finger, soft limbs are twisted and bound with rope around a large fun-fur-caped phallus. Propped, leaning, reclining, balancing, bound, suspended, and stacked together, forms that are human-like and non-human\u200a\u2014\u200asuch as blobs, balls, arches, and lines\u200a\u2014\u200acreate curious relational entanglements. The forms flicker between the abstract and the human; puddles expand into cum as fun fur is transformed into sensitive skin. Thibodeau and Majer wrote to me in an email that they arrange their works like \u201ca little pool of feelings and shapes\u201d and then \u201cgo off swimming\u201d as the objects remain to flit between the recognizable and the abstracted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The forms are similar in size and colour to children\u2019s toys and suggest a whimsical playfulness, reflecting a tongue-in-cheek engagement with gender and sex play. The work softens the threat of difference through its light-hearted appearance while still referencing sex practices such as rope binding and bondage. By creating three-dimensional sculptural forms and installing them in such a way that a viewer can be among them, the artists also directly implicate viewers\u2019 bodies. Stacked and bound together as they are, the forms suggest mobility; if a viewer so chooses or were invited by the artists, the installation could be played with <\/em>and rearranged in infinite iterations. In this way the candy-coloured forms become building blocks for liberatory queer play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While it is possible in both Peel <\/em>and Soft Stay\/Safe Play <\/em>to select recognizable signifiers such as nipples and forms such as phalluses, the works are not so focused. Rather, they strip, or peel<\/em>, the cultural context from human bodies, thereby challenging the meanings that we attribute to body parts, especially those deemed sexual or gendered. The works move beyond the human, yet do not fully leave it behind\u200a\u2014\u200ainstead, they break the boundaries of bodies apart onto hybrid mobile forms. The artists challenge the normative coherence of personhood through the creation of objects that experiment with perception by combining human signifiers with non-human and abstract forms. By embracing strangeness and developing strategies of open-ended visual queerness, the artworks embody gender and sexuality beyond binaries.<\/p>\n![\"Thibodeau_Soft](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO06_Flavelle_Thibodeau_Soft-Stay-scaled.jpg\")
Soft Stay\/Safe Play<\/em>, installation view, Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver, 2014.
Photo : Alexis Grey Hildreth<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Thibodeau_Soft](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO06_Flavelle_Thibodeau_Soft-Stay4-scaled.jpg\")
Soft Stay\/Safe Play<\/em>, details, 2014.
Photos : Alexis Grey Hildreth<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Thibodeau_Soft](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/91_DO06_Flavelle_Thibodeau_Soft-Stay2-scaled.jpg\")
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