My creative practice encounters LBGT and Queer topics, particularly related to the body’s relationship to identity, visibility and representation. I am interested in how difference is constructed through the body, ordered by dominant ideologies and power. My artistic methods vary and include textiles, screen-printing, embroidery/stitching, costume, electronics and experimental video. In my work, I often engage with experimental processes by establishing structural parameters for the work to develop, with and without my control. Such parameters echo power structures that aim to limit and control bodies and identities yet, as the work develops, new and unanticipated forms emerge to resist and challenge norms. My most recent interest is in the body’s relationship to normative time (chromonormativity) and the boundaries of space. I am involved in a year-long project titled Bodies without Borders that explores such intersections.

To me, the Toronto Islands represent an area that is bound in time and space. Having grown up in Toronto, I have many childhood memories from the Islands, from a time that was very separate from the present. I intend to produce several short experimental videos that explore dimensions of queer childhood, sexuality and Otherness. I will explore how the body is bound by memories, and how time collapses from the past to the present with visions of the future. The body is also bound by space, from the limits of our skin to surrounding physical space. The videos will be an expression of the dynamic between time (childhood, memory, death), space (the Island, water/land, enclosures) and the queer body (skin, flesh, textiles, Otherness).

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Joseph Medaglia is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist working in textiles, screen-printing, embroidery/stitching, costume, electronics and experimental video. His work has been shown at various film festivals, art exhibitions and academic conferences in Canada, the USA and UK. He holds a BFA in Visual Art from York University and an MA in Communication and Culture from York/Ryerson Universities. He is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University where he teaches courses in communication design, video, new media and studio practice.