Artist Spotlight: Valentin Brown
Our spotlight series features one of the Intergenerational LGBT Artists Residency alumn. We discuss their practice, projects, and experiences. This is a behind the scenes look at how queer artists are working today!
We sat down with Valentin Brown, who participated as an artist in the 2019 edition of the residency.
Valentin Brown at the Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency, Lake Ontario at Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island
Where are you from?
I currently live in Hamilton, Ontario.
Body Farm at Tangled Art Gallery, 2019, Mixed media painting and drawing, soft sculpture, and unfired clay. Photo: Michelle Peek Photography courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.
Where did you learn or study art and how long have you been making art?
I studied at Sheridan College in the Visual and Creative Arts program. I have been making art since I was a little child taping together printer paper to make long landscape drawings of graveyards with my gel pens.
Tell us about your practice; what are your passions for creating. What are you looking at these days?
I make mixed media, multi-sensory art about my experience of being pathologized in medical and social ways because I am trans, autistic, and traumatized. My work takes the form of the mythology of monsters that live in a place that I call the “Body Farm.” These monsters can be experienced in visual, auditory, and tactile ways. By working this way, I assert that accessibility and aesthetic go hand in hand—that access can be weaved directly into the vocabulary of our work. I think about access as an opportunity to explore new ways of seeing—a gaze in which I can re-frame my lived experiences in humour, curiosity, and hope. I still use gel pens.
What projects do you have on the go?
I am currently partnering with Creative Users Projects to create imagery for a web resource they are creating about accessible curatorial practices. At the same time, my monsters march on, over every phone call, during every video chat, not only filling my notebooks but also spilling onto the backs of printer alignment pages and DBT diary cards.
“I think the residency succeeds wildly in creating opportunities for different generations of queer artists to connect and talk about queerness as an intergenerational legacy” - Valentin Brown
What advice would you give queer artists working in Canada, or, what advice would you give emerging, mid-career and established queer artists?
Please communicate with each other. I say that more as a queer, than an artist. Make the terrifying choice to name your needs and have a conversation. I see that so many of us had had our boundaries violated so deeply that we react as if everyone is an abuser. To pathologize normal expressions of grief, anxiety, or anger as “toxic” is to deny the biology of emotions. Part of having emotions is connection—responding to somebody crying isn’t giving in to “manipulation”; it’s fulfilling one purpose of shedding tears. Healing is non-linear, and nobody can heal in isolation—that’s just not how humans work. As somebody who left an abusive situation suddenly, without explanation, and at great risk to myself, I’m asking you to ask yourself if you are cutting out the right people and asking for accountability in the right places.
Big Softie and the Unidentified Remains (Detail), 2019, mixed textile and found object soft sculpture and unfired clay. Photo: Michelle Peek Photography courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.
What did you get out of the residency and why should people apply to the residency?
I think a lot of queers my age are very isolated these days. Before the residency, most of the queers I knew were more or less my age and more or less in their own little bubble. Now, I can say that I know, in fact, that being queer is more than exchanging memes about not imagining living through your 20s. I got to live with a great group of older queer artists and see in new ways that I not only have a future but that a queer future can look many different ways.
How did the residency help your practice?
In the short time that I spent on the island, I met more people engaged in the art community than I have in my whole life. Additionally, the residency provided me with many opportunities to practice talking about my work with others, giving and receiving feedback, and building my interpersonal skills.
What would you recommend the residency for doing well?
I think the residency succeeds wildly in creating opportunities for different generations of queer artists to connect and talk about queerness as an intergenerational legacy.
What knowledge did you gain at The Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency that you carry forth with you?
Ultimately, all we have is each other—nobody is coming to save us.
I am beginning to form my own understanding of the ancestry that I come from, the stories that I have inherited—the stories that include me and need me as much as I need them. Where I do not have a biological family, I have an ancestry—a shared experience that goes back and forwards in time: an experience that I can feel all around me, even though I can’t always see it or touch it.
Body Farm at Tangled Art Gallery (The Body Farm says, "NO, NO, NO"), 2019, mixed media drawing and painting. Photo: Michelle Peek Photography courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.
What other types of cultural work are you listening to or watching right now?
I listen to the short-story podcast LeVar Burton Reads—I recommend his readings of “Blur” by Carmen Maria Machado and “1000-Year-Old-Ghosts” by Laura Chow Reeve. If you don’t already know, LeVar played the first black and visibly disabled character on Star Trek, and although I did not originally know him for his role as Geordi La Forge (I keep Star Trek Voyager and DS9 closer to my heart), it makes sense that LeVar Burton is out there somewhere reading stories that speak to a mad, trans, autistic person like myself.
Which artists impact your practice the most--how and in what ways?
I think as an autistic artist, I tend to be impacted more by the things that were with me when I was the loneliest than individual artists. For me, being an autistic child meant being alone and spending a lot of time creating and navigating complex worlds in my head that were based on the things that kept me company. Now, when I look back, I can see that the colour harmonies in my paintings remind me of how RuneScape looked like in 2007; why the imagery I make takes the form of mythology or lexicon of creature NPCs that adventurers can encounter; and of course, why it is all documented in audio in the “Captain’s Log.”
Body Farm at Tangled Art Gallery ("RELEASE ME" Banner), 2019, mixed textile and found object soft sculpture. Photo: Michelle Peek Photography courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph.
A big part of The Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency is cooking together, especially for the meal for guests and visiting curators who give studio visits. Could you share a recipe for anything you prepared during the residency?
I made coffee in the mornings for my studio mate James Fowler and he told me and continues to tell me that I’m going to be okay. I’ve never been passionate about cooking, and yet I continue to make apple crisps, remembering the one that Anna Camilleri made after one of our many swims together. Rah shared her smoothie with me one time and sometimes I manage to eat vegetables because I make smoothies now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.