Whenever I see Alex Gibson’s work installed in a white cube I feel like I am seeing something naughty—something that wouldn’t be on pristine walls if everyone admitted they knew exactly what they were looking at. This is not to say that Gibson’s work is so heavily coded that a viewer needs to be deeply ingrained in a subculture to understand its signifiers. We know why the string of saliva off the pretty man’s face is so thick; we know what the streaming liquid aimed onto images of dogs is; we know how the silicone tail is affixed to the crawling man’s backside. All one needs is the slightest of dirty minds. 

And yet, the affective pull of Gibson’s work isn’t solely its salacious content. The eroticism of the images—mostly appropriated from film, pornography, and archives, then recontextualized or rephotographed—is obscured by his material choices. High-gloss resin covers a grid of dingy-quality laser prints of low-resolution screen grabs, undoing the gallery lights’ function and creating a near impenetrable glare. Mirrors are used to produce depth where there isn’t any, refracting light into seemingly unnatural colour blocks. Gibson doesn’t make it easy for us to understand what we see.

Queerness exists in Gibson’s work both erotically and anti-normatively. The eroticism of Gibson’s work refuses the sexless respectability championed by gays and lesbians hoping to assimilate into the mainstream. And yet, it demonstrates a cogent understanding of how queerness stretches beyond non-hetero sex practices; that it is in opposition to broader structures of oppression. 

Over iced coffee (of course) I discussed with Gibson the varied tropes of their work: appropriated images, film and cinematography, corners, and piss.

Gibson is a recent graduate of UBC’s MFA program and holds a Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr. Their work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Italy, Poland, and Barbados where they were born and raised. Their most recent body of work, A hound marks its spot, was exhibited at Wil Aballe in the spring of 2025.

 

 

 

To me, it’s about not settling—not settling for the mold that can create thousands of the same object, but trying to constantly shift the contours of that mold so that it’s never fixed in place—becoming essentially non-reproducible, always different, always transgressive.

 

 

 

I was first introduced to your practice in a group show at Wil Aballe in 2017 where you exhibited a few small paintings. Your practice now is steeped in photography. Can you tell me about your early training as an artist and how your practice has developed to where it is now?

I came from a pretty traditional fine art background back home in Barbados, where I was painting from a very young age, then I was studying painting, drawing, film, and photography in an interdisciplinary foundation program at Barbados Community College. When I was deciding to go to Emily Carr for university, I had always been interested in animation. I had never actually animated anything before, but I had convinced myself that, you know, if I was going to go to art school, I should maybe go into a program that would make me money at some point. I figured out very early-on that that was a mistake. I love animation as a medium, but it’s a lot of labour for so little output. I was focusing on stop motion animation, so the camera and making images was always part of my practice anyway. Primarily, I was doing top-down photography of 2D paper puppets, moving them, taking a photo, moving them, etc. So, my interest in film and cinema has always kind of been there: before animation school, as I was studying it, and after graduating. After school I tried to maintain some kind of practice, and living in Vancouver, I think we are naturally exposed to and inclined towards photo practices because of our history. That’s when I started to actually use what I learned in animation school with photo taking and editing and cinema. 

It’s interesting that your practice now utilizes the photo taking and editing skills from animation school because of the ways photos exist in your practice. They are either completely appropriated or are photographs of appropriated images. What draws you to the act of appropriating imagery?

My love for cinema and film. My brain is like this network of references and as I move about my life I’m thinking about how it relates to films I’ve seen. I think my interest in wanting to use media that doesn't belong to me is informed by that thought process. Also, piracy and “borrowed” media has been ingrained in me from an early age where growing up in the Caribbean there are no guiding laws or consequences for illegally downloading things. My local video rental store growing up—which was run as a legitimate business—would rent out web-ripped copies of new blockbuster movies. You know: the kind where someone’s filming in the cinema and you can see the silhouettes of audience members popping up and down. And when I studied stop-motion animation, I was building sets. So, my practice now follows these ideas of taking images, reprinting them, and creating a kind of theatrical set to rephotograph them in. It becomes almost like a stage for signifiers to shift in meaning. Ambiguous, but also pointed. 

That's a great segue into your recent solo show at Wil Aballe, eight years after you were in the group show where I first saw you. A lot of the imagery from A hound marks its spot is appropriated from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom.” Can you tell me about the exhibition and how images from the film were a starting point for the appropriation of other source material?

The idea for that show started about two years ago when I participated in this residency at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Italy. I was with a group of 14 other artists. We were working closely for a month in an Italian villa—which was very dreamy—and decided that we wanted to have movie nights as part of this residency and we themed all of our selections around films that were set inside villas. We were having this kind of meta experience of living and working in a villa while watching content about villas, or where the villa—the architecture of it—creates the stories and the dynamics inside of it. 

Did you watch “Under the Tuscan Sun,” starring Diane Lane? 

No but “Suspiria”—one of my favs—made the cut. “120 Days of Sodom” ended up on the list. It’d been on my to-watch list since I was a teenager, but I've always heard it’s extremely brutal, gory, graphic, just not pleasurable to watch in any way. So I always put it off—for all of my 20s, basically. At the residency I decided “this is the moment.” Pasolini is critiquing fascism in Italy during World War II. It’s about a group of fascists who kidnap a group of working-class people and force them through all these forms of torture for 120 days. There’s a moment in that film where one of the forms of torture is making the captives act like dogs; they put leashes on them, made them get on their hands and knees. But they were sincerely acting like dogs in that moment. It struck me as this point, this very brief moment in the film—that was quite different to the rest of what was going on—they were embodying this sort of queer sense of being, in a kind of moment of escape from the situation they were in.

Was that a starting point for you to think of other images of puppy play?

Yeah. I was thinking a lot about queer puppy play representation and what that representation means for queer subcultures. It’s typically a community of people wanting to escape the everyday capitalist life. It’s literally about playing and being unproductive, and relishing in that unproductivity. So I got really interested in it. Exploring more representations of queer puppy play, specifically. But then more broadly just dogs—a “being a dog” mentality. 

I see two uses of images and photography in the show. The first being Marking (2025), a photograph that you took and presented classically printed and framed. In that photograph, there are appropriated photos of a robocop dog and, there’s a cartoon, right? 

There’s a meme of a dog slopping up water. 

Yes! These images of dogs and authority against a green screen background, this intermediary space of potential, and then those streams of piss. You’re pissing on these images. With the second use of images, you are creating these constructions of collaged film stills cast in resin. I’m wondering about those two different methods of using images. On the one hand they’re performed on and rephotographed, on the other they’re treated and turned into a sculpture. Can you talk about those two different impulses?

I’m really interested in the concept of preservation. I work with archives—legitimate queer archives—as well as archives of film where I’m just ripping stills from them. When I do, I’m thinking about what’s important to preserve or not preserve. In both of those methods you mentioned there’s an element of preservation, but it comes through destruction. With the appropriated photos covered in resin, there’s a level of destruction as the ink jet prints are soaking up this liquid resin, then those inks start to spill and leak, and when the resin becomes this solid plastic, it’s in theory preserved forever. With Marking it’s preserving those as well by photographing the already existing images, but then the destruction comes in the form of me and my partners pissing on them. In both cases destruction is being preserved. 

So the material choices that you're making are centered around creating a kind of infrastructure that allows for preservation and destruction?

There’s another work in that show, Preserved territory (2025), with a literal bag of piss that also houses a small inject print which is then cast in resin. The image inside the bag of pee is literally being destroyed by the ammonia and the acids in the urine, but, perpetually preserved in this hunk of plastic that will be here for like 1000 years.

The essay you wrote for this show comes to mind. In it you said that the queer image is non-reproducible. Can you tell me a bit about that?  

When I think about the queer image as being non-reproducible, I think about queerness in general as being an identity that is obviously against the status quo; it doesn’t fit the mold. I think queerness should be something that’s always striving to disrupt these norms, right? Like an acknowledgement of being outside of heteronormative society and structures and systems of power. Thinking about queerness as not trying to fit into the standard, but a constant acknowledgment of breaking away from the standard. And so, I think a lot about reproducibility, even in terms of, for instance, making multiples of a sculpture from a mold, right? The idea that it’s a standardized outline of something, that it fits the norm, and so it can be reproduced infinitely. But I think it’s important for queer people—or for queer media and queer images—to not try to fit into the idea of being able to be replicated for normative eyes or normative standards. So, yeah, I was thinking a lot about how to try to disrupt this idea of reproducibility. Or even if we think about the idea that as soon as we label something—like “great, we’ve created a new label for gender diverse queerness”—as soon as we label it and we put a name to it,  we legitimize it. We make it concrete and we make it fixed. Then it’s kind of our jobs again to keep dismantling that. It’s like this constant post-structural breaking down of these systems, and that’s just how I see queerness in general. For me, it’s about engaging this idea of the queer image being non-reproducible—even though it is kind of ironic because I’m taking queer images and I'm literally reproducing them. But in the work, I’m also destroying that form of reproduction. To me, it’s about not settling—not settling for the mold that can create thousands of the same object—but trying to constantly shift the contours of that mold so that it’s never fixed in place, becoming essentially non-reproducible, always different, always transgressive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you expand on that connection between the non-reproducibility of the image and your destructive impulse?

This gets back to where I take these images, and that they’ve been filtered through many forms of reproduction. It’s an existing piece of media, and I screenshot it, and then I print it out, and then I rephotograph it, and then I scan it. So  this idea of reproduction becomes really fragmented as a way to look at the idea of reproducibility or non-reproducibility—or preservation or destruction—through this fragmented lens of both and. It’s both preservation and destruction. I think in my practice the non-reproducibility comes through in the forms of destruction. Images are being reproduced by my hand, taking media and fragmenting it from its original, fixed state or context. So, in that sense, it is a lens of destruction that takes it to from point A to point B. By the time it reaches point B, it’s something new and maybe it’s worth preserving or maybe not, but it creates this interesting dialogue about  weighing what’s important, what’s not important, what should be preserved, what should be destroyed. Both and. It’s the original carrying its context with it, and it’s also not the original, because it’s presented in an entirely new context. It fucks up the temporality of things, and I think that’s fertile. 

Connecting this desire for destruction and preservation with your engagement with archives, and specifically what you called “legitimate queer archives,” is a good segue to your work that showed as part of your Now, Never residency at Access Gallery. For your work Three sides of the same corner (after Morris and Trasov: Light On; Slide; Babyland) (2024), what drew you to work with the Morris/Trasov archive?

This was fresh off of finishing my MFA thesis work and I was already thinking “well, what's next?” I had been thinking a lot about Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov’s Babyland project back in the 70s—this sort of outdoor, “artist retreat” is not the right word—where these artists would go and hang out naked and do weird performances together and have sex and smoke weed. I was just thinking about these utopic qualities that felt very queer to me. Then I got accepted into the residency at Access Gallery, and it was the perfect time to access that archive and work with those images. I started sourcing images from the Belkin Art Gallery, because they have a huge archive of Morris/Trasov works there: a  lot of film stills from Babyland. Again, I was referencing the cinema of it all. That, too, became this deconstruction, or destruction, of images and archives. I was taking these existing still images, printing them out, fragmenting them, and using mirrors to reflect and fragment them even further. Then I’d rephotograph it as a set,  a scene or a stage, to think about complicating—and further complicating—how we see the images.

What’s interesting about those works is that—and this is not the only time you do this—your photographs of these archive photos really confuse space. You’ve done this quite a bit in installation, video, and photo works where the corners of architecture are used to confuse the flat photographic space. Is that what you mean by “queer spatiality”? 

Yeah. It’s such an abstract thing to talk about. I feel like queer people understand it, but we have a hard time describing it. Thinking about queer people or queer bodies that exist outside of standard architecture brought me to Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and the idea that the home is a gendered space directing where we go and how we relate to objects. A lot of queer artists tend to veer towards the outside—like the garden or a courtyard—as a place to break away from those structures of the gender binary. They look to these adjacent spaces they can identify with more, or they create their own spaces to orient their bodies. I’m thinking about Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage where he spent the last few years of his life as he was dying of AIDS. At Prospect Cottage he built this garden on the English coastline where it’s very inhospitable for growing plants and flowers, but he tried every day to keep building this garden. I like the idea of reorienting bodies outside of structured space. 

When it comes to the architecture inside the home, the corner is such a loaded space. It exists in a room, but it’s also a space that exists separately from the rest of the room. For me, growing up it was like a territory of punishment, you know, if you misbehave go stand in the corner, right? You’re still in the room, but it’s a space to go if you’ve done something wrong to  think about what you’ve done. 

Which then becomes this space of queer possibility. I’ve heard you speak about the island of Barbados and the archipelagos in relation to spatial potential and otherness and nonbinariness. Could you talk about how growing up in Barbados has informed your understanding and your relationship to queer space?

I’m sure this is not a unique experience, but being from an island or being from the Caribbean, the place where you grow up is always exoticized by Western North America and Europe. It’s always a vacation destination, a place to escape to. You’re made very much aware of that growing up: that you’re on an island. It feels like in the images that you see of your home in film and on the internet and TV it is always an escape. Or it’s where the villain's hideout is, or it’s fuckin’ Jurassic Park on this fictional island that’s described as being adjacent to the Caribbean. The Caribbean is always pushed to this mythical sort of space, and that negates lived experiences. I think that it’s like a double experience too,  being queer and from the Caribbean. The Caribbean is not the most queer friendly place because we were heavily colonized by Christian values, and that has permeated into everyday life throughout the Caribbean. Though it is getting better. But it’s this idea of feeling doubly removed from what you’re being shown. 

What sort of perspective did you gain about space and Barbados, having lived away from there for over a decade? 

If I had not moved here, I don’t know if I would have come out of the closet. Vancouver has obviously helped me in a lot of ways in that regard, but I don’t think this is a unique experience. Queers grow up in small towns or small countries all the time, and we’re like, “we gotta get the fuck out of here because there’s more out there for us.” I think that’s a very common experience and I definitely felt that. I moved away and while it’s great, there’s also sacrifice that happens: you’re disconnected from your family and your culture and being away from it makes you want it more and appreciate what you had when you didn’t know any better.

Instead of just wanting out of it, you can appreciate the need to be away from it which allows you to revere it again. 

100%. 

You also talk about your work being about queer time. With your work with archives, we can understand how time comes into play with that, but how does queer time come into play with your new work, The weight of three years, which consists of scanned images of these PrEP bottles?

That’s a good question. I think time comes into it in the literal sense that these objects carry time with them. Instead of discarding them, I’ve decided to collect them for the past three years, so there’s already a three-year time stamp on them. There’s the time stamp of the daily ingested pill that goes through my body and does what it needs to do to prevent the transmission of HIV. To get the prescription I have to get tested every three months, then I get another three month refill. So the year is sort of broken down into these quarters. It also catalogues my relationship with my partners, because it’s not just my bottles, it’s their bottles as well. Again, it becomes a photograph where it’s captured or preserved in a moment, but then the mirrors interfere with that moment of capturing or preserving it. And the fact that it’s scanned turns it even more into a “document.” It’s like Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy-piles. Time was imbued in that work as well. They are both about carrying the time that could be measured by weight if that was possible. 

I like that you compared it to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy-piles. If we think of Untitled (Portrait of Ross) (1991)—where the pile of candies were the weight of Gonzalez-Torres’ partner Ross, and the removal of candies by viewers was a metaphor for Ross’s body as it was diminished by AIDS—here we are 44 years later and aspects of the post-PrEP gay experience, like taking a daily dose of PrEP, are still ritualized around this virus.

Going through the pandemic, queer people—whether we lived through the AIDS crisis or not—we had this moment where we felt this mourning or sadness. Suddenly we’re in a situation again where people are in danger. I can’t help but think of the queer elders who came before me and who saw an entire generation, not completely lost, but significantly affected. And now we’re living in a time of sexual liberation again. Do these PrEP bottles reach backwards in time pre-AIDS epidemic as much as they reach back to the epidemic?

History repeats itself, but queer time looks back and helps us feel the events that brought us to this point in time.

Absolutely.

There is obviously a queerness in your subject matter, but there is also a queerness in your material choices and your methodology of representing queer subject matter. I don’t think it’s necessarily sexually explicit, although you don’t shy away from that at all. There is something desirous, and sensual, and very much engaged with the body. Why is it important for you to represent queerness in that way, rather than some broader, politically contrarian understanding of queerness that’s disconnected from the body?

It goes back to those ideas of queer spatiality: life, space, and architecture. It’s the body that experiences what we feel, it’s the body that is affected by architecture, it’s the body that goes through these motions or finds desire paths. The queer handling of the materials comes from using bodies. Making the work, I’m standing over something and peeing on it or pouring resin over it. Viewing the work, people must engage their bodies, too. In A hound marks its spot, many of the works are covered in resin which makes it very difficult to take in the image all at once because of the reflective qualities. You have to move around the work to engage with it piece by piece, never granted full access to the image.

Do you think that photos in and of themselves are unable to critique photography and issues of representation? It’s almost like you need to see it alongside another medium to access a full and robust critique.

Is photo adequate? Oh, I don’t know. I feel a natural inclination to make installation work: photo installation work and video work. It feels necessary to work within all these things because it allows me to work at a more architectural scale. I’m not saying that photo is inadequate. But, for me, my brain is jumping all over the place to all these mediums and then finding a way to make them coalesce.

Thank you for speaking with me about your practice. Can you give me a little teaser of what’s to come? What movies are you watching now that you think will influence your future work?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Eyes of Laura Mars, which came out in the 70s, starring Faye Dunaway. It’s such a cunty film.