Jamie Ross is a Montreal‑based visual artist and filmmaker who currently splits their time between Los Angeles and Montreal—two cities that inform his practice. A practice rooted in community, ritual, and the recovery of unspoken histories, their work traverses gallery installations, photography, video art, and documentary film—foregrounding queer intergenerational connections and the manifestations of secrecy. In Ross’s research-based practice, they explore personal and public repositories, official archives, libraries, museum collections, and oral histories to excavate stories that official narratives have flattened or buried over time. Their interdisciplinary oeuvre offers a model for how historical recovery, queer praxis, and ritual can produce new possibilities for identity, healing, and collective memory. 

Ross’s filmmaking practice emphasizes the beauty of privacy and power of secrecy. They navigate the complexities of trauma and desire in filmic works such as Dad Can Dance, which follows Ross’s father David’s return to dance, ending 45 years of secrecy about his ballet career. With the support of a queer community, the personal reunion is framed as a broader meditation on liberation. Dad Can Dance won the Hot Docs Audience Award for Best Short in 2022, cementing Ross’s reputation for storytelling and translating intimate histories into compelling public narratives. 

I first met Ross at the 2024 University Art Association of Canada conference. They presented their paper “Trolling for a Record of Plague Year Public Sex in Canada with Evergon” situating the practice of Montreal photographer Evergon within the photographic documentation of queer landscapes in contrast to his contemporaries Alvin Baltrop and Peter Hujar, and wider histories of public sex—a thematic throughline that recurs in Ross’s recent projects, including their forthcoming feature film Spoils of the Park (La Jungle). In March, we met over Zoom to discuss the moments that have shaped Ross’s trajectory, the stakes of unearthing hidden narratives, and the ways in which filmmaking becomes effective for contextualizing identity-formation and community-building. 

Through modes of documentary and historical research, Ross interrogates the politics of visibility and the right for subjects to remain inscrutable. During our conversation Ross and I discussed homophobic landscape architectures, and what it means to recover queer lives that have been tangled in the literal and metaphorical undergrowth of the urban forest. The interview that follows explores the documentary impulse, the guidance of queer elders, that one art teacher who made a difference, the complex histories of public sex, and the ways in which Ross’s practice continually returns to and revitalizes the past.

 

 

 

I think there's something really appealing, and really compelling, really loving, about sitting with the fact that our historical antecedents that we claim today may not claim us back—to allow them not to be projected into some known future where we find ourselves today, and to offer them the benefit of privacy and unknowability.

 

 

 

I remember hearing you speak at UAAC and being mesmerized by your entry points into the histories and photographic documents of public intimacy. Specifically, what stayed with me from your presentation was these amazing photographs of the Molson Family Crypt at Mont Royal Cemetery in Montreal, and your research and work with Evergon. Can you return to and situate the research you were doing then? 

Yes, absolutely. At that time, I was looking primarily at fulsome documents of public sexual gatherings and landscapes. I was also looking at Peter Hujar’s work, and the ways in which some artists opt for the more documentary mode, and other artists opt for a different mode—Evergon’s being theatrical. I was looking at the history of photography, especially through the early moving image, and at some of the research from All Light Everywhere, which is a feature-length film directed by Theo Anthony about surveillance and the Taser Corporation (now known as Axon Enterprise), and I would say, one of my main influences for my upcoming film Spoils of the Park (La Jungle). During that time, I was conducting research on the origins of the police body camera, and tracing how the footage and the data from those body cam projects are still held within the Taser Corporation, which created the devices. Following that research, I wrote an essay on the history of the lens and the connection between the circular moving lens and the Gatling gun, looking at how these technological processes of military technology feed ocular technologies that we use today to create moving images. 

Evergon’s modes of working are in some ways documentary—in that they do show what the spaces were like. So we see the Molson Family Crypt, for instance—like you mentioned—but we don't see any of the people 'inhabiting’ it. The story around it is still apocryphal. Evergon lets this idea that there are 500 fairies flitting around with their dicks out kind of stay in the imaginary, visually at least, of the viewer. Which I think is a really cool strategy. And it's a very different strategy than artists like Alvin Baltrop, Peter Hujar, and David Wornarovich even, who really ‘image’ the scenes. They show you the cock, they show you the graffiti, they show you the group scenes. Sometimes they're even taken from these really amazing high angles, from the tops of buildings overlooking these group scenes or landscapes. Those images can serve really distinct purposes—historicizing purposes, documentary purposes. I'm interested in this documentary impulse as it's activated by visual artists. Like Theo Anthony, he's using speech and poetry and verse, narrative, voiceover—a lot of strategies that you would see in an Errol Morris documentary, for example.

I have noticed that Evergon plays various roles in your work: a research subject, a collaborator, even a character in Evergon on the Quarry's Edge (2022). How does one project lead you to the next? I see the threads of this research as throughlines that connect the research you presented at UAAC and the work you have been doing more recently. As a precursor, how has this research, and the themes you were investigating then, led you to new projects since? 

Yeah, Evergon is the protagonist of my new film I'm directing, Spoils of the Park (La Jungle). I've been friends with Evergon for probably 10 years now and he’s inspired so much of my work since that meeting. I began to look more formally at his work while writing a review for C Magazine on his retrospective at the Musee de Beaux-Arts de Quebec, which was entitled Theaters of the Intimate. So a lot of the work that I was sharing at UAAC was trying to create more of a social context for his photography, especially for the series of his that I was sharing in that talk, called Manscapes. It's a series of work he's shown only sparingly over the last 50 years. His retrospective, for example, included only a small collection from that series.

It's all iterative in my practice. The way it works for me is that in the studio, there are ‘folders’ about projects, and those projects are oftentimes very much adjacent to one another. So, for example, I came to Los Angeles to study a secret society of drag queens and marine biologists that did a buyer's club for syphilis medication and a lot of other sort of weird, unruly things. That project occupies a folder in my studio, and it has become writing, audio projects, moving image projects, and sculpture projects.

The same kind of thing happens with my work with Evergon. For the last 10 years, there's been a metaphorical folder in my studio where everything we do together—exhibitions, writing, interviews—will stay. And if I'm doing another project with the same sort of source material, I'll reach out to him and see if the connection feels good, and if it does, reopen that folder.

So it really is the discovery of source materials that sparks ideas for you? 

In a way, yes. In 2019 I produced a project called Club Gemini, which was about a bar—a bar noted for its red velvet upholstery—close to the Maison de la Montaigne, Montreal. It was opened in 1969, and there was so much unknown about the club. In my research there were only three or four newspaper clippings I drew from. One of them had an interview with the queens who ran it—these amazing queens from the Gay Liberation era who had fascinatingly different notions about what it meant to be gay than most of us have six or seven decades later. But they were still so recognizable as queens, and in an era when gay bars were not run by us, this was unique. It lasted less than a month before being shut down. That research revealed possibly the only voice recording of one of the club’s founding members, Paul Bédard, who was also the founder of Québec’s socialist homophile organization, International Sex Equality Anonymous, active in the 1950s and 1960s. That research became the source material for three different artistic presentation iterations of the same project: an exhibition, a sound installation, and an article for Montreal newspaper La Presse.

It's the same for the queer ecology research I do, too. For example, the research from an activist project I helped form called Cruise Control. A lot of the research we were doing in that context is still good for other projects, right? I think that some artists have a sort of complete way of working, where it's like, once the thing that they are working on is complete, it's sort of crystallized, and then the objects of that research can circulate. But for me, there's so much information and data in my practice that I often will return to and reuse. So yeah, it's a great question. I love hearing how other artists structure their relationship to source material. And for me, I definitely always kind of come back to these fundamental interests, which are my folders.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m really interested in this concept of return in your practice. Particularly how you approach the organization of your research, and how past iterations and incomplete projects become reconstituted within new projects. With regard to historical documents, I'm curious, how do we return to these histories, to create new stories? Your research is concerned with histories, but your filmmaking practice is really about storytelling. I wanted to ask you, how did you arrive at filmmaking as an artist, or how did it find you? 

So, it all began in my wasted youth, actually [laughs]. It was in a high school classroom. It was a really, really good high school art teacher who noticed that we were getting drunk and high too often and he was like: Do you guys need the key to the art room? Do you guys need a place to be? Not in the cold? And the answer was yes. So he connected us to the local video art database, and we would rent video art tapes, and then bring them to school. It was really life-changing. My friends and I started making our own art tapes pretty soon after that. Our first projects were very influenced by watching Colin Campbell, Lisa Steele and other Canadian video artists.

My collaborator Bonny Poon and I started making sort of diaristic projects—we starred in our own videos. I think this was before the internet. We had just gotten the internet at home, but, like, dial-up. So yeah, that was the beginning for sure, and from then on I just kept making films. But I didn't go to art school until I was 36. And then it felt like art wasn’t necessarily going to be my breadwinner. I had a whole separate career unrelated to filmmaking and art. I was a preschool teacher, and my background is in linguistics and bilingual early childhood education, which eventually turned into teaching those curricula. So, I was making work, oftentimes on weekends, or on my months off. I would take time from teaching to go do residencies for a few months and make a piece. Then I would tour with the piece, in exhibitions and festivals. And then slowly but surely, I was beginning to make my living from my practice.

Incredible. You can see that early moment in some of the clips in your film Dad Can Dance (2022), the home film footage of you, talking to the camera, and talking with your dad sort of just performing for the camera. This was your collaboration, right? Between father and son, but also as artists?

My dad always had a video camera at home. This was very common for boomer parents, because that was the generation that had accessible Hi8 videotapes. So in some of those clips, it was actually me taking his camera to shoot him, like I was doing 30 years later. One of the stranger parts of making a film with my father was the process of remembering. We spent hours and hours and hours digitizing his archive. It was the middle of the pandemic, and I would travel from Montreal to Toronto, where my dad lived. We digitized Hi8 tapes like all day, every day. It was an insanely large collection of family tapes. And in that process it immediately occurred to us, like, oh, this is a really interesting mirroring. We had not really realized that he had made so much work, because it was just family videos, right? It didn’t count as art to him, and maybe it’s not art per se, but it was a great parallel between us to be like: oh no, this is actually a very deep practice of yours. This dovetailed the work we were doing around creativity once we decided to make a film together about our relationship, after he started speaking about the dance career he had chosen not to speak about for almost 50 years. For me, private family image-making is a practice with such vast potency.

It's really cool that through the process of digitizing the family archive, and remembering, that you recognized the collection of tapes as a body of work in its own right. This is something I think about in my own research. I wonder if it crossed your mind too—with a collection like that—does it count as something worth archiving to somebody else? What does that archive mean to a stranger?

Yeah, I think that it counts. I think that people definitely archive their family videos.

Yeah, but what happens if someone else was to come across it, someone that wasn't part of your family? I don’t know, what do you think? When we die one day, and somebody drops off garbage bags full of our stuff at an archive, which archive is it? And what stuff stays? What materials are considered important?

It's really interesting, there's an incredible amount of archival material at the Archives of Ontario at York University, and a lot of that is family archives. Queer archives are also noted for their collections, as most of these institutions (but not all), arose as collective responses to the emergency of property being lost during the height of the AIDS crisis, lost to landlords, homophobic families, or the dump truck. It truly is a fascinating issue, like, if it's just completely meaningless—private family filming. And especially in light of the era of digitized iPhone archives that people make now. There's a questionable use value for all of it, but until the iPhone, it was collections like the Archives of Ontario that collected family materials because it represented so much potential in telling the less historicized stories of a society. There was so much in even a photo taken at a birthday party that reveals something about that neighbourhood, community, city, province, and moment in time. So there's definitely a precedent for public archives receiving family materials.

Is this how you began with the idea of making Dad Can Dance in the first place, by looking through your dad's collection of family films?

No, actually. So it started when I was going to work on a project on poisons with my collaborator Gesig Isaac at a residency in Banff in 2018, and it was by coincidence that I stopped in Toronto to have lunch with my dad. It was then that he spoke for the first time in 45 years about being a ballet dancer, and about how his last residency was at the Banff Center. Nobody knew, it was this secret. So no, there wasn’t an idea yet, there was no film, there was no idea to make a project, because he hadn't told me until then. The idea for Dad Can Dance began out of my sort of wondering if there was more to this brief anecdote he had shared with me. The first thing I did was have a series of long phone calls. And then I visited the archive of the Banff Centre to find pictures of him dancing in the 1970s. 

The idea of secrets and secrecy has manifested in multiple works of yours. In Dad Can Dance there's this line where you say “this story is about secrets” and then secrets come up in later work too—queer secrets, secret societies, discrete cultures, chance encounters. I want to know more about your interest in secrets.

Yeah, secrecy is really connected to privacy for me. I'm very much interested in pre-legalization and pre-decriminalization queer cultures. That's, like, the boilerplate for many of my projects. It's very rare that I'll do a research project on a post-1969 case. And part of that is to sort of resurrect that feeling palette, let's say, of the cultures that survived—and thrived, in some cases—before there was a sort of public imperative. The expository mode, the expository coming out gesture, was very politically potent in the 60s and 70s. Even the GLF’s (Gay Liberation Front) motto was “come out,” period. This is the political imperative that gave us the Trans Day of Visibility, for instance. That's also still very much in the common parlance, which is very critical for people who work with visuality. The idea that the more visible, the more politically effective we can be. It’s like: if we're not enumerated in the census, if we're not enumerated in the streets, then we don't matter politically. But visibility has not proven politically to be a panacea. There are political reasons that under liberalism, visibility is offered to oppressed groups who are demanding housing, freedom from police brutality, and healthcare. 

Most of my projects try to look at the other ways of being, treating them with more sensitivity and generosity than the “come out” brand of gay and lesbian politics did. The dichotomy that was proposed by the Gay Lib movement was that there was conservative gays and bi people who were self-hating, conservative trans people who were stealth, and then there were the self-loving, “healed” queer and trans people. And it was the healed people who had “pride.” I like to place my projects in relation to the Pride movement. What happens to the people who are not proud, who have shame, secrets, and self-loathing? 

Especially the projects of the Victorian era that I've been working on, and in these examples I uncover that we don't always see shame. We also see a lot of really beautiful sexual cultures in the pre-Stonewall era, and they are marked by a lot of privacy. That cannot be conflated with shame. The earliest documented queer collective moments are under-researched. Jules Gill-Peterson’s research is a major inspiration for me. She is a trans historian who writes about inscrutability, people's right to not appear in the historical record, to remove themselves from historicization. I think there's something really appealing, and really compelling, really loving, about sitting with the fact that our historical antecedents that we claim today may not claim us back—to allow them not to be projected into some known future where we find ourselves today, and to offer them the benefit of privacy and unknowability. They were so deeply surveilled and vilified by the institutions that studied their lives. For example, see Peterson’s cogent reflections in the 2022 film Framing Agnes directed by Chase Joynt, which examines a series of mid-20th century doctors that offered trans people access to affirming healthcare in exchange for biographical information that was later identified as partially falsified.

I want to return to surveillance and how we can understand surveillance within the archive and history—how you approach the concept of a secret holder. You're uncovering things about these histories and people. How do you approach surveillance and visibility in your research practice? 

Usually my projects will begin when a person begins to tell me a story. It's not that I'm necessarily uncovering too much as a historian, although sometimes that happens. There's a mix of the two methods. For example, I uncovered the project that brought me to UCLA using old-school historical methods. You know, reading through people's wills, contacting people's descendants, having interviews with curators that received collections from wills, going into fire insurance maps to find where the former street grid was to find out how people would have entered the back part of a property, reading through the handwritten notes of police snitches that were used in court proceedings, and the handwritten notes of the snitches for newspapers that led to a kind of scandal reporting. This is sort of the classic historian's training. So sometimes that's how things emerge. I'm going through these classical primary sources, and secondary sources, too. So eyewitnesses. 

The story of Neptune's Closet is that there was a secret society called the 606 Club. 606 refers to the 606th analog of a drug called Salvarsan (also known as Arsphenamine or Compound 606), introduced in the 1910s, which was used to cure syphilis before penicillin. There had been a huge scandal in the 1910s when everyone in the 606 club was arrested, and so there’s been a significant amount of mainstream historical work done on it. 23 men were arrested, and there were a significant number of guilty findings, and suicides as a result. The bar raids were really significant for Southern California, and they resulted in the creation of the first oral sex laws in the state. So there was this serious reaction, both in society, but also with legislation. The part that I uncovered was that they had a foil for gathering the above-ground activities of the club: a private marine biology museum. The museum operated in the same building, upstairs from the club. There was this whole other aspect to the activities of the club. Downstairs was the club, and they had initiation rituals, a liturgy, and a series of songs that were sung. Most of the details of their ritual life are lost to time, but with the help of scholars, queer teen psychics, and a really delicious fiction-writing or critical fabulation component, I wrote new songs using the site of their gathering as a main inspiration: the ocean. I located the mollusk specimens that they had collected, hundreds of thousands of specimens, which constituted one of the most substantial collections of seashells in California’s history. I located them in four museums. I also found recordings of the ritual songs, and eye-witness accounts describing the interior spaces of the club. Finally, I found three photographs. Those materials constitute the skeletal forms of this project and it is built out from there. 

Then, conversely, there's other projects like the film I'm working on right now, Spoils of the Park (La Jungle), that’s rooted in anecdotes that were shared by living people. For this project, I began with the oral history from a series of queer Montreal elders. The idea being that they wanted to share these anecdotes and aspects of their eyewitness accounts of the mass arrests on Mont Royal in the 1970s and 1980s that had never made the historical record, never entered community discourse. It was from their telling of these stories that the project began. 

That's a completely different type of history making right? Recovering the oral histories that become like whispers, kept like secrets, or the stories that were never shared. 

Exactly. Particularly in the early ‘80s, there was a mass arrest in the park so significant that it felt like it should be considered on par with Stonewall in New York or the Bathhouse raids in Toronto. But defending our historically queer public spaces was a highly divisive issue in activist circles. It was easier to rally behind institutions like bars and bathhouses to a hostile society. So the origin of this project came from these eyewitness accounts, and subsequently a trip to the actual landscape, to a specific curve in the footpath where we were able to pinpoint exactly where the police hid paddy wagons for their entrapment sting, and exactly where my friend escaped the beating and arrest that dozens of men received at the hands of the police that night. So that's when we opened up a file, to return to your question of project methodology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Spoils of the Park (La Jungle), you’re researching these histories of surveillance of public sex cultures, and exposure through the ecology of the park itself. You examine government led clearcutting of trees in Mont Royal Park meant to expose and deter the indecencies of queer convergence and public sex through the presence of the Emerald Ash Borer beetle. 

Can you speak more about the history of the park?

Yeah, absolutely. The Montreal Morality Cuts are an important part of the city's history. It's one of the most significant social cleansing projects in Canadian history. There haven't been many major historical examinations of these events told from a queer perspective, but Matthieu Caron is an incredible historian who has done incredible research and writing on this era in Montreal history, chronicling the specific political origins of the clear cuts on the mountain.

Then touching on a little bit of the research I've been doing with the McCord Museum's collection of early Montreal photography, and the first few decades of tourist photography actually contain multitudes around single men in the landscape, in the city around Dominion Square (Place du Canada), around the Jeanne-Mance Park, and of course, the mountain Mont Royal Park. In my research I’m looking at images that come from the 1870s. Mont Royal park opened in 1876. So this is its 150th anniversary. For the film, we’re analyzing a lot of the park’s designer’s writings on morality with a critical eye to the control of sexuality undergirding Frederick Law Olmsted's design for the park. The sector that had been staked as queer and sex work territory was named The Jungle for its dense forest, a term so common it was used in the vitriolic newspaper articles of the day calling for its destruction. 

The film is interested in seeing how moral policing and city planning has been a critical feature of the park for the past 150 years, and how that is borne out in the ecology of our central park. In the film, we follow Montrealers who can sketch the picture of the queer forest as they know it. We interviewed two police officers, one former police officer who admits to having committed hate crimes. And we follow ecologists and entomologists that basically walk the viewer through the trace effects of the 1950s clear cuts and the removal of the undergrowth that continued heavily until the 1980s, when we start seeing the mass arrests of people on the mountain.

There's a really distinct history of the Emerald Ash Borer. The accidentally introduced beetle eats only ash trees, and there is a very specific reason why the Montreal outbreak on Mount Royal is more critical than in other cities. Following the 1950s surveillance clear cuts, ash trees were planted as a cover-up plantation. The beetle acts as a literal trace effect. The film is as interested in queer history or human history of the mountain as it is in the ecology of the landscape, spheres which are deeply intertwined.

I really enjoy learning about your methods, your process, and how ideas move through your body of work. I feel like the themes we have maneuvered this conversation through other works of yours, in a way, lead us to Spoils of the Park (La Jungle), your first feature-length film. What sparked Spoils of the Park (La Jungle), for you?

It was when the elders approached me wanting to highlight how the mass arrests before AIDS had turned the parks very quiet. That idea, to me, was not necessarily a feature-length film. Like, nothing about that needed to be a feature-length film necessarily. However, when we connected the dots with the social control and surveillance elements of the ongoing landscaping projects, my collaborators and I began to feel like, okay, this is like turning into an interesting project worth pursuing. There's some dynamics here that have never really been brought to the surface. But in a parallel way—as with the Victorian drag club seashell collection project—there was this discovery that made me realize, oh no, this is actually deeply significant history, and someone needs to do this, and I think… I think it might have to be us.

That moment happened when we started uncovering other types of nocturnal gathering in the park. We began to find more than just guys anonymously fucking in the park. In the 50s, we saw a lot more encampments and sex work, a lot of people inhabiting the park in different ways than we assume to be the case today. These different scales began to emerge. Also, in terms of numbers of participants, in the research we would start seeing guys arriving in the hundreds, and we start seeing guys in different subcultures, arriving at different times of day. We started seeing guys going in the winter, we started to discover a more biodiverse kind of forest. We just assumed we would find one type of activity, and then we started finding all these different kinds. We started finding named sectors of the park. The named sectors give the project its title in French. La Jungle was one of the sectors. There was another sector called The Kitchen, because it was so hot. There was another sector that was, like, mostly platonic, and people would gather to discuss the news of the day and not really fuck, but instead bring newspapers with them. We started seeing these really incredible cultures that sort of got flattened by time, by hate, and the morality projects.

But I think going back to this idea of what turned it into something worth pursuing, is this sensation of aliveness. It emerged by going back even further into history, to the period where I found the gallows where people who were caught on Mount Royal were hanged, and the structure is still standing today. And it's just… it was this moment of, like, oh my word, there were just so many stories in this history that got tangled in the undergrowth of the park itself. The park was something I thought I'd understood because of my own experience there. But there were so many little filaments of the story that it became so much richer than I thought it was. 

There are all these strange little attempts to control and to overgrow the empire. It all led back to this question of: what is the park? Like, what is the idea of the park? What are the philosophical and the historical ontologies of a park, and these questions led me to Frederick Law Olmsted himself, who designed Mount Royal Park. It was Olmsted who coined the term landscape architecture, and the research brought me to Boston to his archive, his studio, and a museum. I began to find a lot of really disturbing writings around sexuality and Victorian psychiatry. While studying the designs for how to put a carriageway through the mountain, there were also designs on how to improve the moral fiber of the Montreal population—a project to improve moral health on a population scale. 

I’m very impressed by your research on this project, I can’t even comprehend…I can’t imagine the work it takes to begin a feature-length film. You’re already well into it, and you’ll be returning to Montreal to complete production, right? What comes next?

Yes, exactly. I mean, for me, this is how the project can demand 90 minutes of viewers’ time. I think that there's this thing about an exhibition which is really liberatory. It can contain a lot of aspects of a research project that a work in one medium cannot easily contain: the album and the liner notes for those who want to go over them as they listen to the record. For me, the idea of being able to make something which is linear, and narrative, and does request a viewer's attention through time is an incredible privilege. I've only made 30-minute films of that sort, and so the idea of making one that's three times as long is so exciting, because I can really get into all the nitty-gritty and all the weird side stories. But I think more artists need to really think with documentary modes in the forefront, rather than thinking just about the creative visual expression aspects. I don't know, I feel like, as an artist who is oftentimes telling stories, I'm drifting away from visual art as a vehicle for certain projects. 

One of the questions for the film, the heart of the film, is asking: what's the cruising monument? How do we erect a monument to these deeply historical scenes without making it necessarily just about the beatdowns that happened, the violence, but instead, a document that reflects the heart of my elder friends’ stories. It’s a delight to be able to accompany them back to the mountain and to bring younger queers up to join us in that process. 

Thank you, Jamie, for sharing your work with me. It's been a pleasure. I wish you the best of luck with the rest of production. I can’t wait for Spoils of the Park (La Jungle)’s release, and I hope to see you in Montreal soon.