JAMES FOWLER

A Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, and community organiser whose practice examines how cultural meaning is made and contested through images, objects, and environments. Working across painting, textiles, soft sculpture, installation, and performance, Fowler investigates how queerness, masculinity, and belonging are shaped by visual culture, social ritual, and relationships to place. His work draws on queer aesthetics, queer ecology, and lived experience to reinterpret symbols associated with landscape, identity, and nationhood, and to ask what other forms of belonging might emerge at the margins of those inherited systems.

Fowler's long-running painting series, often derived from aerial views of cities and cartographic structures, treats landscape as an emotional and cultural terrain shaped by memory, movement, and collective experience. Rendered in acrylic, oil, and gouache on paper, wood, and canvas, these works merge cartography and geometric abstraction to map not just physical spaces but the ideological systems embedded within them.

More recent work moves into textiles, soft sculpture, and installation to examine how masculinity and vulnerability are constructed through objects, rituals, and environments. Felt rifles, crocheted jockstraps, embroidered bandannas, and stitched banners translate symbols of masculinity into soft and tactile materials, drawing from domestic craft traditions, queer signalling systems, and camp aesthetics. Projects such as Catch & Release, Doe and Deery, and The Touch Trees place queer figures and crafted objects inside environments shaped by hunting culture, rural masculinity, and ecological mythology. At the centre of this work are Fowler's cervitaurs: hybrid human-deer figures in crochet, faux taxidermy, and beadwork that use the grammar of the trophy and the fable to ask what the hunt is really about, and who it has always excluded.

Over the past two decades, Fowler has contributed significantly to the development of queer visual culture in Canada. He created and curated the 10x10 Photography Project, a decade-long portrait archive documenting LGBTQ artists and cultural figures across Canada, and co-curated the Church Street Mural Project with Syrus Marcus Ware during World Pride 2014. Fowler is a founding member of the Throbbing Rose Collective, producers of Nuit Rose, and co-organiser of Queer Up North, a wilderness artist residency exploring intersections of queer culture, ecology, and place. He collaborates with curator Pearl Van Geest under the name SweetThings.

Fowler studied Film and Visual Arts in Toronto and North Bay and maintains a full-time studio practice. His work has been exhibited across North and South America and Europe and is held in private and corporate collections.