August Klintberg | Aaron McIntosh | Conny Karlsson Lundgren

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Montreal)

Aaron McIntosh’s The Gloaming exhibition view, January 2025 / Image credit: Michael Patten

August Klintberg, Aaron McIntosh, and Conny Karlsson Lundgren

On view until March 1, 2025
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Montreal)

Artist Talk with August Klintberg and Aaron McIntosh:
Saturday, March 1, 2025, 4pm

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is excited to present until March 1st three exhibitions in parallel that explore queerness through various mediums—collages, quilts, and video— while reflecting on both the past and the present. Lookbook by August Klintberg explore how mass print cultures provide tools to shape and study queerness. The Gloaming, the first Canadian exhibition of Aaron McIntosh brings together quilts and collages of images of vulnerable queer men lifted from personal and public erotic archives. The video Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes), by Swedish artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren, depicts the community of an international gay liberation camp in southern France in the 1970s.

August Klintberg, Lookbook (B 1-4), 2025

August Klintberg
Lookbook

This project returns to some of the fundamental impulses of Klintberg’s earliest adolescent encounters with visual culture through playfully adapting research strategies used by art historian Aby Warburg. In order to theorize relationships between historic artworks, Warburg created a series of collaged panels, gathering photographic reproductions called the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927-1929). Similarly, Lookbook (2025) is a series of photocopy collages on archival, acid-free Japanese kozo paper embellished with hand-cut aluminum sequins presented in Plexiglas boxes. This work includes diverse sources such as the seasonal Sears catalogue, Victoria magazine, Thrasher, and the International Male catalogue. Each of these publications has latent uses in gender-queer expressions of sexuality, desire, and worldmaking, and Lookbook creates a single photographic environment from such disparate items. Klintberg is manifesting a speculative fusion of visual sources and codes to pose the simple but profound question: “how would my life be different if I had been raised believing queerness was good rather than bad?” Learn more

Discover the installation views | List of works | Listen to the artist

August Klintberg is an artist whose practice engages with antecedent artworks, architectures, and archives. His works are part of many collections, including the National Gallery of Canada. He is also an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts. Currently, in Montreal he has a permanent work installed in the lobby of the Humaniti complex, an ongoing installation on the façade of the Maison de la Culture, Côte-des-neiges, and is featured in the exhibition Génération XEROX at the Archives gaies du Québec. MacKenzie Gallery curator Crystal Mowry’s exhibition Thick as Thieves, opening February 2025, features a large-scale installation from the artist. In 2013 he was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award.

Aaron McIntosh, “Kinkquiz No 775: David” with Damask Rose, Lemon Balm, 2024

Aaron McIntosh
The Gloaming

The artist states that since 2020, we have seen an erosion of 2SLGBTQI+ protections in North America and across the globe. In The Gloaming, Aaron McIntosh is dismally responding to this cultural and political darkening of our times for queer rights. He refamiliarized himself with the gloaming – the time of dusk – as a potent moment of uncertainty, danger and erotic possibility. The Gloaming claims space for nuanced possibilities, acknowledges moments when camouflage and exposure overlap. These works are simultaneously homespun and carnal; they point to the frenetic nature of cruising culture: searching eyes darting, forms emerging in and out of recognition, as in the dating app grid, as in quilted patterns. Many generations of queers have found sanctuary in cruising, which shifts sexual inhibition away from the legal sanction of the home to the street, the park, the woods. Learn more

Discover the installation views | List of works | Listen to the artist

Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist and fourth-generation quiltmaker. He is also an Associate Professor and Coordinator in the Fibres & Material Practices program at Concordia University. His work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire and identity politics. His current research-creation project, Hot House/Maison Chaude, has been supported by a 2020-2023 SSHRC Insight Development grant and will soon be presented at the FOFA Gallery in Montreal. His work is part of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts collection and has been featured in major publications such as Future/Present: Arts in a Changing America (Duke University Press, 2024), Arte queer: corpi, segni, storie (Rizzoli, 2023) and Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community (AMMO Books, 2017).

Conny Karlsson Lundgren, Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes), 2021, film still (detail) / Archive photo: Eric de Keizer

Conny Karlsson Lundgren
Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes)

A collection of diary entries from 1977 written by four young Swedish gay men forms the starting point of the installation Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes). The group belonged to the socialist association Röda Bögar [Red Faggots], and the journal depicts their stay at an international gay liberation camp in southern France. Over 40 years later, Conny Karlsson Lundgren visited the farm where the camp took place and filmed the empty buildings along with the garden and surrounding landscape. The artist has created a montage of the filmed still images accompanied by archival photographs, saturated summer sounds, and recordings of the diary fragments. We meet the activists as they reflect on relationships, sexuality, politics and the possibility of using drag and female-coded expressions as a playful weapon against the patriarchy. Learn more

Conny Karlsson Lundgren is an interdisciplinary artist based in Sweden. He is interested in the ephemeral, accidental traces and moments that challenge existing narratives. Karlsson Lundgren is represented in the collections of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Gothenburg Art Museum and Malmö Art Museum, among others. In spring 2024, he presented a major mid-career solo exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm and created Gläntan/The Glade, Sweden’s first LGBTQI+ monument, which was inaugurated in Gothenburg in 2023.

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