EXHIBITION
Opening Reception: 6-8PM Monday, July 7th
On View: July 8th-August 2nd, 2025
Gallery Hours: 12-5PM Tuesday-Saturday
Location: The Khyber Centre for the Arts (1880 Hollis St)
Curatorial Statement:
Out of Line, a collective of eight trans artists, gathered in recurring sessions for 10 months at the Khyber Centre for the Arts throughout 2024/25. Monthly meetings became a space of unfolding: of relational care, unexpected collaborations, and generative debris from play.
The group of nine maneuvered between and reflected upon visibility and concealment while exploring various strategies of withdrawal and the thrill of emergence. To be in-between suggests a refusal to settle—neither hidden nor fully seen, neither isolated nor entirely exposed. It is from within this threshold that the work of Out of Line found its charge.
Play becomes a method of weaving humor and exploration into survival. Curiosity leads towards detritus and residue, entertaining what is left behind, what refuses to be discarded, and that which lingers. These artists attend to the scraps, fragments and margins—not as peripheral, but as central. Shadows are not simply the absence of light but a medium of expression in their own right. Through shadow, shape is expressed. Through play, expectations of legibility are disrupted. Through curiosity, meaning remains open-ended.
Visibility in a world that demands trans people make themselves legible on someone else’s terms begs to be challenged and interrogated. What does it mean to choose invisibility? To disappear or blur, not out of fear but as an act of sovereignty? What does it mean to collaborate without consensus, to meet in a space that resists resolution?
This exhibition is about the radical act of appearing on one’s own terms and the equally radical act of retreating. It is about being out of line with the norms that seek to contain us. It is about the deliberate activation of the space between participation and refusal.
To play hide and seek is to practice relationality: to search and be searched for, to withhold and to reveal. In this in-between, something urgent emerges. Something flickers. Something insists on being felt, even if it cannot always be seen.
Exhibiting Artists:
m black (they/them) is a white-settler multidisciplinary artist based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS). Their practice combines digital, analog, and camera-less image-making processes alongside sculpture, performance, and text to explore and (over)analyze the twin mechanisms of power and desire. Reflected in their work is a fondness for abstraction, ambiguity, and perverse, esoteric knowledge.
@ ____mblack
Lou Campbell (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS. Their practice traverses many mediums including playwriting, acting, directing, poetry, clowning, and sound art. They create work that unpacks the inner workings of their own experiences, usually manifesting in the open sharing of mortifying past mistakes. They also co-run a cross-province collective based in Toronto and Halifax called Probably Theatre. This collective creates performance work devised from poetry, and runs events and exhibitions that facilitate the creation of new work by other artists. Lou wrote and stars in an award winning solo show entitled PRUDE that has toured across Canada. They are currently writing a trilogy performance piece entitled The Holy Ones about the afterlives of trans and gender non-conforming saints and religious figures.
@trash_star
Kit Holden-Ada is a multidisciplinary settler artist making mischief in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, NS). Their work favours collaboration and spans mediums from ceramics, leatherwork and metalsmithing to sound, movement and lens-based media installations. Centering art making as embodiment practice, their work integrates curious explorations of queer relationality, lineage, discipline and play, often in close alliance with the body and the elements. They keep starting to learn the drum kit and have been tinkering at Fervour’s Own Jewellery since 2011.
@kcholdada
Marley O’Brien is a painter, performer and filmmaker working and living in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS with an acute interest in queer perspectives and pop culture. She is best known for her self indulgent oil paintings and her performances in Atlantic short films.
Her practice is driven by her sensibilities and intuitions. Pursuing beauty, passion, humor and pleasure in all of her work like she does in her personal life.
As a painter, actor and filmmaker, she endeavors to create evocative images that exploit and subvert more recognizable iconography from the canons of painting and filmmaking.
@marley_o_brien
Japhy Sullivan (she/her) grew up, down a sunny dirt road in the deep dark woods of Eastern Ontario, in a house filled with musical instruments. Her journey, both musically and geographically, has been a scenic one so far, from her early days honing her craft in local fiddle orchestras and family bands, to running a free improvisation collective in Montreal, and studying traditional Irish ballads and dance music in Cork City. Along the way Japhy has shared the stage as an accompanist with many pillars of the Canadian folk and root music community: Irish Mythen, David Ross MacDonald, Kate Weekes, Scott Cook, & David Newland to name a few.
Recently transplanted to Halifax, Japhy is currently hard at work on her upcoming debut album Fiddler Jones, which showcases her songwriting and musical craftsmanship in a collection of tunes that are intimate and poignant as well as being quick-witted and humorous.
Drew – Quon Duk Ping (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary maker with a background in communication design exploring themes of otherness, memory and impermanence, relational entanglement, liminality, dis/ability, sensual embodiment, regeneration cycles, wrapped within cultural and personal mythologies. Their art practice is intimately connected to their relationship as an animal and a settler with the lands and ecosystems of a degraded postcolonial Mi’kma’ki, the evolution and fluidity of their sexuality and expression as a Queer, gender non-conforming holobiont being, and their multiracial experience with a culture steeped in the ongoing legacy of white supremacy. Born of Chinese and British parents, this first generation settler was raised in Mi’kma’ki (Punamu’kwati’jk – “at the tomcod place” / Dartmouth), the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, where they currently reside.
@chaka.quon
Brody Weaver is a white-settler media artist, writer, and educator currently living and learning in Kjipuktuk (so-called “Halifax, Nova Scotia”). Her work across media, installation, and text is research-based and often makes (mis)use of archives to interrogate histories of gender, sexuality, medicine, and trauma.
Jules Wilson (they/them) is a white-settler storyteller based in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, NS). Their work tends towards tiny.
Facilitator:
Mo Glitch is a visual and performance artist that opens up new possibilities for how to live in this world in non-normative ways. Their practice utilizes inquiry through embodiment practices and experimentation with materials translation. Glitch studies queer/trans art and theory, community organizing, land/place based performance, and nightlife. They draw huge pictures, sculpt small creatures and leave trails of neon scraps behind them. With a background in facilitation and graphic recording, Glitch brings years of experience to gathering groups and hosting collaborative processes that centers justice and care. Glitch is an emerging artist who opens portals to surviving within the confines & crumbling of modernity. They will be starting the MFA program at NSCAD University in the fall of 2025 and live in Kjipuktuk (Halifax).
@postportalproject
Promotional image design by Drew – Quon Duk Ping.
2024 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:
Out of Line will be a trans artist group of 6-8 artist participants. Submissions are open to LOCAL trans and gender non-conforming artists working across all disciplines and all stages of practice. This opportunity was initiated and organized by Mo Glitch of Post Portal Project. It will involve monthly meetings, skill-share, mentorship, and a group exhibition at the Khyber Centre for the Arts. The program is outlined in greater detail below. Applications are now closed.
APPLY BY MIDNIGHT AUGUST 15TH 2024
2024 APPLICATION:
Please email the following to submissions@khyber.ca before the application deadline. We accept submissions as text documents, image files, video and/or audio files. Apply using what formats or combinations work best for you!
- Artist Bio
- Artist CV and/or list of relevant experiences.
- Artist Statement and/or description of your current art practice.
- Why would you like to participate in Out of Line?
- How will Out of Line support your art practice?
- Support Materials including images and/or video of your artwork, artist’s website, social media, reviews, or articles.
Your applications will be peer-reviewed and assessed by a group of trans and/or gender non-conforming artists.
Questions? Please get in touch with Mo Glitch at postportalproject@gmail.com
OVERVIEW:
Post Portal Project’s Out of Line is a 10-month initiative from October 2024 to July 2025, intentionally designed by and for trans and gender non-conforming artists. This program will focus on social engagement and nurturing an environment for artistic skill-sharing and community building, uniting 6-8 trans artists selected through a public call for participation. Held at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, these artists will participate in monthly in-person gatherings, culminating in a vibrant group art exhibition representing their collective journey.
Out of Line is guided by a commitment to amplifying and centering the voices and experiences of trans artists, challenging stereotypes and cis-normative narratives, and encouraging a sense of connection and belonging within the trans artist community.
MONTHLY MEETINGS:
The gatherings will be organized and led by Mo Glitch of Post Portal Project. Each monthly session, spanning 2.5 hours, will blend formal sharing and feedback processes with informal networking opportunities. They will provide crucial reflective spaces for the artists to share their practice, receive critique, and seek peer support, sparking creativity, and alleviating isolation that the pandemic has exacerbated.
GUEST SPEAKERS & MENTORSHIP:
This program will also invite 2 established guest artists, Vivek Shraya and Chris Vargas, to present solo artist talks and mentorship to the cohort. Speaking about their artistic practices and professional experiences, these guest artists will share how they have navigated the production and presentation of their work within the art world.
GROUP EXHIBITION:
The program will conclude with a dynamic group exhibition at the Khyber, where the 6-8 artist participants will showcase their work during July 2025. Artists will be compensated according to CARFAC-recommended exhibition fees.