Tough As Nails

Younger than Beyonce Gallery, Toronto. 2016.

Tough as Nails brought together five emerging Toronto-based artists: Shellie Zhang, Maddie Alexander, B.G. Osborne, Danny Welsh, and Kim Ninkuru, to flaunt the glamorous side of queer resistance. Seeking to complicate ideas of marginality, Tough as Nails explored the relationship between glamour and agency. Drawing on the long tradition of self-fashioned glamour as a practice of survival and world-making for non-normative people, these five artists took up queer glamour as a defiant expression of marginalized identity. Tough as Nails investigated the idea of queer glamour as site of glittering transgression.