Taking the form of the set of a fictional dirty picture, this solo exhibition recontextualizes various personal archives of pornography magazines and bootleg gay VHS tapes using experimental approaches to remove snippets of material, footage, and imagery. Imagined through a weathered blue billboard and the set of a dreamlike film, “Dirty Picture” delves into themes of fantasy, absence, personal narrative, gender and intergenerational queer identity.

Ryan Danny Owen (they/him/her) is a non-binary visual artist, author, and queer historian based in Mohkinstsis, Treaty 7/ Calgary, Alberta. Their work explores intergenerational queer identity, gender, loss, and sexuality through objects, the archive, automatic writing, and performance. Questioning the body through liminality, queer nostalgia, and the disassembling and recontextualizing of loaded material to explore fantasy, memory, and queer absence.