Photo: courtesy of the artist
Montreal artist JJ Levine’s photographic work questions the roles traditionally associated with gender identity through an intimate exploration of queer domestic spaces. Family, Levine’s most recent project, concerns alternative family structures and, in his words, “radically reimagining parenthood.” Although certainly continuous with Switch and Alone Time, projects of his that use the performative body to explore gender construction and malleability, Family is still aesthetically and conceptually more in line with Queer Portraits. Woven around the artist’s community and significant relationships in Montreal, Queer Portraits brings together around a hundred portraits of friends, lovers, and relatives photographed over a nine-year period. With the birth of his child, Family has become an opportunity for Levine to develop a project around the nucleus of his own queer family, challenging heteronormative nuclear and strictly biological conceptions of parentage.
