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G.B. Jones

Installation view from "G.B. Jones" at Cooper Cole, Toronto, 2022. Photo: Jessann Reece

Review15 Dec 2022

“G.B. Jones” is an exhibition framed around the reprinting of the artist’s monograph of the same name. Originally published in 1994 by Feature Inc., a former gallery in New York City, the publication features a collection of Jones’s drawing, collage, photography, and graphic design. Folded into the glossy first pages of the black-and-white reproduction is a selection of praise for the artist. Kind words by peers that include Dennis Cooper and Vaginal Davis, among others, function as a kind of fanzine, mythologizing Jones’s iconic creative practice. Curated by Kunstverein Toronto with research and publication direction by Danielle St-Amour, the corresponding exhibition displayed an expansive selection from Jones’s 40-year creative output and personal archive. Jones’s queer punk attitudes emerged out of her trail-blazing band Fifth Column (1981–2002), which helped put Toronto on the post-punk map of the ’80s and ’90s. Her infamous zine J.D.s (1985–1991), produced in collaboration with Bruce LaBruce, spurred the musical, social, and aesthetic formation of queercore—a moment in anti-authoritarian queer liberation that existed at the fringes of conventional LGBTQ organizing. Galvanized under a term coined by Jones herself, the movement emphasized the rejection of heterosexual values. Queercore’s intent was to undermine moral codes through the representation of queer sexuality, praise for depravity, and the enacting of a radical slippage outside normative modes of conformity through music, visual art, film, and lifestyle. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, a pearl-clutching Toronto became the unlikely epicentre for the mythologization of queercore as it evolved into an alternative zeitgeist of the era.

In the main exhibition space, vitrines display a collection of ephemera including zines, original pressings of Fifth Column L.P.s, T-shirts, and even a pair of socks sporting Jones’s original designs. Hung in salon style along the walls are collections of posters and concert photographs alongside well-worn merch, contact sheets, and a selection from Jones’s iconoclastic Tom Girls—a series of graphite drawings wherein youthful butch subjects offer a feminist alternative to Tom of Finland’s phallocentric universe. In drawings like 7-11 (1990), a leather-clad femme-dom biker flips through printed tabloids with headlines questioning the sexuality of various celebrities. Skateboard Girl (Jean) (1988) depicts a grunge girl leaning on her skateboard, rendering the subject like a love letter. Sporting a variety of hairstyles—buzz cuts, Chelseas, and undercuts— Jones portrays her cavalcade of characters as they engage in various acts of adolescent debauchery, interlaced with her quintessential lesbian erotica.

Expanding the series of Tom Girls drawings on exhibit, the publication defies genre conventions, with the inclusion of comic-book elements (authored by Madame X), collages, and drawings laid out in narrative arcs, all haphazardly occupying the pages of the artist’s book. Prison Breakout #1-17 (1991) unfurls like a storyboard for a late-night porno: a threesome between an imprisoned couple and a woman guard ends with the guard getting tricked into her own imprisonment, while the captives ultimately escape in her stolen uniform. In I am a Fascist Pig #1-3 (1989) another couple is ticketed by a police officer. In an erotic act of revenge, the couple ties the cop to a tree. They leave her ripe buttocks lashed and her trousers at her ankles, with the words “I am a Fascist Pig” written across the back. The two flee the scene on the officer’s motorcycle, like a butch and femme Thelma and Louise. Jones’s work invokes the trope of women on the run—and they always win.

When print copies of G.B. Jones were sent to the author in 1995, Jones received notice from the Canada Border Service Agency that the publication had been seized due to the depiction of “bondage.” With Jones unable to find legal counsel, the seized copies were ultimately burned by customs officers. As described in exhibition’s pamphlet, Canadian Tariff Code 9959 and Memorandum D9-1-1 give customs officials the power to deem which materials are morally suitable to enter Canada. Queer cultural production was regularly targeted, confiscated, and even incinerated well into the late aughts. “G.B. Jones” as both publication and exhibition reflects on this important moment in the history of queer censorship. The original Revenue Canada Customs and Excise - Notice of Detention that Jones received is presented as a framed document, while its facsimile is included as a fold-out inside the publication. The exhibited notice is paired with a photograph of a drawing, Subversive Literature #4: Two Sixteen-Year-Old Girls Reading Books Seized at Canadian Customs (1995), hanging on writer Dodie Bellamy’s wall in 2022. Depicted are two girls leafing through a contraband treasure trove many queer artists would consider a badge of honour to be included within.

While the reprinting of G.B. Jones intervenes in a decades-old attempt to censor queer expression, queercore continues to be relegated to the corners of mainstream queer history. As queer life becomes increasingly subsumed within the heteronormative Canadian nation state, queercore represents the slippage, the sweaty and messy writhing out of a growing queer normativity. To this end, “G.B. Jones” operates as a call to arms rather than a recollection of a past movement, reminding us that queercore is an ongoing revolution, still aflame.


G.B. Jones’s self-titled exhibition ran from 6 August to 10 September 2022 at Cooper Cole, Toronto. Curated by Kunstverein Toronto with research and publication direction by Danielle St-Amour.

About contributors

Alex Turgeon is an artist and educator currently in residence at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris. Usually, he is based in Toronto, Canada.