The sprawling career retrospective of Montreal photographer Evergon demands that I open not with the clever notes I had originally drafted on lush ’80s figuration and devastating elegiac gestures, but with the visceral reaction served up by my trembling body. Standing before the towering three-metre-tall photographs I’ve seen reproductions of for years, I crumpled under their scale, like the edges of the Polaroids curling delicately in their beautiful frames. I wept.

In the late ’80s, the Polaroid company installed two of its largest cameras around the United States, and commissioned artists to work with the limited-edition models. With a car full of performers from Canada, the artist would load sets and friends into the life-size camera to create technically intricate compositions. Evergon’s references are as much personal as they are drawn from the history of painting. These instant dye prints, typically 240 by 110 cm, invoke the phantasmagoric romantic style seen in Derek Jarman’s baroque cinematic tableaus like Edward II (1991) or Caravaggio (1986). In Night Watch I, from the series Ramboys: A Bookless Novel. Works by Egon Brut and Celluloso Evergonni (1990), a pair of punks in steel-toe boots and what might be jockstraps and horn helmets intertwine arms and legs beside the privacy of a blind, which casts a series of shadows on the plywood set. A twist of crimson fabric invokes the baroque at a towering height of 281.5 by 112 cm. The rich blacks and a warm sepia hue compliment the deep erotic charge created by the models.

But I don’t believe this exhibition is asking for a cool, cerebral criticism of Evergon’s technique. This work wants to be swallowed, digested, and shat back out onto damp ground. Across Evergon’s practice, the documentary impulse exists in a powerful tension against the fantastical. The Polaroid behemoths that reduce the viewer to the scale of the devotee in a Greek temple is reversed in the Manscapes: Truck Stops, Lovers Lanes and Cruising Grounds by Egon Brut (1994–1998) series. The artist collected upwards of 7,000 of these photographs, though only ten are exhibited in a way that highlights the documentary nature of these series, drawing the viewer to a five-by-two grid of cruising-ground photographs. With cryptic graffiti, the images document cruising sites visited by the artist in his travels. Later iterations of the series introduce close-ups of bodies, and some nicknames even appear in the titles. In Elf, Mount Royal, Montreal, QC (1998), the subject reveals his penis to the photographer’s Polaroid camera, loaded with 655 film. Winter sunlight casts a warren of shadows against the man’s skin and the snow. In the final iteration of the three landscape series that all use similar titles (Manscapes, 2001), the photos take on a deep chromatic cast, once again returning to innuendo from the burst of flagrant figuration.

In 1969, when the partial decriminalization of gay sex was enacted with an amendment to the Criminal Code, Evergon was finishing his undergraduate studies in art at Mount Allison, in small-town Sackville, NB. With the exception of an introductory room of ephemera from the City of Ottawa Archives on gay activism, the exhibition does not contextualize Evergon’s practice in a larger history of gay liberation in Canada. When installed in a grid in this exhibition, they brilliantly insinuate the erotics of the forensic. This context is important, as the cruising sites of the Manscapes series are precisely those that were excluded from the partial decriminalization of anal sex in Canada in 1969. Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s government’s Criminal Code amendment decriminalized some forms of non-procreative sex. However, anal sex that occurred anywhere other than inside private property or with more than one other person remained illegal. While exceptions were added to the existing Criminal Code in 1969, the law was not repealed. Aspects of anal sex remained criminal acts in Canada until a bill repealed section 159 of the Criminal Code in 2019.

Evergon also refutes Bertolt Brecht in his apocryphal claim that one cannot write poetry about trees when the forest is full of policemen. The documentation of these sites of delight in flagrante captures not the rallying cries of activists, but rather a different, perhaps less legible form of resistance in the bucolic poetics of the forest, steeped in the same formal consideration of Western art-historical references as the rest of his body of work. The artist draws upon the literature of cruising, explicitly citing William Burroughs and Jean Genet, celebrating an outlaw erotic demimonde. The implication of the rampant police violence that defines late–20th century gay life remains just outside Evergon’s frame, but the work cannot be understood without it. And the many long-deserted spaces that Evergon photographs would be nearly illegible to a straight audience as sites of sexual sanctuary were it not for their titles. These images are empty of human subjects, without the cruisers but also without the police who still watch us. In We Do It for the Stories We Can Tell, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, from the series Manscapes: Truck Stops, Lovers Lanes and Cruising Grounds par Egon Brut (1995), the viewer is invited to gaze down a pipe as it crosses a river. Full summer foliage shades the riverbank. The title is borrowed from the same phrase graffitied on the industrial gate interrupting the perilous passage over the course of water. This theatre is a crime scene, a sacred grove.

Despite the heavy charge to these sites, the artist’s wit is a sly through line drawn throughout the exhibition. Evergon’s twinkle is droll in its sincerity. In the exhibition’s highly entertaining audio guide, Evergon, with an audible grin in his voice, admits that the erotically charged room, divided from the rest of the exhibition with a silk curtain saloon door, “may not shock you.” He means the silly wordplay. The self-portrait triptych Homage to Michelangelo and David or the Tuba Lesson (2005) consists of a print from a large-format negative. In the photograph, the artist is blowing a young man. This image, photographed in the artist’s more recent well-lit studio-portrait aesthetic, is hung adjacent to the sumptuous analogue chiaroscuro cock portraits from the cruising trails. While their materiality is so different, they share in their humour. Nothing about these exquisite photographs is meant to shock.

I turn to writer Jarrett Earnest’s powerful claim in the introduction to his guest-edited issue of PUBLIC Journal, on the theme of queer history: “I’ve come to see this kind of work, in the absence of historical validation and institutional support, as, above all, devotional. Devotion here means a complete commitment to the people and stories we love.” The adjacent hall is devoted to the artist’s mother. Nearing the end of her life, the artist’s mother Margaret became a central collaborator and subject of Evergon’s photographs. In the delightfully camp portrait Mama Bear (2006), Margaret poses with the hint of a smile, nude from the waist up while wearing the legs of a bear costume. The love and creative complicity these two share is as much an elegy of devotion as the long list of friends, lovers, brothers, and collaborators lost to AIDS installed on the exhibition’s final wall.

The unabashed queerness of this conceptual seam, the adjacency of these two pillars of devotion of so many queer lives, is electric. That a sincere devotion to the charge of libido, stripped of the trappings of iconoclastic rebellion, and a loving attention toward Margaret’s aging maternal body might touch one another, through saloon doors, is one of the most powerful offerings of this show.