August 3, 2025 • 56 mins
Summary
In this deeply reflective episode of Art in the Raw, Christopher W. Quigley shares his journey from hands-on custom fabrication to creating immersive public artworks that confront themes of impermanence, entropy, and gender-based violence. After surviving two near-fatal strokes, Quigley transformed his artistic vision to focus on projects like Transformation of Dangerous Spaces, an emotionally powerful installation addressing intimate partner violence and toxic masculinity. This conversation navigates Quigley’s personal history, queer identity, and his commitment to using art as a catalyst for social change.
KeywordsChristopher W. Quigley, queer art, custom fabrication, immersive art installation, gender-based violence, intimate partner violence, toxic masculinity, public art, entropy in art, impermanence, Transformation of Dangerous Spaces, queer creativity, stroke survivor artist, art activism
Takeaways- Quigley’s early memories driving his aunt’s 1966 Pontiac Parisienne shaped his love for custom fabrication and collaborative artistic creation.
- His career evolved through interior design and large-scale custom fabrication projects, including record-breaking public art installations like the largest outdoor chandelier in Cleveland, Ohio.
- Queer identity in a traditionally male, heterosexual-dominated industry required Quigley to exceed ordinary expectations—mediocrity was never an option.
- Two near-fatal strokes in 2022 profoundly shifted Quigley’s artistic purpose from fabricating for others to creating meaningful, socially engaged artworks.
- His work embraces themes of entropy and impermanence, with sculptures designed to slowly dissolve over decades, reflecting the temporary nature of life and legacy.
- Transformation of Dangerous Spaces is an immersive, eight-stall art installation addressing intimate partner violence and toxic masculinity, rooted in local community tragedy.
- The project focuses on male accountability and education, highlighting the socialization of boys and men in spaces like locker rooms as key sites for perpetuating violence.
- The installation challenges audiences emotionally and requires trauma-informed support to help process its intense themes.
- Men’s organizations have been slower to engage with the project compared to women’s groups, illustrating ongoing challenges in addressing gender-based violence collaboratively.
- Quigley advises young queer artists to focus on making authentic, plentiful art without agenda, embracing creation as a fundamental ritual for growth and impact.
- 00:00 – Introduction: Sunday drives and early inspirations
- 02:30 – Career in custom fabrication and move to Manhattan
- 05:00 – Navigating queerness in a male-dominated industry
- 10:00 – Life-changing strokes and artistic transformation
- 12:00 – Themes of entropy, impermanence, and the ephemeral series
- 18:00 – Creation of Transformation of Dangerous Spaces installation
- 22:00 – Addressing intimate partner violence and toxic masculinity
- 26:00 – Audience reactions and intersectionality in the work
- 36:00 – Challenges engaging men’s groups and trauma-informed care
- 43:00 – The significance of horror aesthetics and queer resonance
- 48:00 – Vision for public policy and societal change through art
- 50:00 – Advice for young queer artists embracing entropy
- 52:30 – Quick 10 questions for Christopher W. Quigley
- 01:01:00 – Closing remarks and future tour plans
Christopher W. Quigley Official Website
TRANSFORMATION OF DANGEROUS SPACES
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Okay.
All right, we're live.
All right, Christopher Quigley, welcome to Art in the Raw.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you very much.
your childhood Sunday drives and 66 Pontiac Parisian with your aunt Wendy are described asfoundational to your love for custom fabrications.
(00:23):
Can you paint a sensory picture of those moments, the sounds and textures and emotions andhow they ignited your artistic identity?
Well, having to learn with your hands and learn that any great project or anything that'sa final project requires a tremendous amount of collaboration.
(00:43):
There's not one person that rebuilds a car.
There's a body person, there's a paint person, there's an interiors person, there's anengine person.
There's all these different people that come together to be able to make one reallybeautiful thing happen.
My aunt Wendy and I, my aunt Wendy was kind of a bit of a, she was one of those kind ofwomen that just bought things without a lot of thought put behind them.
(01:07):
And she bought two cars and it was a 66 Dodge Dart and the 66 Pontiac Parisienne.
And unfortunately, when I look back on it, you know, she sold the Dodge Dart and I lookback on it and go, you know what, we got rid of the wrong car.
But what we ended up doing is that I learned that
(01:29):
I didn't have a lot of limits about what I thought I was capable of doing.
So I would do things on the car.
would pick up a book and it was a book and I would learn how to do things.
You know, I pulled the carpet out because I wanted to replace the carpet.
But, you know, other people got involved in the car to put the engine in and showed me howto do the brakes.
(01:51):
But we would take it out on Sunday drives and we lived out in the middle of we were about
about three hours north of Fargo, North Dakota in a little town called Portage-le-Prairie,Manitoba in Canada.
And our Sunday drives were driving around all the back roads with Wendy in the back seat.
And I must've been about 13 or 14 years old driving my aunt around the back country.
(02:14):
And those were our Sunday drives.
And so when I was in interior design,
I knew how to collaborate.
knew how to pull things together and I knew how to get people together to be able to makestuff.
And so I fell into custom fabrication on the interior design side and really kind ofetched out a really fantastic little career for myself.
(02:39):
So much so that um I was offered a position to take over the US business for a customfabricator in the US and I got to move to Manhattan for 10 years.
and run that.
And now I have had my own company called uh Agency Custom.
(03:00):
And we did a lot of custom fabrication for public artists and for architects makingarchitectural statements.
And we're just finishing one right now, which is a 28 story media facade for a companycalled CoStar, which is one of the US's largest and most ambitious uh
public art displays that are gonna be going in Richmond, Virginia.
(03:23):
So when my background really kind of helped the acumen that I had acquired, I was able toparlay into becoming my own artist and doing my own things and saying, you know what, I
have a voice, I have things I wanna make.
And I just decided that it was my turn.
(03:44):
that it was my turn to make stuff.
It was my turn to create.
It was my turn to make the stuff that I wanted to make.
That's kind of how driving a 66 Pontiac Parisianne led to what I'm doing now.
I love that story.
And I think of a 66 Pontiac Parisian and I think of a drag queen with the big, you know,bonnet on driving down the street, kind of like to Wong Fu style or something like that.
(04:16):
Well, if there's any more that I can add to this, my aunt would sit in the back with abottle of wine and I would drive her around.
yeah, those were our Sunday afternoons as kids.
It was fantastic.
So when you relocated from Manitoba to Manhattan, that must have involved some profoundcultural and geographic shifts for you.
(04:42):
ah Did that physical transformation mirror your journey towards your queer creativity inspaces that challenge conventions?
yeah, that's an interesting question.
Because where I ended up from Manitoba, I went to Vancouver, I went to the far west coast,and then to Manhattan.
And I've been in an industry that's really predominantly, has been predominantly overrunby middle-aged men, heterosexual middle-aged men.
(05:13):
And my place at the table was something that I had to create for myself.
um I didn't have the access and I wasn't invited to the same tables that they were at.
um And I always, I make fun of it in a little way.
And I wanna use this tongue in cheek, but I call them mediocre middle-aged heterosexualwhite guys.
They just got to phone stuff in.
(05:34):
They didn't have to be exceptional.
They didn't have to do anything remarkable.
for me to be taken seriously in the industry, because I'm dealing with architects anddevelopers and contractors and general contractors.
And there's not a lot of gay guys in that industry.
And where I fit in was on the custom side was that it was like, had to call it bespokebecause it was a different, it was a different, better term.
(06:01):
But
I didn't have the opportunity to be mediocre.
I didn't get that chance.
And I don't think that, you know, guys like you and me don't get an opportunity to bemediocre.
And we align remarkably well with women in that realm because we're all after the samekind of privilege.
We're wanting access to it.
(06:22):
And so we align with, you know, our allies, which are straight women.
And because we're after the same thing, we're after the same spot at the table andstraight women
and gay men don't get an opportunity to just be mediocre.
We don't get taken seriously.
So, yeah.
straight women.
Other marginalized groups will say the same thing that you have to, you can't just be goodat your job to do well in your career, you have to be exceptional.
(06:51):
Yes, and it's exhausting.
It's exhausting.
And so in my industry, you know, I was really able to carve out a remarkable career formyself.
did, you know, I did very well.
I've done some really massive projects all around North America.
I worked for, I worked for the company that built the largest outdoor chandelier inCleveland, Ohio.
(07:13):
And if there's any place that needs a chandelier, was downtown Cleveland.
And it's in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest outdoor chandelier, and itstraddles the financial and the theater district.
And so these sort of things are things that I was able to kind of like hang my hat on,because these are things that I was a part of when I was with this company.
(07:36):
And when I was, you when I started my own company and I was doing this on my own, it wasthe same thing.
I had to pick up the biggest, the best, the most, the most...
energetic or the most advanced projects I could find just so that I could continue beingtaken seriously because I didn't want to take just a restaurant job or a hotel job.
(07:58):
I wanted the big casino job.
I wanted to do, you know, the product, South Dakota State University.
We built a giant chandelier for them, a big custom chandelier that um was based off of anumbrella that got turned inside out on my way to a meeting.
That was the inspiration for it.
So I have really done, I have to admit, I've done very well in this industry.
(08:21):
And it's not because I don't, I look at it as like being gay had a really big part in itbecause I just know what's good.
And we know what's good.
And I relate to people.
Yeah, exactly.
But I also learned how to code shift.
those things just get really tiresome after a while because this idea of being authenticto yourself, it's like, well, authenticity is dependent on the situation and the person.
(08:52):
Authenticity is a mask that we put on.
for many years, I was like, what part of me is the authentic part that people are seeing?
So I had a...
uh can require some vulnerability and that's hard to do sometimes.
Yeah, so I really liked what I've done and how it's transformed me.
And when I got to Manhattan and I was running around the city, it was a fantastic growingexperience because it was just, got to learn how to do business hard.
(09:23):
And it was a, that's a tough, that's a tough town.
like it was, and you know, now I'm doing pro, I was doing projects all over the UnitedStates and Canada and Europe and doing, you know, doing some really amazing things.
And so where this left was I left.
in 2022, November of 2022, and I came back to Canada.
(09:46):
And I really wasn't sure what I was going to be doing, but I just drove across the countryfrom the west coast all the way to the east coast until I ran out of land.
And in the midst of all of this, I ended up having two massive near fatal strokes in frontof a pie shop.
So if you ever want to understand what uh poetry is, have a stroke in front of a pie shop.
(10:09):
It was, I'm like, that is poetic.
uh That was a fantastic thing, but that shifted.
That transformed me in a way that I can recognize.
Like I can see the transition point from where it was until I was in the hospital forweeks, having to walk again, having to coordinate where sound was coming from, and even
(10:33):
getting my hands to work properly.
It weeks.
And when the lights came back on, was like, I don't think I can do this for other peopleanymore because this just happened out of the blue.
And I had no pre-warning.
I had no clue.
And it just turned into one of those things of, wow, all of this could be taken awayreally quickly.
(10:55):
And I was very lucky.
I didn't end up in a wheelchair.
I didn't end up dead.
I wasn't in a vegetative state.
I still have all of my faculties, and I can still ride a motorcycle.
And that was one of the things that I ended up buying after I got to be able to have,because I had to go, had to, you know, I had my balance checked a lot, but I was like, if
I'm still upright, I'm going to ride a motorcycle.
(11:18):
I'm doing all the things that I needed to do.
And now I'm doing, instead of just doing really well, I need to do some good.
And so what I'm working on now are projects that do some good.
That's what I like to think anyway.
maybe patting myself on the back, I do really want to do some good and leave a legacybehind that is good.
(11:41):
Yeah.
Maybe if aunt Wendy was still here, she'd be in that sidecar on that motorcycle with thatbottle of wine.
she's still here and she's still she's not she doesn't have the wine anymore, but she'sstill She likes her.
She's got a little life in our in our little town and she's uh She's got a good littleshe's got a good thing going for herself now.
(12:02):
So it's a good it's a good thing
Um, you've cited entropy and impermanence as core themes in your work.
Was there a pivotal before and after moment when you realized that decay could be agenerative force in your art?
So yeah, the first piece that, because I have about, in my repertoire right now, I've gotabout 25 years worth of work ahead of me that I can create.
(12:30):
I look at it like I've got about 20 years worth of work.
And when I was first developing the first piece, which is actually a play, um it's basedon death.
It's based on being able to leave a legacy behind.
And then I was starting to work on some public art sculptures that are very much aboutentropy and decay.
(12:55):
They start off as one form and dissolve into another and dissolve into something else.
But there is an ephemeral nature to everything that I'm making is that it's not meant tobe permanent.
It's meant to eventually go away.
But some of these will have lives much longer than I will ever have on Earth.
um
the ephemeral series of sculptures that I'm working on.
(13:18):
those are meant to last about 250 years and they dissolve.
They dissolve away over a very slow period of time and that is you know to take this idealike we have control over our elements and minerals and structure and steel but over time
we can allow that just to dissolve away from the natural elements and they dissolve intoother items.
(13:40):
They dissolve into stalactites and stalagmites and then they crystallize away and thenthey just eventually just completely disappear.
And it's like anything that we make everything that we build everything that we make isephemeral no matter As long lasting as we think things are as eternal as they we like to
believe things are everything in our lives is temporary everything and When I had thestroke all of this stuff became very clear like it was it was really April 23rd
(14:13):
2023 at 10 a.m.
is when everything in my life changed.
The way I saw the world, how I experienced it, how I feel it now is vastly, it'sdiametrically opposed to where I was on April 22nd.
It's...
I can't explain it any better than that.
(14:35):
just, I just realized that nothing that we have, like all the things that we have, all ofthe things like our paintings, our artwork, our clothes, our cars, our carpets,
everything, nothing comes with us.
And I learned that in the hospital because I was, you know, it was when I had the firststroke, they figured it out and they're like, we don't think that you're, we know you're
(14:55):
going to have another one because your type of stroke.
comes in clumps and clusters.
So we expect that you might have another one or two more, but we don't expect that you'regoing to survive because the first stroke I had was so close to my brain stem.
I was told that I should call my family and get my affairs in order.
And by the time that my mother would get there, I was probably not going to still be here.
(15:18):
So it shifted when you're presented with your own mortality in that way.
ah
I think in movies and books and things that we were always told it's going to be thisepiphanal moment.
But it was matter of fact, there was no emotion attached to it.
I didn't cry.
(15:38):
I didn't get angry.
was like, oh, okay.
Yeah, I got to call my mother.
I need to take care of this.
I need to get this done.
I need these things done.
And then I realized that how I was going to die, I had no choice.
There was no choice in this, that it was just going to happen, that every time I went tosleep, I wasn't sure if I was going to wake up.
(15:59):
So that was how my world shifted.
It just completely changed.
And when I have a voice, I have creativity that I have access to, I have resources, I havebusiness acumen, I have all of these things that instead of doing it for other people, I
(16:19):
need to do it for me.
I need to, I just need to do my, have to leave something behind that is.
That is me.
That is not other people.
I need to have authorship.
I need to have that authorship, so...
How long do you anticipate the pieces that you've done that are slowly decaying to last?
(16:41):
about 200 years is the estimated.
So they're made out of uh blocks of minerals, everything from quartz to salt, gypsum,they're all inert and when they mix together, they are non-toxic.
don't, other than the salt, they don't have a mix to them that becomes toxic.
(17:01):
But quartz can take anywhere from 50 to 75 years on its own to dissolve.
There'll be other materials and other minerals that are being extracted out of the St.
Lawrence River on the East Coast and pressed into uh three foot by three foot cubes.
And those will be kind um of left to the elements in these 30 foot sculptures that willjust decay over time.
(17:30):
And how long have they been there?
Oh, these are still in the works.
These are still in the work.
project that I'm currently involved in at breakneck speed is, and you've used the word acouple of times, is the project that I'm working on is actually called Transformation of
Dangerous Spaces.
And this more focuses on societal decay and the erosion of systems.
(17:56):
And that's the one that kind of became
pushed to the forefront, because I thought that it was going to happen or it was planned,I was just asked.
How was that?
Yeah, sure.
Your shift from fabricating for others to creating these immersive installations liketransformation for dangerous spaces um is quite different from what you were doing before.
(18:26):
um Describe the first time you witnessed audiences step inside the collapse of your work.
What surprised you about their engagement?
So when I was sending out the proposals and where the proposal started from was um from anexperience that in my small town there was a woman that lived here, her name was Elaine
(18:53):
Mosher and I always have to make sure that I mention her name.
but she was the sixth woman since September of 2025, 2024, that had been murdered by herpartner.
And I know this is a real, this is a kind of a downturn in the conversation, but itaffected me.
And I live in a town of 900 people now.
(19:15):
And so it's a very tight-knit community.
is remarkably beautiful and very supportive.
And when Elaine Mosher died, it affected me.
And it affected me in a way that I wasn't really prepared for.
And I knew I to be involved somehow.
(19:36):
I had to be involved because this has now been called an epidemic in Canada.
The intimate partner violence and gender-based violence statistics here are off thecharts.
They are remarkably stubborn.
And so I went to one of the uh executive directors of a transition house with a housingplan because the idea was to take a house like where Elaine had been murdered and convert
(20:05):
it into something
was going to be positive, like another transition house where other women that are leavingthe transition service can be reintegrated back into the community in a nice comfortable
place.
It would be transforming that space.
And the project that I had been involved with was this idea of being able to do somethinglike that.
(20:27):
the executive director, Kellyanne Hamshaw, uh said, I actually looked you up and I seeyour history and I see what you've done.
Would you be interested in coming up and developing an educational piece for men?
that would educate them on intimate partner violence and gender-based violence.
And not so much as an awareness campaign, but more like something that would point outwhere it happens and where it starts.
(20:53):
And when I was sending out the proposal for people, the response back that I got was itwas incredibly visceral.
People said they had a really heavy emotional reactions to just my proposal because it isa lived experience.
Like, you know, I grew up much like you did.
I grew up listening to homophobic slurs and misogyny and how power and how violence istransferred in the boys bathroom or in the locker room.
(21:24):
Mm-hmm.
is where we learned it.
This is where that transmutation of information comes along is in those rooms behindclosed doors.
Boys learn it from their dads and then they transfer this information amongst each otherand they trade it like trading cards.
And now we're in a position where young men and boys are being indoctrinated at scale.
(21:47):
online with men that have platforms and have been monetized and have an audience and a fanbase.
And that's the trouble.
The troubling part of this is that we've gone from this analog position and this analogsource of information transfer.
I'm 52.
So for me, this was pre-internet.
So, you know, the locker room, like I got, I got physically assaulted many, many times inthe locker room.
(22:13):
Mm-hmm.
the, am I allowed to swear on this podcast?
I got the shit kicked out of me in the bathrooms, in the hallways, in the locker rooms.
I've been sexually assaulted in a bathroom.
These are places where this to me was, this was a dangerous space that needed to have somelight shed on it.
And so the proposal itself just garnered so much response from women's organizationsacross the country.
(22:41):
that the main response that came back was that I had to have trauma-informed therapists atthe beginning and at the end of the installations so that there is informed, explicit
consent of people going into this to understand that these eight stalls are going to beremarkably emotional because they are, they focus on eight separate themes of gender-based
(23:07):
violence and intimate partner violence, know, starting off from, you
the analog to the digital source of information transfer to consent and how young men andboys look at consent now, which is far different than the way that I was taught.
I see the t-shirt you're wearing and the groups that I grew up with as a young man, thesewere much older men, but consent was something that was very much part of my upbringing as
(23:40):
a young gay boy.
That there was no play, there was no anything that happened without explicit consent.
And that seems to be taking a very decided left turn.
It's not as explicit.
as it once was.
And then dealing going through from consent all the way to how much damage and how muchviolence can occur in the amount of time that it takes a human body to evacuate its
(24:08):
bladder, which is about 21 seconds.
It takes you 21 seconds to pee and the amount of violence that can happen within 21seconds.
Like the last 21 seconds of a 911 call or the last 21 seconds of somebody locked in thebathroom waiting for police to show up.
So these spaces and these eight stalls are remarkably emotional.
(24:31):
They are meant to confront and they are meant to be intense and they are interactive andthey're immersive and they are going to provide a reckoning but it's to point a finger at
where
(24:51):
at one of the spaces, I'm not saying this is the only space, but one of the spaces whereyoung men and boys pick up the information that they get and where they learn how to even
express violence is in those rooms.
I hope that was a good answer.
that's a very powerful description of it.
(25:12):
And, and when I came across it, um, and reviewed your website myself, um, I found it, um,very powerful because I had my own experiences, uh, in school with violence in locker
rooms.
Um, and it brought back a lot of that for me.
(25:32):
Um, especially as a young, I didn't know it at the time.
at the time, a young gay boy, how much your peers can detect that and seize on it andattack it to protect their own masculinity, I think.
(25:54):
oh
That's exactly a great thought.
Yeah.
Do you do you find that uh queer audiences and straight audiences that come to the to theexhibition react similarly or differently?
So that's an interesting comment because I was thinking about this is that the regardlessof like I look at this is that I just happen to be the person that was developing this and
(26:25):
I just happen to be gay but is it gay art?
No.
Is it queer art?
No.
It's just art.
It's just meant to be an immersive piece.
The universal experience that I have, that you have, that even trans women have.
is the socialization that regardless of where they're at now in in in where we're at nowin our lives our original socialization and culturalization was this it was the universal
(26:57):
experiences is this level of humanity that we experience or this inhumanity that weexperience regardless of our gayness or queerness or transness that the overarching
The overarching theme through all of this was about masculinity and what that was and howthat was being portrayed.
(27:24):
I've had questions been asked about why this doesn't explicitly include trans women.
And I'm like, well, it doesn't also explicitly include, you know,
other minorities and people of different races because the universal experience is thesame.
(27:48):
There are some cultural differences between things, there isn't an explicit
mention of gayness to it or even transness, but it's all very implicit.
It's all built into the superstructure and into how I've developed this entire structureand these eight stalls and the lighting and the sounds and all of these things are all
(28:15):
because of the experience and the lived experience that I've had.
I don't have a trans experience, but I can understand the perspective, but theimplicitness of it.
I don't believe that it has to be explicit to really get the point across because like, Ithink that I'm just going to repeat what I've just said already is that the universal
(28:37):
experience is the same.
That the socialization is the same.
Yours, mine, my neighbor, the kid I went to school with, we all have the same experience.
We all did.
And this piece reveals that and it exposes it.
And it allows people that have gone into it to go, oh, right, this is something that Iexperienced because the point about all of this with intimate partner violence and
(29:06):
gender-based violence is that it's a mess that men created.
And women and women's groups have endured this for decades trying to fix it.
And it's not, oh no.
(32:09):
There you are.
Ugh, it keeps on, what happened again this time is that you disappear and it's just mewith the flag behind.
Yeah, my internet here at the house dropped.
ah We were in a really good conversation too.
No, not your fault.
It's apparently my fault.
uh
(32:31):
know exactly where I was.
So.
There it is.
uh
was in the question list.
um
(32:54):
Okay, we are recording again.
So go ahead, pick back up where you were and I'll splice it in together.
Sorry about that.
So, yeah, so where I was with this is that the, is the intimate partner violence andgender-based violence is an issue that men created.
And going back to it, it's like, this is an issue that women have had to endure and havehad to create systems to protect themselves against men.
(33:24):
And for men to be involved in this, and then in Canada, we have something that was calledthe Mass Casualty Report.
that very clearly and explicitly asked for men to step up to be part of the solution, tobe part of the way that this is going to be fixed and how to fix this and be involved in
(33:45):
it and that men need to step up.
And so when Kellyanne offered me this challenge to say, you create something, this was mestepping up.
This was my ability, but
the way that it had to be brought forward was that for men to kind of accept theirresponsibility and to acknowledge, they have to accept where it comes from and look at it
(34:10):
and identify it and point at it and kind of understand it's like, yeah, this is one of thespaces where I learned this.
And this is how men get to be involved.
You know even growing up like let's be honest, you know, have I have I been a saint?
Absolutely not have I laughed at things I shouldn't have yeah.
Have I told jokes?
I shouldn't have Absolutely.
(34:32):
Have I used words have I said the things?
Yes I have because that's what was taught to me and that's what I thought was funny orthat's what I thought was part of that was it was normalized and then the violence getting
gets normalized so transformation of dangerous spaces is meant to be
an open dialogue, but it's meant to confront.
(34:55):
It has to confront.
Yeah.
My, my, yeah, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
ahead.
Go ahead.
I wanted my original concept with this was to, you know, quite honestly, just push meninto the deep end of the pool.
But as more people got involved in this and were consulting on it, I was told that I hadto, there were things like the trauma informed practice that I had to include in this
(35:24):
because that wasn't something that I was prepared to do.
I was like, men need to be punished and these guys need, but as I was working through it,I'm like, oh, we actually have to extend a hand and they have to be walked through this.
And the trauma informed practice by having a therapist at the beginning explaining thepiece and then having a debrief
(35:45):
At the end with your group was meant to allow that to happen and allow for some level ofclosure and healing and discussion to say, hey, how did this affect you?
What did you think?
What do you find is the response of men em and trans women and others that come throughthis process when they go through that um counseling session at the end?
(36:19):
How many feel, I'll pause there.
What do you see that their response is to it?
So where we're at, I want to just clarify that right now this project is in its civicoutreach.
we're actually going to be fabricating this in 2026.
(36:40):
So right now what we're dealing with is getting men's groups and women's groups andgetting federal, municipal, and provincial or forward slash state approval and endorsement
on this.
quite honestly, about where I've had
The most success is with all of the women's organizations.
(37:01):
They've been providing me with unbelievable levels of endorsement and beautiful letters toget this project endorsed and supported.
Where I've struggled, and I was surprised by, where I've struggled is with the men'sorganizations.
that they're slow on the uptick on this, on picking up on this or wanting to be a part ofit or um to have some involvement in authorship on the education side.
(37:32):
The piece itself is going to remain artistically sovereign to the way that I had developedit.
However, the men's organizations, I put out a call to say, look, if you want to haveauthorship in this, the education that gets put out is something you can have a part in.
But that's been the difficult part is getting the men's groups involved, which has beenvery disappointing uh for their own reasons.
(37:58):
And some of it I can never say.
Yeah, and so the ones that need to see it the most or be a part of this the most stillaren't.
And I'm not saying that these men's organizations aren't doing the work and they are doingvery, very good work.
One organization that I am getting endorsement from called Guys Work, there are reasonswhy they are unable to, but other organizations just have not been.
(38:29):
coming up to support as emphatically as I had expected.
On the trans side, I haven't had a lot of interaction because I think that when I explainwhy there isn't any explicit trans content in this, it's that even trans women at some
(38:50):
point in their life were socialized as boys.
and they have that socialization the same way the women are socialized in a very specificway.
We still have that and trans women have that, they have that socialization.
So I think there is some commonality with this that again, this is just a human experiencethat we've all gone through.
(39:13):
And that's certainly true for trans women who are, are older and grew up in a time unliketoday where so many young trans children are recognizing their trans characteristics and
(39:33):
are able to come out earlier.
But for those who grew up in an earlier time in the eighties and nineties in 2000 andcouldn't, could not be true to themselves.
they probably did have to ah go through these um boys, men's locker room scenarios and,and listen to those same words.
(39:53):
um
Tell us how we can get some of these organizations.
How can we help some of these organizations be open to displaying this work of art?
(40:14):
One of my mentors in this project has expressed to me that it's going to require patienceand how things work.
I'm running a nonprofit organization for the first time in my life.
I come from corporate where, in the corporate world, you are the dictator.
You decide how quickly things are and it's a very, this is a very different world and itrequires an inordinate amount of patience.
(40:43):
And one of the things that I didn't have going into this or that I didn't realize I neededmore of was patience.
So these men's organizations, I do believe will come around.
They will get involved.
I know they will.
It's just requiring patience.
the...
This piece doesn't come in to replace what they're doing.
It pays homage to what they're doing.
(41:04):
This is a different...
This isn't an awareness campaign.
And I wanted to...
uh
I wanted to, there is somebody else who called it an awareness campaign.
was like, no, this isn't awareness because we're already aware of it.
This isn't something that I'm trying to go, hey, guess what?
partner violence and gender-based violence exist and I'm providing awareness to this.
is far beyond that.
(41:25):
This is now an initiative and it is.
somewhat steeped in love of horror.
And I had one city councilor express it to me that it seemed like the way that this hadbeen developed and with the imagery and with the tone of this is that it's like a circus
midway house of horrors.
(41:48):
And I was like, that's a fantastic explanation because it is, it does have that element.
For me,
horror, the horror films are where I went for Refuge because it was predictable.
Horror films have...
Yeah, yeah, we're huge horror fans because there is a formula to it.
(42:14):
We know how it's going to go.
We know what the beginning is.
We know what the middle is.
We know how it's going to end.
Mm-hmm.
that's a predictable amount of horror that we're like, we can take this on.
And we know how it's going to end because the bad guy always gets taken out.
Or the bad guy, you know, it ends on something else.
But when we go home or we're dealing with this in our real lives, the horror isunpredictable.
(42:38):
There's no way to predict how something is going to turn out or what your dad is going todo tonight or what your bully is going to do tomorrow.
Those sort of things, that unpredictability is, I think, what draws gay people to horroris that there is the heroine, there is the hero, there is this predictable formula.
(43:04):
that we attach ourselves to, even to the bad guys, because the bad guys are venerated.
it's like, know, we look at, you know, I go to a horror film festival every year becausethat's just my genre.
And so this entire piece has that flavor.
(43:26):
It's meant to, because it's predictable.
I wanted to have predictable horror.
This is it.
And the horror I think helps maybe to know, but it was, I mean, it was a, uh it was atelling tangent, right?
Because as we mentioned, there's so many people in the queer community who in their youthwere drawn to horror.
(43:51):
and sometimes it's the horror, takes horror to drive the message home, um, in a way thatbeing, being polite about it can't, um,
If, if transformation of dangerous spaces could manifest as a permanent public policy,what would it look like?
(44:19):
On its own, in some of my materials and my presentations, I talk about this piece as beingnot just an art installation, but its policy and motion.
It's meant to go alongside.
both gender-based violence initiatives that cities and towns and communities are pullingin together.
(44:40):
Like there's a lot of it going on throughout North America where communities aredeveloping policies because the statistics, regardless of all the awareness campaigns
are...
oh
remain static.
And I can only talk about Canadian statistics.
(45:00):
In 2024, there was over 163,000 reported incidents of intimate partner violence andgender-based violence.
And when you break that down, that's like almost one every four minutes.
Mm.
Those numbers are mind boggling and then there's a huge swath that just go unreported.
(45:21):
And these are by women and then there's another 30, 35 % that go unreported.
So we're looking at things, we're looking at this as an item for young men and boys to gointo again, to kind of have this idea of like, oh yeah, no, this is again, I need to put
(45:43):
it in front of them.
I need municipalities and cities and galleries and civic spaces and universities to bringthis into their spaces so that they can have access to it as part of some grander plan, as
part of gender-based violence policies that municipalities are developing as a compendium.
(46:06):
But on its own, always want, I'm always trying to make sure that, you know, I'm notgetting too far in the weeds with it on the policy side, because it is an art piece to me.
But where it's being taken and how it's growing and what it's turning into is far more ofuh a more aggressive initiative than I had originally anticipated when I went into this.
(46:30):
Because this was not, this was a wonderful gift.
a sad gift that started from grief, that was born from grief, but I'm doing something verygood with it.
And I'm very proud of it.
I'm very proud of how it's turned out and what people's response and like even yourresponse and bringing me on here means a lot to me.
(46:53):
You know, and that's, you one of the nice things from the stroke is that I cry reallyeasily.
I feel things very deeply now.
It rewired my brain in a way that, you know, who I am now by comparison to who I wasprevious to the stroke is vastly different.
And I recognize that these are two different people where I was pre-stroke and where I amnow that.
(47:19):
how I see things and how I feel things and how I experience things.
All these little things have a really deep resonance with me.
Even these conversations, like this conversation with you, David, these things mean a lotto me.
And it's, you the fact that you brought me on here to talk about this makes me, I'm doingthe right thing.
(47:41):
This is the right thing.
I'm doing this right.
I think you are.
I hope that the right thing definitely comes out of it.
And kind of on that, we talked a little bit earlier about impermanence um with regard tosome of the other art pieces you're doing that are decaying themselves.
(48:07):
What impermanence do you think comes out of uh transformation of dangerous spaces?
Where I see this is more in the decay or the entropy of systems that fail men and the samesystems that fail women, these systems that will be, that will erode.
(48:30):
That this is meant to help hasten that erosion of the education of this toxic.
toxic masculinity, education, we need to point fingers at them and point it out for themto go away.
If we keep them hidden away and we don't point them out and talk about them, they continueto thrive.
(48:50):
They take oxygen.
But once you point them out, you can take away the oxygen, you can take away theattention.
And these things eventually will start to erode and these systems and these ideas that menhave about how women are to be treated or how gay people are to be treated or how trans
people are to be treated will dissolve.
(49:15):
But it takes time and it takes initiative and it takes a lot of people to stand up andstep up to make that stuff happen.
And this podcast is one of them.
You are breaking down systems every show that you produce.
uh Every meeting I have is meant to do that.
(49:35):
I think that all of this together, all of us together in this are breaking these systemsdown and creating an impermanence because this can't last.
We can't last like this.
This is an impossible task.
We just cannot believe that this is going to...
No.
We can't, we just cannot, and we have to just say it.
(49:58):
We all have to say it.
We cannot let this continue.
To young queer artists, early in their artistic careers, wrestling with impermanence.
um What's one ritual or mindset that helps you embrace entropy as liberation that youcould share with them?
(50:22):
Well, first start by saying don't have a stroke.
Don't have your life, don't.
Just like that, don't, it's highly not recommended.
I don't recommend that part, but if it does happen, lean into it.
But for queer artists, even just create art, create good art.
(50:45):
Focus more on the work.
Focus on the work rather than the persona.
what you're creating early on and like I'll be really straight with you.
It's like, know, I'm 52 and it's taken me till now to create something like this.
And I don't think I could have done this level in my twenties or even in my earlythirties.
(51:10):
I don't think that would have been possible.
um I have a wealth of experiences that have contributed to how this is, how this has comeabout.
However,
uh As a gay artist or as a queer artist, if you're going out in the world, it's create theart first.
(51:32):
The artwork doesn't have identity unless you impose it on it, but it's meant to be goodwork first.
Focus on creating really good work and create a lot of it.
Because you never know.
You never know which one is going to be the one that hits.
(51:53):
You kind of have to treat it like throwing paint against a wall and what sticks.
But just create for the sake of creating without an agenda or without anything to beimposed on top of it because it should be able to live on its own.
And there are some incredibly talented young artists.
(52:15):
and incredibly talented young people that may not necessarily know that they're an artist,that have something in them.
But write it down.
Start by writing.
That's where I started.
I just started by writing.
Yeah, just create the art.
Just go at it.
Just, you know, pick up a hammer and nails and just go create something.
(52:36):
Who cares?
That's it.
All right, so we've reached the end of our interview here.
So we're going to go through our quick 10 questions uh for artists.
So if you're ready, I'll get started.
(52:58):
um What is your favorite artistic medium or tool?
Whoa.
So for the majority of my career, was light, creating lights, creating with light.
That was that was where I was at.
Now it's interdisciplinary and I don't have any one favorite, but the first half of mycareer, the first part of my career, I was creating things that held light.
(53:30):
It was just it was just one of those things that it was just so pretty.
that regardless of the room that it was in, I always treated light and lighting like itwas the top hat on Fred Astaire.
That you can have this wonderful space and this wonderful dance, but the top hat, the tophat was lighting.
Yep.
(53:52):
What artistic trend or cliche do you wish would disappear?
or a cli-shane.
man, that's a really hard one.
I'm not sure.
uh I love, mean, there's, yeah, I mean, there's so much that it is what it is just forwhat it is, even if it is a cliche.
(54:18):
ah know, large scale contemporary art installations, know, that are...
m
that are derivative of others.
think derivative work, think that's where I would be.
If it's original and cliche, fantastic.
But if you're creating something and it's derivative of something that's already inexistence, yeah, that can go away because we don't need any more of that.
(54:42):
Create something original and cliche.
Embrace it.
What fuels my creativity the most?
Bye.
Bye.
My environment right now, because I live in a really, I live very rural-y and I haveresources and I get to just kind of do whatever I want and create what I want.
(55:15):
um That's what fuels me is my own autonomy that I'm not beholden to anybody else.
I'm not beholden to somebody's paycheck, but my autonomy.
My autonomy in this world right now fuels my creativity.
What sound or noise complete?
(55:37):
wait, I skipped one.
What sound or noise instantly inspires you?
listen to a lot of house music.
So I get really inspired by gospel house.
That really gets me going.
(55:58):
grew up in a rave era in the early 90s, you and I was a club kid for a while.
So for me, know, house music is like the, you know, especially gospel house just gets megoing every day.
That's how I start my day and end my day.
What sound or noise completely kills your focus?
(56:18):
chewing.
Chewing.
I have misophonia, so.
Ah, that's when you are irritated by the sound of someone else's chewing, I think.
Chewing, breathing, anything.
I live alone.
(56:39):
what's your favorite word or phrase to include in your work, literally or metaphorically?
Keep it weird.
Keep it weird.
Keep it weird.
queer artists living or dead honored with a major public monument, who would it be?
Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde.
(57:02):
He had some, he used to write under a Nome diploma and he had some really wild books.
But if there would be one person that could do with, you know, with more recognition justfor what he was able to do for gay people moving forward, like it's Oscar Wilde.
(57:26):
If you ever want an education, go read Oscar Wilde books.
He does some amazing stuff.
lessons.
You know, just he knows.
Wilde and Truman Capote.
Truman Capote would be the next one.
If you want to read some incredible letters.
my god, Truman Capote, you want an education.
Those are the two those are the two guys to look at.
(57:48):
Oh, true.
Um, what is one profession or creative field you could never see yourself in?
I would not want to I don't I don't ever want to work for anybody I haven't had a regularnine to five jobs since I was in my 20s.
(58:12):
So we're going on 30 plus years I just I don't think I could work for anybody period inany facet.
I Have been my own boss for so long.
You know, I I'm
I'm very good to myself, I don't think that I could work in any industry where I had toreport to somebody else.
(58:37):
No.
Yeah, that goes back to that whole autonomy thing, I think.
Yep.
uh If your art could take on a life of its own, what form would it take?
The next, because of the, I want, what I want for, you know, with one of the other ones,which is called, which is an actual stage play that I'm writing with an author, a
(59:06):
playwright here in Canada.
His name is Michael Best and he's an award-winning playwright.
and he's helping me write a play.
So really where I would like to see this go is I would like to be in the theater.
There's something dramatic.
(59:26):
There's just something.
of David Janger's spaces.
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of options, but there's just something, just the drama ofbeing on a stage and being in front of people and speaking lines that have been written
for you.
There's a romance to that and having people be part of it.
(59:48):
Like, theater is like the original immersive art.
It's...
and it's interactive and it's playful and there's feedback and all of this stuff that Ithink that the theater, theater is really the, really where I would like to see all of my
(01:00:09):
work move into is into theater.
And I think there's a bit of theater behind everything that I'm creating.
And finally, 100 years from now, what do you hope your art says about you to those whofind it?
I'm gonna repeat something I said earlier.
um
(01:00:32):
You know, in the first part of my career, I did very well.
I've done very well.
I have to be honest.
I did very well.
But did I do a lot of good?
No.
This is meant to be good in all its format.
Like, I want to do some good.
I want to be remembered as somebody that did good.
that's the...
(01:00:54):
That's really what I want.
The legacy that I want to be able to leave behind is that I did good.
I did some good.
That's it.
I did some good.
I think transformation of dangerous spaces will definitely do some good for a lot ofpeople who need to hear it.
appreciate you saying that.
Thank you.
I really do appreciate you saying that.
(01:01:15):
That's very nice of you.
Thank you.
Christopher, it's been really insightful conversation.
um I have really enjoyed it.
um I look forward to seeing transformation of dangerous spaces sometime soon.
I do too.
And you know, we're going to be doing, we're doing 30 cities a year, 30 communities a yearin Canada over for each, each year, 30 cities between now and 2028.
(01:01:47):
My ultimate goal with the piece is to have it travel the United States as well.
I'll be touring around in a 45 foot tour bus with, you know, following the piece as I goalong in a 45 foot billboard.
But
The ultimate goal is like, really would like to see this.
(01:02:07):
I'd like to see this travel well beyond my time here.
Well, when it ever comes to Toronto or some other amazing cities in Canada that I haven'tvisited yet, but would love to, ah I look forward to finding out so that I can come see
it.
(01:02:27):
You will be invited.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
You will be getting an invitation to come and see it.
Thank you.
David, you're very good at this.
You're very good at this, man.
Wow.
Appreciate that feedback.
All right, I'm going to stop the recording.
Okay.
All right, we're live.
All right, Christopher Quigley, welcome to Art in the Raw.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you very much.
your childhood Sunday drives and 66 Pontiac Parisian with your aunt Wendy are described asfoundational to your love for custom fabrications.
(00:23):
Can you paint a sensory picture of those moments, the sounds and textures and emotions andhow they ignited your artistic identity?
Well, having to learn with your hands and learn that any great project or anything that'sa final project requires a tremendous amount of collaboration.
(00:43):
There's not one person that rebuilds a car.
There's a body person, there's a paint person, there's an interiors person, there's anengine person.
There's all these different people that come together to be able to make one reallybeautiful thing happen.
My aunt Wendy and I, my aunt Wendy was kind of a bit of a, she was one of those kind ofwomen that just bought things without a lot of thought put behind them.
(01:07):
And she bought two cars and it was a 66 Dodge Dart and the 66 Pontiac Parisienne.
And unfortunately, when I look back on it, you know, she sold the Dodge Dart and I lookback on it and go, you know what, we got rid of the wrong car.
But what we ended up doing is that I learned that
(01:29):
I didn't have a lot of limits about what I thought I was capable of doing.
So I would do things on the car.
would pick up a book and it was a book and I would learn how to do things.
You know, I pulled the carpet out because I wanted to replace the carpet.
But, you know, other people got involved in the car to put the engine in and showed me howto do the brakes.
(01:51):
But we would take it out on Sunday drives and we lived out in the middle of we were about
about three hours north of Fargo, North Dakota in a little town called Portage-le-Prairie,Manitoba in Canada.
And our Sunday drives were driving around all the back roads with Wendy in the back seat.
And I must've been about 13 or 14 years old driving my aunt around the back country.
(02:14):
And those were our Sunday drives.
And so when I was in interior design,
I knew how to collaborate.
knew how to pull things together and I knew how to get people together to be able to makestuff.
And so I fell into custom fabrication on the interior design side and really kind ofetched out a really fantastic little career for myself.
(02:39):
So much so that um I was offered a position to take over the US business for a customfabricator in the US and I got to move to Manhattan for 10 years.
and run that.
And now I have had my own company called uh Agency Custom.
(03:00):
And we did a lot of custom fabrication for public artists and for architects makingarchitectural statements.
And we're just finishing one right now, which is a 28 story media facade for a companycalled CoStar, which is one of the US's largest and most ambitious uh
public art displays that are gonna be going in Richmond, Virginia.
(03:23):
So when my background really kind of helped the acumen that I had acquired, I was able toparlay into becoming my own artist and doing my own things and saying, you know what, I
have a voice, I have things I wanna make.
And I just decided that it was my turn.
(03:44):
that it was my turn to make stuff.
It was my turn to create.
It was my turn to make the stuff that I wanted to make.
That's kind of how driving a 66 Pontiac Parisianne led to what I'm doing now.
I love that story.
And I think of a 66 Pontiac Parisian and I think of a drag queen with the big, you know,bonnet on driving down the street, kind of like to Wong Fu style or something like that.
(04:16):
Well, if there's any more that I can add to this, my aunt would sit in the back with abottle of wine and I would drive her around.
yeah, those were our Sunday afternoons as kids.
It was fantastic.
So when you relocated from Manitoba to Manhattan, that must have involved some profoundcultural and geographic shifts for you.
(04:42):
ah Did that physical transformation mirror your journey towards your queer creativity inspaces that challenge conventions?
yeah, that's an interesting question.
Because where I ended up from Manitoba, I went to Vancouver, I went to the far west coast,and then to Manhattan.
And I've been in an industry that's really predominantly, has been predominantly overrunby middle-aged men, heterosexual middle-aged men.
(05:13):
And my place at the table was something that I had to create for myself.
um I didn't have the access and I wasn't invited to the same tables that they were at.
um And I always, I make fun of it in a little way.
And I wanna use this tongue in cheek, but I call them mediocre middle-aged heterosexualwhite guys.
They just got to phone stuff in.
(05:34):
They didn't have to be exceptional.
They didn't have to do anything remarkable.
for me to be taken seriously in the industry, because I'm dealing with architects anddevelopers and contractors and general contractors.
And there's not a lot of gay guys in that industry.
And where I fit in was on the custom side was that it was like, had to call it bespokebecause it was a different, it was a different, better term.
(06:01):
But
I didn't have the opportunity to be mediocre.
I didn't get that chance.
And I don't think that, you know, guys like you and me don't get an opportunity to bemediocre.
And we align remarkably well with women in that realm because we're all after the samekind of privilege.
We're wanting access to it.
(06:22):
And so we align with, you know, our allies, which are straight women.
And because we're after the same thing, we're after the same spot at the table andstraight women
and gay men don't get an opportunity to just be mediocre.
We don't get taken seriously.
So, yeah.
straight women.
Other marginalized groups will say the same thing that you have to, you can't just be goodat your job to do well in your career, you have to be exceptional.
(06:51):
Yes, and it's exhausting.
It's exhausting.
And so in my industry, you know, I was really able to carve out a remarkable career formyself.
did, you know, I did very well.
I've done some really massive projects all around North America.
I worked for, I worked for the company that built the largest outdoor chandelier inCleveland, Ohio.
(07:13):
And if there's any place that needs a chandelier, was downtown Cleveland.
And it's in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest outdoor chandelier, and itstraddles the financial and the theater district.
And so these sort of things are things that I was able to kind of like hang my hat on,because these are things that I was a part of when I was with this company.
(07:36):
And when I was, you when I started my own company and I was doing this on my own, it wasthe same thing.
I had to pick up the biggest, the best, the most, the most...
energetic or the most advanced projects I could find just so that I could continue beingtaken seriously because I didn't want to take just a restaurant job or a hotel job.
(07:58):
I wanted the big casino job.
I wanted to do, you know, the product, South Dakota State University.
We built a giant chandelier for them, a big custom chandelier that um was based off of anumbrella that got turned inside out on my way to a meeting.
That was the inspiration for it.
So I have really done, I have to admit, I've done very well in this industry.
(08:21):
And it's not because I don't, I look at it as like being gay had a really big part in itbecause I just know what's good.
And we know what's good.
And I relate to people.
Yeah, exactly.
But I also learned how to code shift.
those things just get really tiresome after a while because this idea of being authenticto yourself, it's like, well, authenticity is dependent on the situation and the person.
(08:52):
Authenticity is a mask that we put on.
for many years, I was like, what part of me is the authentic part that people are seeing?
So I had a...
uh can require some vulnerability and that's hard to do sometimes.
Yeah, so I really liked what I've done and how it's transformed me.
And when I got to Manhattan and I was running around the city, it was a fantastic growingexperience because it was just, got to learn how to do business hard.
(09:23):
And it was a, that's a tough, that's a tough town.
like it was, and you know, now I'm doing pro, I was doing projects all over the UnitedStates and Canada and Europe and doing, you know, doing some really amazing things.
And so where this left was I left.
in 2022, November of 2022, and I came back to Canada.
(09:46):
And I really wasn't sure what I was going to be doing, but I just drove across the countryfrom the west coast all the way to the east coast until I ran out of land.
And in the midst of all of this, I ended up having two massive near fatal strokes in frontof a pie shop.
So if you ever want to understand what uh poetry is, have a stroke in front of a pie shop.
(10:09):
It was, I'm like, that is poetic.
uh That was a fantastic thing, but that shifted.
That transformed me in a way that I can recognize.
Like I can see the transition point from where it was until I was in the hospital forweeks, having to walk again, having to coordinate where sound was coming from, and even
(10:33):
getting my hands to work properly.
It weeks.
And when the lights came back on, was like, I don't think I can do this for other peopleanymore because this just happened out of the blue.
And I had no pre-warning.
I had no clue.
And it just turned into one of those things of, wow, all of this could be taken awayreally quickly.
(10:55):
And I was very lucky.
I didn't end up in a wheelchair.
I didn't end up dead.
I wasn't in a vegetative state.
I still have all of my faculties, and I can still ride a motorcycle.
And that was one of the things that I ended up buying after I got to be able to have,because I had to go, had to, you know, I had my balance checked a lot, but I was like, if
I'm still upright, I'm going to ride a motorcycle.
(11:18):
I'm doing all the things that I needed to do.
And now I'm doing, instead of just doing really well, I need to do some good.
And so what I'm working on now are projects that do some good.
That's what I like to think anyway.
maybe patting myself on the back, I do really want to do some good and leave a legacybehind that is good.
(11:41):
Yeah.
Maybe if aunt Wendy was still here, she'd be in that sidecar on that motorcycle with thatbottle of wine.
she's still here and she's still she's not she doesn't have the wine anymore, but she'sstill She likes her.
She's got a little life in our in our little town and she's uh She's got a good littleshe's got a good thing going for herself now.
(12:02):
So it's a good it's a good thing
Um, you've cited entropy and impermanence as core themes in your work.
Was there a pivotal before and after moment when you realized that decay could be agenerative force in your art?
So yeah, the first piece that, because I have about, in my repertoire right now, I've gotabout 25 years worth of work ahead of me that I can create.
(12:30):
I look at it like I've got about 20 years worth of work.
And when I was first developing the first piece, which is actually a play, um it's basedon death.
It's based on being able to leave a legacy behind.
And then I was starting to work on some public art sculptures that are very much aboutentropy and decay.
(12:55):
They start off as one form and dissolve into another and dissolve into something else.
But there is an ephemeral nature to everything that I'm making is that it's not meant tobe permanent.
It's meant to eventually go away.
But some of these will have lives much longer than I will ever have on Earth.
um
the ephemeral series of sculptures that I'm working on.
(13:18):
those are meant to last about 250 years and they dissolve.
They dissolve away over a very slow period of time and that is you know to take this idealike we have control over our elements and minerals and structure and steel but over time
we can allow that just to dissolve away from the natural elements and they dissolve intoother items.
(13:40):
They dissolve into stalactites and stalagmites and then they crystallize away and thenthey just eventually just completely disappear.
And it's like anything that we make everything that we build everything that we make isephemeral no matter As long lasting as we think things are as eternal as they we like to
believe things are everything in our lives is temporary everything and When I had thestroke all of this stuff became very clear like it was it was really April 23rd
(14:13):
2023 at 10 a.m.
is when everything in my life changed.
The way I saw the world, how I experienced it, how I feel it now is vastly, it'sdiametrically opposed to where I was on April 22nd.
It's...
I can't explain it any better than that.
(14:35):
just, I just realized that nothing that we have, like all the things that we have, all ofthe things like our paintings, our artwork, our clothes, our cars, our carpets,
everything, nothing comes with us.
And I learned that in the hospital because I was, you know, it was when I had the firststroke, they figured it out and they're like, we don't think that you're, we know you're
(14:55):
going to have another one because your type of stroke.
comes in clumps and clusters.
So we expect that you might have another one or two more, but we don't expect that you'regoing to survive because the first stroke I had was so close to my brain stem.
I was told that I should call my family and get my affairs in order.
And by the time that my mother would get there, I was probably not going to still be here.
(15:18):
So it shifted when you're presented with your own mortality in that way.
ah
I think in movies and books and things that we were always told it's going to be thisepiphanal moment.
But it was matter of fact, there was no emotion attached to it.
I didn't cry.
(15:38):
I didn't get angry.
was like, oh, okay.
Yeah, I got to call my mother.
I need to take care of this.
I need to get this done.
I need these things done.
And then I realized that how I was going to die, I had no choice.
There was no choice in this, that it was just going to happen, that every time I went tosleep, I wasn't sure if I was going to wake up.
(15:59):
So that was how my world shifted.
It just completely changed.
And when I have a voice, I have creativity that I have access to, I have resources, I havebusiness acumen, I have all of these things that instead of doing it for other people, I
(16:19):
need to do it for me.
I need to, I just need to do my, have to leave something behind that is.
That is me.
That is not other people.
I need to have authorship.
I need to have that authorship, so...
How long do you anticipate the pieces that you've done that are slowly decaying to last?
(16:41):
about 200 years is the estimated.
So they're made out of uh blocks of minerals, everything from quartz to salt, gypsum,they're all inert and when they mix together, they are non-toxic.
don't, other than the salt, they don't have a mix to them that becomes toxic.
(17:01):
But quartz can take anywhere from 50 to 75 years on its own to dissolve.
There'll be other materials and other minerals that are being extracted out of the St.
Lawrence River on the East Coast and pressed into uh three foot by three foot cubes.
And those will be kind um of left to the elements in these 30 foot sculptures that willjust decay over time.
(17:30):
And how long have they been there?
Oh, these are still in the works.
These are still in the work.
project that I'm currently involved in at breakneck speed is, and you've used the word acouple of times, is the project that I'm working on is actually called Transformation of
Dangerous Spaces.
And this more focuses on societal decay and the erosion of systems.
(17:56):
And that's the one that kind of became
pushed to the forefront, because I thought that it was going to happen or it was planned,I was just asked.
How was that?
Yeah, sure.
Your shift from fabricating for others to creating these immersive installations liketransformation for dangerous spaces um is quite different from what you were doing before.
(18:26):
um Describe the first time you witnessed audiences step inside the collapse of your work.
What surprised you about their engagement?
So when I was sending out the proposals and where the proposal started from was um from anexperience that in my small town there was a woman that lived here, her name was Elaine
(18:53):
Mosher and I always have to make sure that I mention her name.
but she was the sixth woman since September of 2025, 2024, that had been murdered by herpartner.
And I know this is a real, this is a kind of a downturn in the conversation, but itaffected me.
And I live in a town of 900 people now.
(19:15):
And so it's a very tight-knit community.
is remarkably beautiful and very supportive.
And when Elaine Mosher died, it affected me.
And it affected me in a way that I wasn't really prepared for.
And I knew I to be involved somehow.
(19:36):
I had to be involved because this has now been called an epidemic in Canada.
The intimate partner violence and gender-based violence statistics here are off thecharts.
They are remarkably stubborn.
And so I went to one of the uh executive directors of a transition house with a housingplan because the idea was to take a house like where Elaine had been murdered and convert
(20:05):
it into something
was going to be positive, like another transition house where other women that are leavingthe transition service can be reintegrated back into the community in a nice comfortable
place.
It would be transforming that space.
And the project that I had been involved with was this idea of being able to do somethinglike that.
(20:27):
the executive director, Kellyanne Hamshaw, uh said, I actually looked you up and I seeyour history and I see what you've done.
Would you be interested in coming up and developing an educational piece for men?
that would educate them on intimate partner violence and gender-based violence.
And not so much as an awareness campaign, but more like something that would point outwhere it happens and where it starts.
(20:53):
And when I was sending out the proposal for people, the response back that I got was itwas incredibly visceral.
People said they had a really heavy emotional reactions to just my proposal because it isa lived experience.
Like, you know, I grew up much like you did.
I grew up listening to homophobic slurs and misogyny and how power and how violence istransferred in the boys bathroom or in the locker room.
(21:24):
Mm-hmm.
is where we learned it.
This is where that transmutation of information comes along is in those rooms behindclosed doors.
Boys learn it from their dads and then they transfer this information amongst each otherand they trade it like trading cards.
And now we're in a position where young men and boys are being indoctrinated at scale.
(21:47):
online with men that have platforms and have been monetized and have an audience and a fanbase.
And that's the trouble.
The troubling part of this is that we've gone from this analog position and this analogsource of information transfer.
I'm 52.
So for me, this was pre-internet.
So, you know, the locker room, like I got, I got physically assaulted many, many times inthe locker room.
(22:13):
Mm-hmm.
the, am I allowed to swear on this podcast?
I got the shit kicked out of me in the bathrooms, in the hallways, in the locker rooms.
I've been sexually assaulted in a bathroom.
These are places where this to me was, this was a dangerous space that needed to have somelight shed on it.
And so the proposal itself just garnered so much response from women's organizationsacross the country.
(22:41):
that the main response that came back was that I had to have trauma-informed therapists atthe beginning and at the end of the installations so that there is informed, explicit
consent of people going into this to understand that these eight stalls are going to beremarkably emotional because they are, they focus on eight separate themes of gender-based
(23:07):
violence and intimate partner violence, know, starting off from, you
the analog to the digital source of information transfer to consent and how young men andboys look at consent now, which is far different than the way that I was taught.
I see the t-shirt you're wearing and the groups that I grew up with as a young man, thesewere much older men, but consent was something that was very much part of my upbringing as
(23:40):
a young gay boy.
That there was no play, there was no anything that happened without explicit consent.
And that seems to be taking a very decided left turn.
It's not as explicit.
as it once was.
And then dealing going through from consent all the way to how much damage and how muchviolence can occur in the amount of time that it takes a human body to evacuate its
(24:08):
bladder, which is about 21 seconds.
It takes you 21 seconds to pee and the amount of violence that can happen within 21seconds.
Like the last 21 seconds of a 911 call or the last 21 seconds of somebody locked in thebathroom waiting for police to show up.
So these spaces and these eight stalls are remarkably emotional.
(24:31):
They are meant to confront and they are meant to be intense and they are interactive andthey're immersive and they are going to provide a reckoning but it's to point a finger at
where
(24:51):
at one of the spaces, I'm not saying this is the only space, but one of the spaces whereyoung men and boys pick up the information that they get and where they learn how to even
express violence is in those rooms.
I hope that was a good answer.
that's a very powerful description of it.
(25:12):
And, and when I came across it, um, and reviewed your website myself, um, I found it, um,very powerful because I had my own experiences, uh, in school with violence in locker
rooms.
Um, and it brought back a lot of that for me.
(25:32):
Um, especially as a young, I didn't know it at the time.
at the time, a young gay boy, how much your peers can detect that and seize on it andattack it to protect their own masculinity, I think.
(25:54):
oh
That's exactly a great thought.
Yeah.
Do you do you find that uh queer audiences and straight audiences that come to the to theexhibition react similarly or differently?
So that's an interesting comment because I was thinking about this is that the regardlessof like I look at this is that I just happen to be the person that was developing this and
(26:25):
I just happen to be gay but is it gay art?
No.
Is it queer art?
No.
It's just art.
It's just meant to be an immersive piece.
The universal experience that I have, that you have, that even trans women have.
is the socialization that regardless of where they're at now in in in where we're at nowin our lives our original socialization and culturalization was this it was the universal
(26:57):
experiences is this level of humanity that we experience or this inhumanity that weexperience regardless of our gayness or queerness or transness that the overarching
The overarching theme through all of this was about masculinity and what that was and howthat was being portrayed.
(27:24):
I've had questions been asked about why this doesn't explicitly include trans women.
And I'm like, well, it doesn't also explicitly include, you know,
other minorities and people of different races because the universal experience is thesame.
(27:48):
There are some cultural differences between things, there isn't an explicit
mention of gayness to it or even transness, but it's all very implicit.
It's all built into the superstructure and into how I've developed this entire structureand these eight stalls and the lighting and the sounds and all of these things are all
(28:15):
because of the experience and the lived experience that I've had.
I don't have a trans experience, but I can understand the perspective, but theimplicitness of it.
I don't believe that it has to be explicit to really get the point across because like, Ithink that I'm just going to repeat what I've just said already is that the universal
(28:37):
experience is the same.
That the socialization is the same.
Yours, mine, my neighbor, the kid I went to school with, we all have the same experience.
We all did.
And this piece reveals that and it exposes it.
And it allows people that have gone into it to go, oh, right, this is something that Iexperienced because the point about all of this with intimate partner violence and
(29:06):
gender-based violence is that it's a mess that men created.
And women and women's groups have endured this for decades trying to fix it.
And it's not, oh no.
(32:09):
There you are.
Ugh, it keeps on, what happened again this time is that you disappear and it's just mewith the flag behind.
Yeah, my internet here at the house dropped.
ah We were in a really good conversation too.
No, not your fault.
It's apparently my fault.
uh
(32:31):
know exactly where I was.
So.
There it is.
uh
was in the question list.
um
(32:54):
Okay, we are recording again.
So go ahead, pick back up where you were and I'll splice it in together.
Sorry about that.
So, yeah, so where I was with this is that the, is the intimate partner violence andgender-based violence is an issue that men created.
And going back to it, it's like, this is an issue that women have had to endure and havehad to create systems to protect themselves against men.
(33:24):
And for men to be involved in this, and then in Canada, we have something that was calledthe Mass Casualty Report.
that very clearly and explicitly asked for men to step up to be part of the solution, tobe part of the way that this is going to be fixed and how to fix this and be involved in
(33:45):
it and that men need to step up.
And so when Kellyanne offered me this challenge to say, you create something, this was mestepping up.
This was my ability, but
the way that it had to be brought forward was that for men to kind of accept theirresponsibility and to acknowledge, they have to accept where it comes from and look at it
(34:10):
and identify it and point at it and kind of understand it's like, yeah, this is one of thespaces where I learned this.
And this is how men get to be involved.
You know even growing up like let's be honest, you know, have I have I been a saint?
Absolutely not have I laughed at things I shouldn't have yeah.
Have I told jokes?
I shouldn't have Absolutely.
(34:32):
Have I used words have I said the things?
Yes I have because that's what was taught to me and that's what I thought was funny orthat's what I thought was part of that was it was normalized and then the violence getting
gets normalized so transformation of dangerous spaces is meant to be
an open dialogue, but it's meant to confront.
(34:55):
It has to confront.
Yeah.
My, my, yeah, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
ahead.
Go ahead.
I wanted my original concept with this was to, you know, quite honestly, just push meninto the deep end of the pool.
But as more people got involved in this and were consulting on it, I was told that I hadto, there were things like the trauma informed practice that I had to include in this
(35:24):
because that wasn't something that I was prepared to do.
I was like, men need to be punished and these guys need, but as I was working through it,I'm like, oh, we actually have to extend a hand and they have to be walked through this.
And the trauma informed practice by having a therapist at the beginning explaining thepiece and then having a debrief
(35:45):
At the end with your group was meant to allow that to happen and allow for some level ofclosure and healing and discussion to say, hey, how did this affect you?
What did you think?
What do you find is the response of men em and trans women and others that come throughthis process when they go through that um counseling session at the end?
(36:19):
How many feel, I'll pause there.
What do you see that their response is to it?
So where we're at, I want to just clarify that right now this project is in its civicoutreach.
we're actually going to be fabricating this in 2026.
(36:40):
So right now what we're dealing with is getting men's groups and women's groups andgetting federal, municipal, and provincial or forward slash state approval and endorsement
on this.
quite honestly, about where I've had
The most success is with all of the women's organizations.
(37:01):
They've been providing me with unbelievable levels of endorsement and beautiful letters toget this project endorsed and supported.
Where I've struggled, and I was surprised by, where I've struggled is with the men'sorganizations.
that they're slow on the uptick on this, on picking up on this or wanting to be a part ofit or um to have some involvement in authorship on the education side.
(37:32):
The piece itself is going to remain artistically sovereign to the way that I had developedit.
However, the men's organizations, I put out a call to say, look, if you want to haveauthorship in this, the education that gets put out is something you can have a part in.
But that's been the difficult part is getting the men's groups involved, which has beenvery disappointing uh for their own reasons.
(37:58):
And some of it I can never say.
Yeah, and so the ones that need to see it the most or be a part of this the most stillaren't.
And I'm not saying that these men's organizations aren't doing the work and they are doingvery, very good work.
One organization that I am getting endorsement from called Guys Work, there are reasonswhy they are unable to, but other organizations just have not been.
(38:29):
coming up to support as emphatically as I had expected.
On the trans side, I haven't had a lot of interaction because I think that when I explainwhy there isn't any explicit trans content in this, it's that even trans women at some
(38:50):
point in their life were socialized as boys.
and they have that socialization the same way the women are socialized in a very specificway.
We still have that and trans women have that, they have that socialization.
So I think there is some commonality with this that again, this is just a human experiencethat we've all gone through.
(39:13):
And that's certainly true for trans women who are, are older and grew up in a time unliketoday where so many young trans children are recognizing their trans characteristics and
(39:33):
are able to come out earlier.
But for those who grew up in an earlier time in the eighties and nineties in 2000 andcouldn't, could not be true to themselves.
they probably did have to ah go through these um boys, men's locker room scenarios and,and listen to those same words.
(39:53):
um
Tell us how we can get some of these organizations.
How can we help some of these organizations be open to displaying this work of art?
(40:14):
One of my mentors in this project has expressed to me that it's going to require patienceand how things work.
I'm running a nonprofit organization for the first time in my life.
I come from corporate where, in the corporate world, you are the dictator.
You decide how quickly things are and it's a very, this is a very different world and itrequires an inordinate amount of patience.
(40:43):
And one of the things that I didn't have going into this or that I didn't realize I neededmore of was patience.
So these men's organizations, I do believe will come around.
They will get involved.
I know they will.
It's just requiring patience.
the...
This piece doesn't come in to replace what they're doing.
It pays homage to what they're doing.
(41:04):
This is a different...
This isn't an awareness campaign.
And I wanted to...
uh
I wanted to, there is somebody else who called it an awareness campaign.
was like, no, this isn't awareness because we're already aware of it.
This isn't something that I'm trying to go, hey, guess what?
partner violence and gender-based violence exist and I'm providing awareness to this.
is far beyond that.
(41:25):
This is now an initiative and it is.
somewhat steeped in love of horror.
And I had one city councilor express it to me that it seemed like the way that this hadbeen developed and with the imagery and with the tone of this is that it's like a circus
midway house of horrors.
(41:48):
And I was like, that's a fantastic explanation because it is, it does have that element.
For me,
horror, the horror films are where I went for Refuge because it was predictable.
Horror films have...
Yeah, yeah, we're huge horror fans because there is a formula to it.
(42:14):
We know how it's going to go.
We know what the beginning is.
We know what the middle is.
We know how it's going to end.
Mm-hmm.
that's a predictable amount of horror that we're like, we can take this on.
And we know how it's going to end because the bad guy always gets taken out.
Or the bad guy, you know, it ends on something else.
But when we go home or we're dealing with this in our real lives, the horror isunpredictable.
(42:38):
There's no way to predict how something is going to turn out or what your dad is going todo tonight or what your bully is going to do tomorrow.
Those sort of things, that unpredictability is, I think, what draws gay people to horroris that there is the heroine, there is the hero, there is this predictable formula.
(43:04):
that we attach ourselves to, even to the bad guys, because the bad guys are venerated.
it's like, know, we look at, you know, I go to a horror film festival every year becausethat's just my genre.
And so this entire piece has that flavor.
(43:26):
It's meant to, because it's predictable.
I wanted to have predictable horror.
This is it.
And the horror I think helps maybe to know, but it was, I mean, it was a, uh it was atelling tangent, right?
Because as we mentioned, there's so many people in the queer community who in their youthwere drawn to horror.
(43:51):
and sometimes it's the horror, takes horror to drive the message home, um, in a way thatbeing, being polite about it can't, um,
If, if transformation of dangerous spaces could manifest as a permanent public policy,what would it look like?
(44:19):
On its own, in some of my materials and my presentations, I talk about this piece as beingnot just an art installation, but its policy and motion.
It's meant to go alongside.
both gender-based violence initiatives that cities and towns and communities are pullingin together.
(44:40):
Like there's a lot of it going on throughout North America where communities aredeveloping policies because the statistics, regardless of all the awareness campaigns
are...
oh
remain static.
And I can only talk about Canadian statistics.
(45:00):
In 2024, there was over 163,000 reported incidents of intimate partner violence andgender-based violence.
And when you break that down, that's like almost one every four minutes.
Mm.
Those numbers are mind boggling and then there's a huge swath that just go unreported.
(45:21):
And these are by women and then there's another 30, 35 % that go unreported.
So we're looking at things, we're looking at this as an item for young men and boys to gointo again, to kind of have this idea of like, oh yeah, no, this is again, I need to put
(45:43):
it in front of them.
I need municipalities and cities and galleries and civic spaces and universities to bringthis into their spaces so that they can have access to it as part of some grander plan, as
part of gender-based violence policies that municipalities are developing as a compendium.
(46:06):
But on its own, always want, I'm always trying to make sure that, you know, I'm notgetting too far in the weeds with it on the policy side, because it is an art piece to me.
But where it's being taken and how it's growing and what it's turning into is far more ofuh a more aggressive initiative than I had originally anticipated when I went into this.
(46:30):
Because this was not, this was a wonderful gift.
a sad gift that started from grief, that was born from grief, but I'm doing something verygood with it.
And I'm very proud of it.
I'm very proud of how it's turned out and what people's response and like even yourresponse and bringing me on here means a lot to me.
(46:53):
You know, and that's, you one of the nice things from the stroke is that I cry reallyeasily.
I feel things very deeply now.
It rewired my brain in a way that, you know, who I am now by comparison to who I wasprevious to the stroke is vastly different.
And I recognize that these are two different people where I was pre-stroke and where I amnow that.
(47:19):
how I see things and how I feel things and how I experience things.
All these little things have a really deep resonance with me.
Even these conversations, like this conversation with you, David, these things mean a lotto me.
And it's, you the fact that you brought me on here to talk about this makes me, I'm doingthe right thing.
(47:41):
This is the right thing.
I'm doing this right.
I think you are.
I hope that the right thing definitely comes out of it.
And kind of on that, we talked a little bit earlier about impermanence um with regard tosome of the other art pieces you're doing that are decaying themselves.
(48:07):
What impermanence do you think comes out of uh transformation of dangerous spaces?
Where I see this is more in the decay or the entropy of systems that fail men and the samesystems that fail women, these systems that will be, that will erode.
(48:30):
That this is meant to help hasten that erosion of the education of this toxic.
toxic masculinity, education, we need to point fingers at them and point it out for themto go away.
If we keep them hidden away and we don't point them out and talk about them, they continueto thrive.
(48:50):
They take oxygen.
But once you point them out, you can take away the oxygen, you can take away theattention.
And these things eventually will start to erode and these systems and these ideas that menhave about how women are to be treated or how gay people are to be treated or how trans
people are to be treated will dissolve.
(49:15):
But it takes time and it takes initiative and it takes a lot of people to stand up andstep up to make that stuff happen.
And this podcast is one of them.
You are breaking down systems every show that you produce.
uh Every meeting I have is meant to do that.
(49:35):
I think that all of this together, all of us together in this are breaking these systemsdown and creating an impermanence because this can't last.
We can't last like this.
This is an impossible task.
We just cannot believe that this is going to...
No.
We can't, we just cannot, and we have to just say it.
(49:58):
We all have to say it.
We cannot let this continue.
To young queer artists, early in their artistic careers, wrestling with impermanence.
um What's one ritual or mindset that helps you embrace entropy as liberation that youcould share with them?
(50:22):
Well, first start by saying don't have a stroke.
Don't have your life, don't.
Just like that, don't, it's highly not recommended.
I don't recommend that part, but if it does happen, lean into it.
But for queer artists, even just create art, create good art.
(50:45):
Focus more on the work.
Focus on the work rather than the persona.
what you're creating early on and like I'll be really straight with you.
It's like, know, I'm 52 and it's taken me till now to create something like this.
And I don't think I could have done this level in my twenties or even in my earlythirties.
(51:10):
I don't think that would have been possible.
um I have a wealth of experiences that have contributed to how this is, how this has comeabout.
However,
uh As a gay artist or as a queer artist, if you're going out in the world, it's create theart first.
(51:32):
The artwork doesn't have identity unless you impose it on it, but it's meant to be goodwork first.
Focus on creating really good work and create a lot of it.
Because you never know.
You never know which one is going to be the one that hits.
(51:53):
You kind of have to treat it like throwing paint against a wall and what sticks.
But just create for the sake of creating without an agenda or without anything to beimposed on top of it because it should be able to live on its own.
And there are some incredibly talented young artists.
(52:15):
and incredibly talented young people that may not necessarily know that they're an artist,that have something in them.
But write it down.
Start by writing.
That's where I started.
I just started by writing.
Yeah, just create the art.
Just go at it.
Just, you know, pick up a hammer and nails and just go create something.
(52:36):
Who cares?
That's it.
All right, so we've reached the end of our interview here.
So we're going to go through our quick 10 questions uh for artists.
So if you're ready, I'll get started.
(52:58):
um What is your favorite artistic medium or tool?
Whoa.
So for the majority of my career, was light, creating lights, creating with light.
That was that was where I was at.
Now it's interdisciplinary and I don't have any one favorite, but the first half of mycareer, the first part of my career, I was creating things that held light.
(53:30):
It was just it was just one of those things that it was just so pretty.
that regardless of the room that it was in, I always treated light and lighting like itwas the top hat on Fred Astaire.
That you can have this wonderful space and this wonderful dance, but the top hat, the tophat was lighting.
Yep.
(53:52):
What artistic trend or cliche do you wish would disappear?
or a cli-shane.
man, that's a really hard one.
I'm not sure.
uh I love, mean, there's, yeah, I mean, there's so much that it is what it is just forwhat it is, even if it is a cliche.
(54:18):
ah know, large scale contemporary art installations, know, that are...
m
that are derivative of others.
think derivative work, think that's where I would be.
If it's original and cliche, fantastic.
But if you're creating something and it's derivative of something that's already inexistence, yeah, that can go away because we don't need any more of that.
(54:42):
Create something original and cliche.
Embrace it.
What fuels my creativity the most?
Bye.
Bye.
My environment right now, because I live in a really, I live very rural-y and I haveresources and I get to just kind of do whatever I want and create what I want.
(55:15):
um That's what fuels me is my own autonomy that I'm not beholden to anybody else.
I'm not beholden to somebody's paycheck, but my autonomy.
My autonomy in this world right now fuels my creativity.
What sound or noise complete?
(55:37):
wait, I skipped one.
What sound or noise instantly inspires you?
listen to a lot of house music.
So I get really inspired by gospel house.
That really gets me going.
(55:58):
grew up in a rave era in the early 90s, you and I was a club kid for a while.
So for me, know, house music is like the, you know, especially gospel house just gets megoing every day.
That's how I start my day and end my day.
What sound or noise completely kills your focus?
(56:18):
chewing.
Chewing.
I have misophonia, so.
Ah, that's when you are irritated by the sound of someone else's chewing, I think.
Chewing, breathing, anything.
I live alone.
(56:39):
what's your favorite word or phrase to include in your work, literally or metaphorically?
Keep it weird.
Keep it weird.
Keep it weird.
queer artists living or dead honored with a major public monument, who would it be?
Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde.
(57:02):
He had some, he used to write under a Nome diploma and he had some really wild books.
But if there would be one person that could do with, you know, with more recognition justfor what he was able to do for gay people moving forward, like it's Oscar Wilde.
(57:26):
If you ever want an education, go read Oscar Wilde books.
He does some amazing stuff.
lessons.
You know, just he knows.
Wilde and Truman Capote.
Truman Capote would be the next one.
If you want to read some incredible letters.
my god, Truman Capote, you want an education.
Those are the two those are the two guys to look at.
(57:48):
Oh, true.
Um, what is one profession or creative field you could never see yourself in?
I would not want to I don't I don't ever want to work for anybody I haven't had a regularnine to five jobs since I was in my 20s.
(58:12):
So we're going on 30 plus years I just I don't think I could work for anybody period inany facet.
I Have been my own boss for so long.
You know, I I'm
I'm very good to myself, I don't think that I could work in any industry where I had toreport to somebody else.
(58:37):
No.
Yeah, that goes back to that whole autonomy thing, I think.
Yep.
uh If your art could take on a life of its own, what form would it take?
The next, because of the, I want, what I want for, you know, with one of the other ones,which is called, which is an actual stage play that I'm writing with an author, a
(59:06):
playwright here in Canada.
His name is Michael Best and he's an award-winning playwright.
and he's helping me write a play.
So really where I would like to see this go is I would like to be in the theater.
There's something dramatic.
(59:26):
There's just something.
of David Janger's spaces.
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of options, but there's just something, just the drama ofbeing on a stage and being in front of people and speaking lines that have been written
for you.
There's a romance to that and having people be part of it.
(59:48):
Like, theater is like the original immersive art.
It's...
and it's interactive and it's playful and there's feedback and all of this stuff that Ithink that the theater, theater is really the, really where I would like to see all of my
(01:00:09):
work move into is into theater.
And I think there's a bit of theater behind everything that I'm creating.
And finally, 100 years from now, what do you hope your art says about you to those whofind it?
I'm gonna repeat something I said earlier.
um
(01:00:32):
You know, in the first part of my career, I did very well.
I've done very well.
I have to be honest.
I did very well.
But did I do a lot of good?
No.
This is meant to be good in all its format.
Like, I want to do some good.
I want to be remembered as somebody that did good.
that's the...
(01:00:54):
That's really what I want.
The legacy that I want to be able to leave behind is that I did good.
I did some good.
That's it.
I did some good.
I think transformation of dangerous spaces will definitely do some good for a lot ofpeople who need to hear it.
appreciate you saying that.
Thank you.
I really do appreciate you saying that.
(01:01:15):
That's very nice of you.
Thank you.
Christopher, it's been really insightful conversation.
um I have really enjoyed it.
um I look forward to seeing transformation of dangerous spaces sometime soon.
I do too.
And you know, we're going to be doing, we're doing 30 cities a year, 30 communities a yearin Canada over for each, each year, 30 cities between now and 2028.
(01:01:47):
My ultimate goal with the piece is to have it travel the United States as well.
I'll be touring around in a 45 foot tour bus with, you know, following the piece as I goalong in a 45 foot billboard.
But
The ultimate goal is like, really would like to see this.
(01:02:07):
I'd like to see this travel well beyond my time here.
Well, when it ever comes to Toronto or some other amazing cities in Canada that I haven'tvisited yet, but would love to, ah I look forward to finding out so that I can come see
it.
(01:02:27):
You will be invited.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
You will be getting an invitation to come and see it.
Thank you.
David, you're very good at this.
You're very good at this, man.
Wow.
Appreciate that feedback.
All right, I'm going to stop the recording.
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