Berlin Fellowship 2022 — Visual Arts

Alex Turgeon

*1988, Halifax, Nova Scotia (CAN)

Lives in Toronto (CAN)

www.alexturgeon.com

Vita

Alex Turgeon is an artist primarily concerned with how architecture and language can embody a queer subjecthood through the formal positioning of material and poetic text. He received his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver and his MFA from Rutgers University (NJ). Turgeon’s work finds form in the interdisciplinary combinations of sculpture, installation, video, performance, drawing, graphic design, artist books, and web animations which utilize conceptual poetics as a formal scaffold for realisation.

Residency

During my residency, I intend to reflect on the territories inherent within the isolated sites of the queer body in relation to our expanding cityscapes, while intersecting the subject of the built environment onto itself. My project will explore how modes of gentrification operate as methods for framing definitions of the subject and how architectural history, including rapid redevelopment, can offer opportunities to reconsider how our living spaces are articulated, constructed, and utilized. As part of my ongoing work, this project will further explore the evolution of our built environs by upending definitions, offering new arenas to reflect on how the built space of language and the poetic space architecture articulate notions of identity, isolation, and otherness within the ever-present immediacy of our connected world.