PRIDE: Trans artist Ardyn Gibbs is living in the light

Their work explores the pleasures, resilience and secrets of the queer experience through holograms, lenticular prints, digital renderings, and the reflective distortions of chrome.

I can’t help but think of holograms as the neon-retro dreams of a future that never came, which made my first encounter with Ardyn Gibbs’ holographic artwork an unanticipated surprise. Far from the solidity promised by Jem and Star Trek: The Next Generation, these holograms cast three-dimensional spells that playfully wink in and out of being – a fitting medium for a queer artist exploring visibility with no small measure of joyful defiance.

Gibbs uses a variety of digital tools to explore queerness as experienced within the body: as heartbeats and dance, sweat and sensation that the artist translates into pulsing light and colour through future-facing technology. While more prolifically used by major corporate advertisers, Gibbs first saw holographic projections at Art Toronto and soon picked up a Holofan to create 3D animations that can inhabit space without reliance on screens. The resulting works are apparitions of fleeting fun that launch their lived experience into otherworldly dimensions.

A recent McMaster graduate now settled in Hamilton, the Cayuga-born artist credits the pandemic’s disruption and shift to remote learning for their embrace of digital media. “I don’t know where my practice would have been at all,” they admit with a grin. The portfolio they presented at the urging of studio art professor Briana Palmer as a first year humanities student was promising but unfocused: drawings, ceramic sculptures, “silly little videos of me singing as a teenager.” The need to make art without regular studio access after pandemic lockdowns sharpened their creative focus during a chaotic time when Gibbs also came into their trans identity. 

Their art began to engage more deliberately with their transition with the support of peers like Eli Nolet, a trans classmate who shared many of the same experiences. The two collaborated on an installation work for their graduating exhibition that was later shown in Toronto and has been updated this spring in “Tender Like a Bruise” at Hamilton Artists Inc. This new exhibition references the backrooms of queer undergrounds with a moody installation of glowing monitors, Nolet’s handmade chain works, encouraging words of belonging and digital renderings that harness the pleasures found within identities too often associated with pain. 

“Everybody wants to hear about the hard parts of queerness,” Gibbs acknowledges, which is reason enough to insist on trans pleasure. By experimenting with holograms, lenticular prints, and the reflective distortions of chrome, Gibbs plays with the visibility of queer bodies through art that requires the viewer to move through these spaces to fully receive these images and words. 

Transition can be an isolating experience for many queer youth, but Hamilton’s generous network of peers and spaces – what Gibbs describes as a “lovely community, funky but special” – holds a special place in their heart. This was especially true of Sous Bas, a beloved dance club in downtown Hamilton that Gibbs fondly recalls as the first space in Hamilton where they found kinship and community. Now closed, Sous Bas is memorialized as a reflective layer in some of their digital renders, including a variant of the CBC Arts logo that Gibbs was commissioned to create for last November’s Trans Awareness Month. The resulting work is reflective of their distinct artistic voice – a spiky pink beacon of movement and joy that celebrates the sweat and shimmering beauty of life under the club lights. 

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Their works encapsulate joy in sometimes coded form to honour a history of secrecy among queer communities as well as the subjective honesty of their own experiences. A swan in Bayfront Park that curiously approached and followed Gibbs and Nolet during a shared walk lingers in Gibbs’ imagination as a “magical experience” that resonated with their shared trans experience. The swan conveys beauty as well as fierce territoriality and protection, and has since become a recurring symbol in Gibbs’ visual vocabulary.

This same swan appears in their response last year to the vandalism of Trans Lives are Sacred by B.C.-based artist Ris Wong, a billboard commission at Hamilton Artists Inc. that was repeatedly targeted by violent acts of graffiti and cutting. When Inc. artistic director Sanaa Humayun invited Gibbs to respond with their own additions to the mural, they were understandably apprehensive. Working on a site that had already attracted so much hostility was a worrying prospect, but Inc. staff worked alongside Gibbs to devise a safety plan and provide supervision throughout the project.

The resulting work is characteristic of Gibbs’ preference for softness in the face of hardened hate; the Bayfront swan became a layered design that is both approachably appealing to viewers and ambiguous in meaning. The choice to write the word “co-exist” under a cut flap in the mural is a nod to Cree writer Billy-Ray Belcourt’s teachings on co-existence – a call to hold space for different ways of being in the world through inherent respect rather than perfect understanding of the other. 

These gentle touches are a form of resilience in the face of a hostile world. At a time when tensions and debates are resounding heavily against the very existence of trans people, Gibbs is defiantly sharing the abundance of joy in queer lives. In their hands, digital chrome is a magic mirror that transforms the world, and in Gibbs’ lens can present “a queer body as a shiny, beautiful, glimmery thing, especially when moving through the world dancing.” In increasingly dark times, Ardyn Gibbs lives, deliberately and daringly, in the light.