'Doe & Deery' Solo Exhibition by James Fowler
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Doe & Deery is an immersive installation that reinterprets hunting culture through a queer, textile-based lens. The exhibition unfolds as a spatial narrative across three environments: the waysides, the cabin, and the forest.
Textile-based sculptures of northern flora and fauna draw us in, referencing colonial systems of classification, while the domestic interior of a hunting cabin presents soft replicas of objects associated with habitation and ritual. In the final act, two human-deer hybrid figures are suspended and field-dressed, transforming the language of the trophy into a site of vulnerability and ornament.
Through material softness, embellishment, video, sound, and constructed environments, this new body of work examines how systems of masculinity are learned, performed, and sustained through ritual, while proposing alternate forms of relation grounded in transformation and embodiment.
About the Artist:James Fowler is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, textiles, and soft sculpture. He grew up in North Bay, and his work often reflects an ongoing negotiation between rural and urban experience. His practice explores queerness, ecology, and systems of power through material transformation and spatial installation. Drawing from traditions of cartography, craft, and domestic labour, Fowler reconfigures familiar forms into speculative environments that examine belonging, violence, and social ritual. He is a member of Red Head Gallery and a founding member of the Throbbing Rose Collective, producers of Nuit Rose and the Queer Up North Artist Residency. Fowler maintains an active studio practice in Toronto.
