Alison L. Bain

Constructing an artistic identity

This article investigates occupational identity construction among contemporary Canadian professional visual artists. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews I draw on the perceptions and subjective experiences of 80 Toronto visual artists to explore how individuals consciously articulate and act upon an occupational identity that they have carefully and deliberately chosen. I demonstrate how the informal nature of artistic occupational definitional parameters can render the title ‘professional artist’ an empty signifier. Given the limited means of clearly distinguishing between professional and amateur, and the lack of recognition attributed to artistic labour as ‘real’ work, I argue that professional status comes largely from drawing on a repertoire of shared myths and stereotypes to help create an artistic identity and project it to others.

‘Reclaiming raunch’? Spatializing queer identities at Toronto women's bathhouse events

In this paper we examine the tensions inherent in the queer politics of Canadas first women-only bathhouse event, the ‘Pussy Palace’. Organized by the Toronto Womens Bathhouse Committee (TWBC), this event is designed to provide women with a ‘safe’ and ‘supportive’ space in which to explore alternative gendered and sexualized identities. We draw on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with organizers, sponsors and participants of the Pussy Palace to consider how the process of ‘queering space’, which is often interpreted as libratory, can paradoxically discipline gendered and sexualized selves. We argue that queer identities and spaces can be distinct from and oppositional to gay and lesbian identities and spaces. With this argument we contribute to a substantial body of geographical literature on sexualities, and to more recent critical work on queer geographies.

Female artistic identity in place: the studio

In this paper I examine the role of the studio as a central site of artistic identity construction and maintenance. Using ten case studies drawn from interviews with contemporary women visual artists from Toronto, Canada, I argue that women artists value studio space because it powerfully reinforces their sense of commitment and belonging to a predominantly male‐dominated profession. I consider how women cope with the demands of artistic practice when they are unable to establish a spatially separate workspace by addressing the experiences of artists who are parents. I demonstrate how women artists who are primary care‐givers are rarely adequately protected from the interruptions of daily life and have grown accustomed to working in fragments of time and space. While these women may appear willing to concede space to others, when space is crucial to their artistic practice, they have a remarkably strong influence on the form of their creative environment. I maintain, then, that the studio as a fixed physical space continues to be a very real necessity for women artists in all stages of their careers.

White western teenage girls and urban space: Challenging Hollywood's representations

This article explores fictional cinematic representations of the world of white female adolescents in the USA. It argues that Hollywood has disseminated an oversimplified image of teenage girlhood that reinforces the notion that girls participate only peripherally in the daily life of exterior urban spaces. An analysis of nine Hollywood teen movies, from the 1980s and the 1990s, reveals a limited palette of spaces appropriated by predominantly white middle-class American adolescent girls. The analysis, within the broad categories of retreat space, liminal space, and interaction space, suggests alternatives for understanding how adolescent girls use urban space.

Rendering a neighbourhood queer

This paper traces, and is the traces of, a collective project to render a neighbourhood queer. It is a project that emerges from queer social relations. Academic research and knowledge generation are approached collaboratively by working with queer-identified residents from west-central neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada who volunteered with the Queer West ShOUT Youth Program. Within the context of two participant-facilitated discussion events, we discursively and artistically investigate queer world-making in the neighbourhood of West Queen West. Through collective mental mapping and photovoice renderings we interpret the queering of urban space as a queer utopian impulse. We critically examine the ‘concrete utopia’ of Queer West Village and question its resonance in the lives of ShOUT volunteers. Theoretically inspired by Muñoz, our ‘a/r/tographic’ mode of inquiry and critical praxis are a rendering of ‘queer futurity.’ We draw on our past to critique our lived present so as to imagine future potentialities. We do so in order to argue that it is vital that the queerness we individually and collectively strive for at the spatial scale of the neighbourhood, such as the process of place-making itself, is grounded in material experience yet remains provisional and an ideality that motivates us.

Claiming and Controlling Space: Combining heterosexual fatherhood with artistic practice

This article is structured around nine short vignettes that explore the complex and embedded gendered relations of fatherhood for heterosexual male contemporary Canadian visual artists at different stages of life. In contributing to the geographical literature on work, gender, and identities, this article answers the questions: What form does hegemonic masculinity take in the visual arts? How do male artists organize and conceptualize work life and family life? What impact does fatherhood have on artistic identity construction? In formulating answers to these questions, I argue that dominant discourses of masculinity have left some men feeling illegitimate as both artists and fathers, and reliant on spatial control as a mechanism to ‘fix’ their artistic identities.

Queer de-participation: reframing the co-production of scholarly knowledge

This article critically examines the play of power in the co-production of scholarly knowledge in the context of a queer, feminist Participatory Action Research (PAR) project. By unpacking the power relations inherent in crafting a narrative of a collective project for a broader audience, we consider the conflicts, silences, and erasures that we experienced as participants, gatekeepers, and co-authors. We analyze iterations of a co-produced conference and journal article papers to recall the power dynamics that framed and reframed the outcomes of this project. In so doing, we critique what ‘co-’ and ‘with’ actually mean in the practice of publishing queer feminist PAR. We argue that there is an accelerating process of de-participation and exclusion that can work to erode the progressive, inclusive politics of feminist participatory methodologies.

Neighbourhood artistic disaffiliation in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

This article argues that the creative drive of cultural workers to envision alternative urban futures and to make real changes in neighbourhoods in the urban present, while politically powerful and imaginatively seductive to urban decision-makers, contains destructive impulses. Such a drive can challenge, but also reinforce, the established social order and unequal power relations. This article critically examines the spatial politics of creative destruction that can unfold in the place-making wake of cultural workers. A case study is used from the mid-sized, industrial city of Hamilton of a deprived inner-city neighbourhood that is informally being reimagined as an arts district. In this neighbourhood, some cultural workers selectively practice middle-class disaffiliation. Individual acts of avoidance, control and destruction function as withdrawal strategies to help minimise the negative externalities of crime and social disorder and to realise a vision of this neighbourhood in their own image.

Artists, Temporality, and the Governance of Collaborative Place-Making

Place-making is a policy exercise rooted in a politics of both space and time. By examining the temporal sequencing of discursive relations and governance networks in the cultural redevelopment of Güterbahnhof Moabit in Berlin, this article demonstrates the fallacy of place-making via artist proxy. It documents the hidden expectations of artist stakeholders and the overextension of their capacities in their municipally delegated and self-assumed roles as “strategic” and “collaborative” partners with local government in place-making processes. It argues that contrary to collaborative and participatory governance ideals, artists are often singularly responsibilized by civic leaders to realize place-narratives for a community rather than with them, which creates a fundamental barrier to community engagement.

Artist intermediaries in Berlin: cultural intermediation as an interscalar strategy of self-organizational survival

This paper argues that intermediation is both a valuable form of occupational self-organization for professional artists and a political act of embedding with socio-spatial ramifications at different local, urban, and global scales. A case study of events organized in Berlin by the interdisciplinary cultural centre Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik demonstrates how artists strategically practice intermediation as modes of autopoietic and dissipative self-organization and as an interscalar survival strategy. These artist intermediaries add improvisational flexibility to the state’s understanding of Verstetigung (sustainable anchoring that fosters a reliable relationship between urban policymakers and cultural producers) and challenge neoliberal urban development logics that instrumentalize creativity.