Dallas Fellini
Curator | Middlebrook Prize Winners
Toronto, ON, CANADA
Dallas Fellini is a curator, writer, and artist with a focus on trans studies and archival studies.
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Biography
Dallas Fellini is a curator, writer, and artist living and working in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their current research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies, interrogating the compromised conditions under which trans histories have been recorded and considering representational and archival alternatives to trans hyper-visibility.
Dallas is currently pursuing a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto, and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from OCAD University. They have published criticism with Canadian Art, C Magazine, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, Cornelia Magazine, Peripheral Review, Function Magazine, and The Journal of Visual & Critical Studies. They have curated exhibitions and screenings for Gallery 44, Vtape, Trinity Square Video, Xpace Cultural Centre, Hearth, Riverdale Hub Gallery, and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Dallas is a member of Crocus Collective and a cofounder of Silverfish, an arts publication devoted to interdisciplinary collaboration, skill-sharing, and cultivating sustained dialogue between emerging artists and writers.
Areas of Expertise (8)
Artists' Books
Photography
Curatorial Studies
Contemporary Art
Archival Studies
Trans Studies
Art Criticism
Artist-Run Centres
Accomplishments (3)
Middlebrook Prize, Art Gallery of Guelph (professional)
2024
Gerd Muehsam Award, Art Libraries Society of North America (professional)
2024
Medal in Visual and Critical Studies, OCAD University (professional)
2019
Education (2)
University of Toronto: MVS, Visual Studies, Curatorial Studies 2024
OCAD University: BA, Visual and Critical Studies 2019
Links (2)
Languages (1)
- English
Media Appearances (4)
JHI Spotlight—Dallas Fellini
University of Toronto | Jackman Humanities Institute online
2023-10-16
Meet U of T student Dallas Fellini, curator of the JHI's Art Exhibition Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts, which includes works by Kasra Jalilipour, Jordan King, Kama La Mackerel, Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney, and Lan “Florence” Yee. Responding to the JHI’s 2023-24 research theme Absence, the exhibition explores the marginalized queer and trans archive, highlighting the surveillance, erasure, and censorship that shape histories. Through modes of fiction-making, critical imagining, and revisionism, the exhibition proposes strategies for a future of queer and trans history-making that challenges oppressive narratives and fills the gaps in the archive.
Moving Ether Way
Canadian Art, Toronto ON print
2021-04-01
Written by Joy Xiang, review of exhibition at Trinity Square Video.
Impenetrable Intimacies: the body as a fever dream
Femme Art Review online
2020-12-01
The body as a fever dream teeters between thresholds of the corporal, constricting and constructing form. Spectral absences refuse the optical cannibalism lurking around every sightline in the gallery space. I have seen many exhibitions on the Body — in its academicized capital B — it has become synonymous with an essential identity, co-opted most frequently by a cis-white feminist framework.¹ The body as a fever dream works outside of this history, centring the body as an opaque form; one that honours trans experience. Using elements of absence, refusal and opacity, the exhibition refigures the body as something that exists in the slash between either/or, granting self-governance to a form that has historically been framed under the cisgender gaze.
The best art shows to see in Toronto this fall
Now Magazine online
2020-09-18
Written by Kelsey Adams, featuring "the body as a fever dream," curated at Xpace Cultural Centre.
Conferences (4)
Queer Dis/Appearance in the Colonial Archive: Censorship, Punitive Surveillance, and Colonial State-Building
Art Libraries Society of North America Conference Pittsburgh, USA
2024-04-03
Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts: Artistic Responses to Archival Absence
CDHI Lightning Lunch: Queer & Trans Art as Knowledge Mobilization University of Toronto
2024-02-14
Disappearance in Queer and Trans Archives: Artistic Responses to Archival Absence," Presenter
Sex Salon Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
2024-01-31
Transforming Value Within Art Publication Collecting Organizations
Art Libraries Society of North America Conference Mexico City, Mexico
2023-04-19
Curatorial Projects and Exhibitions (5)
Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto and The Jackman Humanities Institute September 13, 2023 - June 21, 2024 The archive has long been theorized as a structuring force that informs public memory, state narratives, and the making of official history. When trans and queer histories enter the archive, the conditions upon which they are absorbed are often those of surveillance, criminalization, coloniality, and degradation. More commonly, however, these histories do not make their way into official archives at all, which leads to a fragmented remembering of queer and trans pasts.
gendertrash from hell: to heaven
Co-curator with Crocus Collective Vtape September 9, 2021 gendertrash from hell: to heaven presents three performance and video works by transsexual videographer, performance artist, sex worker, and activist Mirha-Soleil Ross: Tremblement de Chair (2001), Madame Lauraine’s Transsexual Touch (2001), and ALLO PERFORMANCE! (2002). This mini-retrospective looks back at Ross’s activism as it relates to pleasure, desire, and futurity. Each video work puts forward artistic strategies invested in a safer and more inclusive future, projecting fragments of a potential utopia into our contemporary lives.
the body as a fever dream
Xpace Cultural Centre October 9 - November 7, 2020 the body as a fever dream addresses the moments in which our understanding of and presence in our own bodies is fluctuating, moments in which we feel we do not wholly exist, moments where our physicality may encounter a limbo state between presence and absence. A digital dance performance acts as companion to the artworks in this exhibition, posing questions around how the body takes form in gallery settings and how meaning is made in the absence of performing bodies.
this house, made and mended by unbelonging hands
Co-curator with Crocus Collective Riverdale Hub Gallery April 1 - June 30, 2021 this house, made and mended by unbelonging hands is a group exhibition of contemporary craft and zine works by emerging queer artists. Throughout history, queer people, and especially queer people of colour, have had to make their own spaces, their own communities, and their own systems of documenting their stories. this house, made and mended by unbelonging hands showcases artists whose work takes on expansive approaches to craft practices and speaks to this legacy of queer-spacemaking, kinship, and continual resistance across time. Dayna Danger, Akash Inbakumar, Kaythi, Vincy Lim, Yahn Nemirovsky, and Cleopatria Peterson present works that engage the longstanding tradition of queer craft as something that connects us to past and future queer ancestors.
Proof 27
Gallery 44 October 29 - December 11, 2021 Proof is Gallery 44’s annual group exhibition of work by emerging Canadian artists, reflecting a range of current concerns and practices in contemporary photography and lens-based media. The artists in Proof 27 hold and reshape the demarcation of space in their explorations of distance and closeness, separation and intimacy. They implement lens-based practices to perform an undoing of demarcation, destabilizing the boundaries through which we define proximity and intimacy and instead reframe understandings of space as multiple and interstitial. The works in Proof 27 plumb the depth of distance, forging an eclectic document of proximity, space and intimacy.
Articles (4)
G.B. Jones
Cornelia Magazine2023 As we enter the gallery, we’re greeted by the artist’s name, spelled out sloppily across the stark white wall in a two-tone, drop-shadow tag: G-B-J-O- N-E-S. “Are you familiar with the artist?” a member of the gallery staff asks. Like any good queers who grew up on the internet, my friends and I spent years online acquainting ourselves with G.B. Jones's visual practice: perusing digitized versions of her queer punk zines through online archives, returning to her iconic erotic drawings of leather dykes on Tumblr, and listening to whatever songs from her queer post-punk band Fifth Column we could find uploaded to YouTube. Now, for the first time, I’m encountering Jones's original works in person, in Cooper Cole’s commercial gallery.
Fantastic Futures: Cosplay in the Work of Phil Ly and Marissa Sean Cruz
Function Magazine2022 The photograph I interact with most on a daily basis is, of course, the image I have saved as my phone lockscreen. It is a photo by emerging Toronto photographer Phil Lý. In this image, a woman turns her cheek towards the camera, her gaze resting outside of the frame. Late afternoon light flits down through foliage to kiss the tops of her shoulders and head. The line of her jaw peters out to where it meets a pointed, prosthetic ear, its yellowish colour a severe contrast against her brown skin.
Ongoing Legacies of Transmisogyny
C Magazine2020 About a year ago, I attended an artist talk hosted by an arts organization dedicated specifically to serving queer artists. After relishing a rich conversation between featured artists of many different identities, one attendee expressed that they couldn’t help but notice a heavy absence of trans women in the artist talk and in the room more generally, and inquired about the organization’s history of engaging trans women artists. While the critique was warranted, it felt overly simplistic to attribute this failure to one artist talk or one arts organization; at that moment, there were no trans artists being shown at the Toronto galleries that I frequented, many of which had programming histories that didn’t include trans women artists at all.
Influencer Identity and Apocalyptic Prophecy
Peripheral Review2020-11-14
On her Instagram account, Summer Emerald asserts that she is the “World’s Hottest Doomsday Preacher.” Her Internet presence alone possesses the sort of authority that makes me unwilling to question this. For almost a year, I have been vigilantly watching the Montreal-based artist prophesize the apocalypse to her Instagram followers. Appropriately, my visits to Emerald’s Instagram page became more frequent after being placed under government-mandated social isolation in my gloomy basement apartment at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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