For years I believed my portrait work was about the queer body itself. I thought the drawings were centered on presence, absence, erasure, or the familiar narratives of exclusion: not allowed, not recognized, not at the table. But every time I tried to frame my work that way, something felt off. Too familiar. Too rehearsed. Too close to the language so many artists have done. The truth came into focus only when I started asking a different question.What if my work isn’t about the body?What if...

Conversations about legibility often drift toward theory, but for queer people it begins somewhere far more ordinary. It begins in the small, daily adjustments we make before we step out the door. Recently I was talking with my spouse about clothes we wanted to wear—ties, sharper lines, bolder queer jewellery—and the hesitation appeared almost immediately. Not because we questioned our choices, but because we worried the world wouldn’t know how to read us. That hesitation, that tiny pause, is...

Justin Ogilvie — Selected Works, 2015–2025 Cowichan Public Art Gallery, Duncan, BC, September 5 - November 15, 2025 “Artwork by Justin Ogilvie, photo by Jeannette Sirois, courtesy of Cowichan Public Art Gallery” A few weeks ago, I visited Spectral Bodies: Fragments from a Journey at the Cowichan Public Art Gallery, a solo exhibition of selected works by Vancouver-based painter Justin Ogilvie. The show spans a decade of practice, bringing together paintings created between 2015 and 2025 that...