JEANNETTE SIROIS  

A three-channel moving image installation.

Undesirable confronts the historical language through which legal, bureaucratic, medical, and religious institutions have classified, documented, and regulated queer and trans lives in Canada. Drawing on archival terminology, administrative procedures, significant dates in Canadian queer history, and language emerging from within LGBTQ+ communities, the work examines how institutions construct legibility through systems of filing, assessment, categorization, and record keeping.

The work uses a tightly choreographed soundscape of fluorescent hums, bureaucratic machinery, file stamps, page turns, and electronic interference to immerse viewers within the sensory environment of institutional control. Anaglyph imagery periodically disrupts this order. Its doubled red and cyan fields resist comfortable viewing, producing visual instability, interference, and perceptual discomfort. Rather than functioning as an optical effect alone, the anaglyph becomes a form of pressure: an image that asks the viewer to continue looking even when looking becomes difficult.

Influenced by the severity and uncompromising material language of Brutalism, Undesirable considers endurance as both physical and political. What discomfort will a person withstand to protect the conditions of their own life? What will they risk to maintain identity, conviction, autonomy, and the right to exist on their own terms? The work does not equate the viewer's temporary discomfort with historical violence. Instead, discomfort operates as a bodily proposition, asking what it means to remain present when systems are structured to make presence difficult.

As institutional language accumulates across the three channels, its authority begins to fracture. Human voices, historical milestones, reclaimed language, and acts of witness interrupt bureaucratic order and expose its instability. Progress is neither linear nor secure; rights gained remain vulnerable to revision, erosion, and removal.

Rather than recounting a history of persecution alone, Undesirable investigates the continuing relationship between institutional power and queer and trans lives, asking how systems shape who is recognized, who is documented, who is excluded, and who is permitted to belong.