The Live Auction Collection:
Curated by Natalie King

Natalie King (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist, curator, facilitator, and member of Timiskaming First Nation. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, video, community engagement, and curation, King’s work explores cultural survival, memory, kinship, and the radiant cycles of life and death and Anishinaabe cosmologies. Their practice bridges body and land, intimacy and resistance, often centering queer and Two-Spirit kin through vibrant and emotionally charged visual language. Grounded in Anishinaabe teachings and anti-colonial frameworks, King’s work enacts desire, joy, grief, and futurity. Recent exhibitions include Legacies of Love at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, POWER (ONSITE Gallery), and World-builders, Shape-shifters (The Robert McLaughlin Gallery). Their work is held in the permanent collections of McMaster University and the Doris McCarthy Gallery.

Curatorial Statement

ArtAttack! gathers artists whose practices explore queer kinship, resistance, joy, and cultural memory. As curator, I wanted to highlight work that resists simplification - that holds space for contradiction, humour, grief, and care. Each artist in this lineup brings a distinct approach rooted in lived experience. From diasporic futurisms, ancestral knowledges to graphics that centre refusal and surreal intimacies, these works offer multiple entry points into queer world-building. Curating this year’s ArtAttack! is a way of honouring the layered, often contradictory and complex realities of queer expression. It’s about refusing coherence in favour of presence and reverence - and making space and place for complexity, collectivity, and creative survival.