Collection: Curated by Andrew Zealley

Tonight, art lives here at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Tonight, art helps us to support Buddies in its continuing work as a cultural mainstay for queer Toronto in risky, complex, and contradictory times. Art helps us understand lived experiences, our own and the lives of others. Take a risk: take art home. This is the important action, tonight. The curator is merely an organizer, a selector. Cutting letters from picture magazines to compose a ransom note: Let’s Help Buddies Now! It is the artist and their work that is critical to movement, messaging, and growth. In this way, I leave the real message of my statement to an artist: What art can offer (if it can at all—to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind. After that you may return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but that is your problem. (Yoko Ono)  

—Andrew Zealley, Disco Hospital