JJ Levine photo exhibit at the McCord Museum

February 2022 – If you’re in Montreal February 18th and later, you may wish to visit the McCord Museum to see JJ Levine Queer Photographs. The exhibit “will present a selection from JJ Levine’s major photo projects Queer Portraits, Alone Time, and Switch. Levine’s work questions the representation of traditional binary gender roles through staged photographs of queer subjects in intimate, domestic settings.”

If you can’t make it to Montreal, a sample of Levine’s work is on their web site. Levine describes the Switch series of photos as presenting “the viewer with what initially appear to be pairs of classic studio portraits of heterosexual couples. Upon closer examination, however, each diptych is comprised of two models, not four. I dress each model as a man in one image and a woman in the adjacent one. By staging the same models twice in each pair of photographs, I don’t give any clues as to the subjects’ lived genders, therefore challenging the idea that gender is stable, consistent, or single.”

The McCord Museum is in downtown Montreal at 690 Sherbrooke Street West across from McGill University.