PARIS.- This exhibition marks the first dedicated presentation of Canadian artist G.B. Jones’s work in France, and the first to focus on her films, a less known yet vital strand of her wider oeuvre. Emerging from Toronto’s 1980s underground scene, Jones first came to prominence as a member of the all women post-punk band Fifth Column before expanding her practice to include zine-making, drawing, and filmmaking.

As a visual artist, Jones is best known for Tom Girls (1985), a series of drawings that reimagine Tom of Finland’s hypermasculine figures as boisterous, leather-clad women. Rooted in her ongoing interest in questioning and subverting power dynamics, these works were first published in J.D.s (1985–91), the zine she co-founded with Bruce LaBruce. By merging punk’s DIY ethos with a radical queer sensibility, J.D.s played a defining role in shaping the queercore movement.

Jones’s films extend these concerns to the moving image form. They function both as tools of dissent and proposition, sabotaging dominant structures while constructing a queer feminist reimagining of cinematic desire. Presented alongside related ephemera, photographs, and drawings, the exhibition features films a wide range of films including The Troublemakers (1990), The Yo-Yo Gang (1992), and The Lollipop Generation (2008), in which friends, lovers, and collaborators embody characters who move through the city as a site of continual trespass. If Jones’s films are inseparable from the context that created them, her work however exceeds nostalgia. In revisiting these films today, what emerges is not a static archive but a body of work that connects past struggles to contemporary concerns around visibility and agency.

G.B. JONES

Born in 1965 in Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada Lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

G.B. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, musician, and publisher of zines. Jones’ drawings first received notoriety when published in the Toronto-based queer punk zine J.D.s that she ran with Bruce LaBruce. Her prolific drawing series Tom Girls is widely recognized, and reimagines Tom of Finland’s drawings by replacing all the hyper masculine subjects with women, subverting the intent into a contribution to third wave feminist art. In 2002, Jones began a series of collaborative collages with Paul P., many of which were published in the book A Queer Anthology of Rage. Jones’ spray painted images of Ionian columns— one of which is permanently installed at Cooper Cole— references her post-punk band Fifth Column (1981–2002) and suggests the weaving together of her music and drawing practice.

Jones has exhibited her art nationally and internationally since the early 1990s, in spaces such as Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Participant Inc., New York; Mercer Union, Toronto; The Power Plant, Toronto; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; White Columns, New York; AKA Artist Run Space, Winnipeg; Muncher Kunstverein, Munich; and Schwules Museum, Berlin. She was included in the 2012 exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1990s, which was curated by Helen Molesworth for the MCA Chicago and subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the ICA Philadelphia. She has also exhibited at national and international galleries including David Zwirner, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto; Feature, New York; Galerie Clark, Montreal; and Or Gallery, Vancouver.

Juliette Desorgues is a curator and writer based in Paris. With a background in art history and theory from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vienna, and University College London, she has worked internationally as a curator both independently and within institutions. From 2019 to 2021 she served as Curator at MOSTYN, Wales and from 2013 to 2017 as Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. She has also held curatorial roles at the Barbican Art Gallery, London and Generali Foundation, Vienna. As a writer she has published widely, for monographs as well as publications such as Art Basel Stories, Arcane, Art Monthly, Frieze and Mousse Magazine. She sits on the Board of the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation.