Factory Media Centre is delighted to announce that Jay Pahre is joining us as a 2026 &NOW Artist-in-Residence!
During the residency at Factory Media Centre, I will be working on a new project called Dispersal Season. Dispersal Season explores queer and trans movement and evasive strategies in response to rising visibility of anti-trans sentiment. I am interested in how continuing to trouble “visibility” of transness both destabilizes the targeting of trans lives and bodies, but how strategic refusals and evasions of interpretable visibility create opportunities for collective resistance by-and-for trans communities. In other words, this project will think through what transness looks, feels, and sounds like with evasion, furtivity, and refusal as touchstones, rather than visibility or representation.
About the Artist
Jay Pahre is a queer and trans settler and immigrant artist, writer, and cultural worker currently based on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee Nations, within the lands protected with the “Dish with One Spoon” wampum agreement (Hamilton, ON). His work engages trans and queer ecologies, interspecies collaboration, and place in the context of settler colonialism. Drawing from a walking and community-informed practice, he works to consider what moments of ecological precarity and transformation look, sound, and feel like. The uses of metal, electricity, and heat have been instrumental in his work to think through friction and conductivity as agents of transformations that can imagine alternative forms of queer/trans and more-than-human futures grounded in collective implication. His creative practice is informed by collective and community engagements through artist residencies and public engagements. He received his BFA in Painting and BA in East Asian studies in 2014, and his MA in East Asian studies from the University of Illinois in 2017. He went on to complete his MFA in visual art at the University of British Columbia in 2020, and is currently pursuing a PhD at McMaster University. He has attended residencies at the Western Front, Banff Centre, Isle Royale National Park, and the Empire of Dirt. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada at traditional galleries and community spaces, and his writing has been published in academic journals and comic anthologies.
About the Residency
FMC’s &NOW Production Residency is an opportunity for artists and creators to utilize the space and resources at FMC to produce a new work or continue a developing body of work.
Header Image: Jay Pahre, Skinwelt (2020), steel, grass