Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 

Tyler Matheson: Artist-in-Residence

Factory Media Centre is thrilled to announce that Tyler Matheson will be joining us as our March – April 2024 &NOW Artist-in-Residence. 

During his residency, Tyler will be building off a work commissioned by Trinity Square Video for the exhibition a psionic hope, an astonishing dream curated by Philip Leonard Ocampo. He hopes to explore the potentiality of queer collective experience and dance floor culture. Through a collective queer experience of music, Tyler seeks to investigate collective emotions unearthed by the experience of music, hope, love, grief, desire, euphoria, freedom, and pride.

Learn more about Tyler’s culminating residency exhibition Toward a Methexic Queer Media
  • Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 
    Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 
  • Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 
    Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 
  • Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 
    Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 
  • Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 
    Tyler Matheson, Your Disco Needs You, Trinity Square Video, 2023. Image courtesy Darren Rigo. 

About the Artist:
Tyler Matheson (he/him) is a queer interdisciplinary research-based artist, educator, and culture worker residing in the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. Matheson received his BFA from York University and his MFA from the University of Waterloo. His work has been exhibited at Orchid Contemporary, Hamilton; Small Arms Inspection Building, Mississauga; Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario, Sudbury; The University of Waterloo Art Gallery; Hamilton Artists Inc.; Art Gallery Burlington; Art Gallery of Mississauga; Art Mûr, Montreal; and the plumb, Lonsdale Gallery, Gallery TPW, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Trinity Square Video, all Toronto. Matheson has participated in residencies at McMaster University (Hamilton), Plug In ICA Summer Institute (Winnipeg), and Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto). Matheson’s work has been published in Cornelia, Femme Art Review, Off Centre, Peripheral Review, and dArt Magazine. Tyler is a founding member of the multi-artist collaboration QueerSoftOrange, and actively works under this pseudonym. Matheson’s practice has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts funding.

About the Project:
Your Disco Needs You (2023) uses karaoke videos to visualize the songs of gay anthems from past generations. Songs that became emblematic of the queer nightlife that traces history from before, during and after the gay liberation movement. Queer spaces and music offer an escape, a portal to a transformative, and queer potential for utopic community collectivity. The karaoke videos are engulfed in a pillar of sequin fabric, like a beam of light, the sequin material signifies the material interior of many of these queer sites, and the kinds of performances they engender.

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.