QueerSoftOrange
Collective Project
2021 –
Members: Adrien Crossman, Maddie Alexander, Luke Maddaford, Tyler Matheson, Morris Fox, Dana Buzzee, Sheri Osden Nault, Jane Foley
We are QSO (Queer Soft Orange), a collective of Queer artist-practitioners that have been gathering, collaborating, supporting each other, and fostering community over the past several years. We locate the collective radiating from South-Western Ontario, expanding outwards, inter-regionally, and beyond through an acute engagement with the Internet. In a digital commons, we share our resources, create reading lists, collaborate on art and curatorial projects, and host peer-based online studio visits and community mentorship. QSO is a collective born from necessity, an urgency to build and maintain connection within Queer community by creating public outputs and outreach to the communities we serve, while our physical spaces are threatened and shrinking. Towards this work, we recently issued our manifesto, published in Femme Art Review #2 (London, ON, 2022), and Not Just a Collective’s Not Just A Library Book Fair (Arnhem Netherlands, 2022).
QSO is an ongoing love letter between ourselves and our understandings of contemporary Queer knowledge and experiences, that engages our histories, and our dreamed futures. Forming QSO has allowed us to stay connected, not only with each other but to the communities we care about: connecting emergent queer art and visual culture past, present, and future. Sharing our work and our research beyond our collective is about reciprocity, extending our community resources and connecting to other generations of Queer artists. Finding shared terrain across generations is vital to our goals as a collective, engaged in archiving our Queer-now.
Below is a copy of our manifesto, custom coasters and the design for the limiter edition hanky we released as part of bad2thebone at the pumb bar in 2023.