Dan Cardinal McCartney’s Misgendering Mouthfuls is a performance that includes 25 lemons, 25 misgendering comments and invasive questions. The artist will read out the first round with ease, but then proceed to read the second round after biting into each sour lemon half. Through the mouth comes the hurt.

In light of Arts Commons’s recent censoring of B.G-Osborne’s exhibition, A Thousand Cuts—a work by a trans artist that deals with trans visibility in popular culture—in The New Gallery's +15 window, our upcoming +15 exhibition by Cardinal McCartney has been cancelled in a joint decision made by Untitled Art Society and the artist.

“In full respect of B.G-Osbourne's work, I am refusing to show in Arts Commons. Their act of censorship is transphobic and dangerous, and shows a complete lack of transparency. As a two-spirit, transgender artist, I understand the violence of silencing. I stand in solidarity with B.G-Osbourne, and the trans community at large.”

In lieu of the exhibition in Untitled’s +15 space, this performance by Cardinal McCartney will be hosted in conjunction with our current main space exhibition, What if we were alive.

Cardinal McCartney is a multi-disciplinary artist from Fort McMurray, Alberta. He holds a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art + Design. Cardinal McCartney reclaims agency over his body through sculptural collages, performance for video, and traditional charcoal drawings. As a two spirit, transmasculine person, he sifts through questions of blood memory and inter-generational trauma. Gender dysphoria combined with cultural diaspora leaves gashes to either remain open or to be scabbed over in time.

What if we were alive is a group exhibition of video and performance works by Bridget Moser, oualie frost, Allison Hrabluik and Salote Tawale. The works in this exhibition variably consider the conundrums, tenderness, triumph, loss and exquisite strangeness of being a human. From the absurdity of life’s everyday rituals and the inherent pathos of hope, to the sincerity of love and the necessary loneliness of life, these works each oscillate between the profoundly idiosyncratic nature of experience and the threads of universality that foreground what it means to be human.