KILO Quebec is the culmination of several months of cooperation between San Diego-based artists Joshua Tonies and Joe Yorty. This exhibition brings together a body of recent collaborative projects as well as a selection of independent works by the artists, each tracing a key lineage to their collaboration. While their studio practices, in terms of both content and material, diverge in several ways, working together synthesized areas of convergence. In particular, themes of queerness and invisibility/visibility emerged and ultimately became the foundation of their collaboration.

Their work together started with a series of diptych collages crafted through a call-and-response process using mezzotint printing, vintage wallpaper, and vinyl shelf liner that touch on topics of memory, nostalgia, and the home. The final five collages, mounted to creased aluminum sheets, are included in this exhibition.
Pointing to themes of visibility and “passing” as queer people, the artists referenced dazzle camouflage patterns from British and U.S. World War I era ship design as a basis to design a large wallpaper mural. This work merges images of source materials from each artist’s individual projects, including stills taken from a recent animation of Tonies’ former home and a photo archive of faux stone surfaces found in Yorty’s daily life.
This exhibition includes another collaborative work - a two-part animation looped on two CRT televisions referencing modernist tropes in early video game technology that imagines a utopian landscape of simulated surfaces.
The works assembled in this exhibition speak to the artists’ individual experiences of maneuvering the world in their queer bodies. In addition, this exhibition offers connections to broader cultural and historical themes that strive to touch on more universal or collective narratives.

_
Joshua Tonies is an artist working with drawing and the moving image, focusing on temporary ecological studies expressed through animation, drawing, works on paper, and book arts. His work delves into the interplay of the artificial and natural, using faux and synthetic materials to explore themes of queer identity, transformation, and ecological consciousness. Tonies is a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of San Diego and Lecturer at UC San Diego, teaching courses in animation, video art, and studio arts. He has exhibited his work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Musée d’Art  Contemporain de Montréal, The Center for Fiction in NYC, Comfort Station in Chicago, Illinois, and the San Diego Museum of Art.

www.joshtonies.com

@joshtonies

Joe Yorty is an interdisciplinary artist who employs a range of materials, objects, and methods to make work that largely addresses the anxieties and absurdities of American domestic culture. Including sculpture, collage, video, and photography his studio practice grapples with the stuff of thrift store refuse, last-minute estate sale deals, and the occasional dumpster dive to rub against the pathos of the ceaseless search for fulfillment in the accumulation of things that, to a large extent, defines the American experience in the 21st century. His work has been shown on both coasts of the United States and some places in between.
Yorty was born in southwest Utah, raised in Southern California, served 11 years in the U.S. Navy, and received an MFA in Visual Art at UCSD in 2013. He currently lives and works in San Diego where he serves as the founding Creative Director for the not-for-profit gallery and project space BEST PRACTICE.

www.joeyorty.com

@joejoejoe_yorty