Jeune tête d’affiche 2024-2025

Jamie Ross

“One cannot write poems about trees when the forest is full of police.”

— Bertolt Brecht

Spoils of the Park peers into 100 years of outdoor sex, and the City of Montreal’s attempt to eradicate it. Together with queer elders, sex workers, and entomologists, the artist and their collaborators stroll down the footpaths of Montreal’s gay forests in search of the trace effects and ecological afterlives, looking for what can only flourish out of sight. This multidisciplinary project includes Ross’ first feature-length film, which is currently in production with Montreal documentary production house EyeSteelFilm.

Jamie Ross is a visual artist and filmmaker. Ross’ multidisciplinary projects spring from research into cultures of queer secrecy and invisibility and the dynamics of vocal harmony, synchrony and time that those cultures create. Often collaborating with experts on their projects, the artist has worked with malacologists and their sprawling Victorian mollusk collections, scientific glassblowers (Neptune’s Closet), retired prima ballerinas (Dad Can Dance), and incarcerated neo-Pagans in Quebec (XII).

In 2021, Ross moved to California to pursue research on a secret society for drag whose underground seashell museum was raided by the Los Angeles police in 1914. Supported by a Fulbright Scholarship (2021-2024), the multidisciplinary project was developed at the UCLA Department of Art’s Interdisciplinary Studio. It was presented as a suite of exhibitions, a symposium, and a film entitled Neptune’s Closet, for which Jamie received an MFA from UCLA’s Department of Art.

This quotation, however widely cited by scholars of Brecht, remains apocryphal.

Jeune tête d’affiche contest

Jamie Ross is the recipient of the 2024-2025 Jeune tête d’affiche contest. This annual contest, dedicated to image-based practices, is open to students of Canadian universities and/or Canadian students abroad who are completing their graduate degree in Fine Arts in the spring or fall of 2023.

The selected artist will have their image featured in Dazibao’s programming pamphlet. This brochure benefits from a large distribution locally, nationally, and internationally, thus giving the selected image to considerable exposure.

Past recipients

(Click on the image to see previous posters)

Jamie Ross (2024-2025) / Mena El-Shazly (2023-2024) / OK Pedersen (2022-2023) / Jordan Blackburn (2021-2022) / John Boyle-Singfield (2020-2021) / Zinnia Naqvi (2019-2020) / Ralitsa Doncheva (2018-2019) / Emma-Kate Guimond (2017-2018) / Simon Belleau (2016-2017) / Celia Perrin Sidarous (2015-2016) / Didier Morelli (2014-2015) / Rosika Desnoyers (2013-2014) / Alex Kisilevich (2011-2012) / Juan Ortiz-Apuy (2010-2011) / Karen Zalamea (2009-2010) / Atom Deguire (2008-2009)