Session 39 | Jamie Ross

Le Fist et la montagne

On May 15, 2025 at 7 pm

— Facebook event

For Session 39, Jamie Ross, recipient of the 2025 Jeune tête d'affiche, will present excerpts from his upcoming film, followed by the North American premiere of Sam Ashby's Sanctuary.

Ross's film explores the sexual history of Montreal’s Mount Royal Park from the Victorian era to today. In Sanctuary (2024), Ashby explores queer spirituality and utopian sexual movement of Purusha Androgyne Larkin (1934–1988), a monk, pioneering gay filmmaker, and self-proclaimed cosmic-erotic mystic. Larkin’s 1981 book, The Divine Androgyne, challenged repression with a spiritual vision rooted in eroticism and presented a radical path to cosmic-erotic consciousness through ‘extreme’ forms of sexual pleasure.

Over the last 15 years, the two artists have developed film work that deals with cases of queer utopian experiments, connecting complex legacies of queer world-building from Montreal to England, to the American Southwest.

Sam Ashby (b. 1981) is a British artist based in London. Ashby’s archival, research-led practice is concerned with uncovering marginal narratives and activating them through film, writing and publishing. From 2010–2021, he edited, designed and published Little Joe, a journal for the discussion of film around subjects of sexuality and gender within a queer historical context. His first film, The Colour of His Hair (2017) premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and won the Best Documentary prize at the London Short Film Festival in 2018. His recent film, La Licorne (2022), was commissioned by Villa Noailles for the 90th anniversary of Ile du Levant, a naturist colony in the South of France. His work has been supported by Arts Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Council, BFI, Wellcome Trust, and Elephant Trust. Ashby was an artist in residence at SPACE (2013), Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR, 2014), Villa Noailles (2022), and is a MacDowell Colony Fellow (2016, 2019). Most recently, he has edited an anthology of Little Joe for SPBH Editions/MACK, and was an artist in residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation (2024) and presented his first solo exhibition, Sanctuary, at San Mei Gallery, London (2024).

Jamie Ross (b.1987) is a visual artist working with image, object, and sound. Ross’ multidisciplinary projects spring from research centering queer secrecy and invisibility, asynchrony and harmonics. A method at the heart of their practice, Jamie frequently draws experts into their projects. Recent shows have seen collaborations with malacologists and their sprawling Victorian mollusk collections, elderly prima ballerinas, incarcerated neo-Pagans, scientific glassblowers, and entomologists. For their film debut about their father’s secret career as a ballet dancer, for which they won Best Short Film at Hot Docs Festival in 2022 (NFB co-production, New Yorker Documentary). Ross' research uncovered a secret society for drag whose underground seashell museum was raided by the Los Angeles police in 1914, a finding which precipitated a move to California to deepen the investigation. Supported by a Fulbright Scholarship (2021-2024), the multidisciplinary project was developed at the UCLA Department of Art Interdisciplinary Studio, and was presented as a suite of exhibitions, a symposium, and a film. Ross works between Los Angeles and Montreal.