JUSTIN MEZZAPELLI

The Portrait Backlog / bread tag assemblage, reclaimed frames / 2022 / The Robert McLaughlin Gallery / photo by Toni Hafkenscheid

From left to right: Rock, Paper, Scissors / Kitchen Teeth / Slice / Won't Go Stale / Working Tongue (despite low stock) / Give Me This Day My Daily Bread / Body

Installed as part of the group exhibition Loose Parts.

This body of work is a portrait of queerness that explores the messy, cyclical, and generative qualities of grief. In particular, Justin Mezzapelli illustrates - through various assemblages - the meticulous nature of latent self-discovery and the difficult process of shedding social expectations. Working with bread tags in household frames, the artist draws out different layers of meaning from these everyday objects and reflects on his own experiences with queerness. Typically thrown away or stored in a kitchen drawer, a plastic bread tag lasts long after the food's expiry date. As a metaphor for protective strategies that put physical and emotional distance between people and their fears of rejection or harm, the bread tag is both a playful and powerful storytelling tool. Collecting plastic bread tags destined for a landfill is also an act of refusal and acceptance. Mezzapelli acknowledges loss and the ways it has shaped his identity, while simultaneously letting go of prescribed patterns and embracing new possibilities.

Text by Hannah Keating. 

Rock, Paper, Scissors / Kitchen Teeth / bread tag assemblage, reclaimed frames / 21 x 27.5'' / 21.5 x 25.5" / 2022

(From left to right) Slice / Won't Go Stale / Working Tongue (despite low stock) / bread tag assemblage, reclaimed frames / 8.5 x 11" / 9 x 11" / 17 x 21" / 2022

Give Me This Day My Daily Bread / (detail on left) bread tag assemblage, reclaimed frame / 24 x 39.5" / 2022 

Give Me This Day My Daily Bread consists of 365 bread tags, each displaying the dates of a yearly calendar. This piece attempts to chase expiry, challenge its inevitability, while working with the constraints of imposed social structures. Here, when the tags refuse both their duty of preservation and expiration warning, they, like the queer body, demand the potential for revolution - and all together, they do it colourfully.

Body / bread tags in reclaimed shadow box / 11 x 20.5" / 2022

Loose Parts exhibition text / The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa 

Upheaval is like an earthquake. Whether from external events or personal growth, it can shake inner worlds, deconstruct long-held patterns, and free ideas from tight grips. In its aftermath, formerly rigid orders are scattered and frayed, appearing more fluid than before; within this creative threshold, the pieces left behind beg for new orientations and arrangements. A loving embrace of queerness and being in flux, the exhibition Loose Parts takes pleasure in the beauty, openness, and potential of in-between spaces and holding things lightly. Artists sophia bartholomew, Akash Inbakumar, and Justin Mezzapelli do this with intention, creating laborious works that unfasten and reorder social structures and conceptions of self through a queer lens.

In an early educational context, the theory of loose parts is a learning strategy that encourages the development of creative problem-solving skills through tactile play. Adopted as the title of this exhibition, the spirit of loose parts is carried into a collection of artworks that engage with repetitive acts of assembly. In this case, the artists work with everyday objects such as flower petals, pine needles, bread tags, and paper. Gathering and sorting, covering and weaving, their provisional installations propose a way of relating with ourselves and others that is imbued with curiosity and flexibility and is attentive to the inevitable condition of impermanence.

Seeking kinship and wisdom in ancient mythologies, art making processes, and personal experiences of becoming, the works in this exhibition yield to, rather than resist, uneven ground. Whether by choice or necessity, grief is a space where we lose and let go of things as they are. Loose Parts proposes that these familiar tools, held at arm’s length, might be the building blocks for creating the world one wants to live in. It is an invitation to come home to yourself and carve out space for your flourishing.

Text by Hannah Keating.