We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. the Canada Council for the Arts

Photography by Brigitte Patenaude

Curatorial Research by Logan Williams

“A physical manifestation of watershed decisions, daydreams, and idle fantasies waiting to come true; Fit to Keep sees the self become both physically and immaterially a “castle”. Each misstep a pleat, each success a tufted stone.”

Culminating in staged photography, the artist’s work teeters between social commentary and auto-theory, using heightened aesthetic perceptions to first speak to his own body within the frame and subsequently extends an invitation to others who find themselves in similar, identity-challenging environments. The cumulative result is a body of work that uses a variety of theatrical dispositions, craft, and photography to investigate how the queer body infiltrates the moralistic imperative at the core of adolescence. Mesmerized by its formal qualities and invested in discovering the architectural terms for its many flourishes, Sproat explores how masculinity, strength, and status are calculated through details and formalities. Building a costume that speaks to his current crossroads and critical thought.

Through exaggeration, repetition, scale, and materiality, the artwork integrates aesthetic qualities of castles and their fortresses into a two-piece suit, resulting in a sculpture-costume hybrid that transforms trousers into towers, sleeves into turrets, and collars into spires. Embellished with darts, seams, and a variety of melange woolen fabrics, artist Evan Sproat mimics the three-dimensional qualities found on the exterior walls of a castle’s facet, replacing the corporeal silhouette with a considered architectural presence. By Interlocking canonical shapes through carefully placed slits and seams, exaggerating trousers to emulate an outer curtain wall, and enlarging both a shirt and jacket collar to perfectly frame a waving banner that drapes to a fork-tongue tip, he disguises the body within intersecting garments. Whether the style of necktie knot or shape of crenulation, each detail is given the utmost consideration in its presentation with nothing left to chance.