Pearl Van Geest

Pearl Van Geest (she/her) is a queer Canadian artist, writer, curator and arts educator, practicing since graduating from art school (OCAD) in 1996. She also holds a BSc, MFA and BEd. Her work is included in private and public collections, including the Canadian Arts Council’s Art Bank. She was short-listed for the RBC Painting prize in 2003.Van Geest has curated exhibitions and projects, led workshops and programs in public art galleries, curatorial agencies and collectives with a focus on community engagement, empowerment and 2SLGBTQI+ rights. Most recently she is the co-curator of Queer Up North, an extensive project exploring queer ecologies – ideas that trouble dominantly held binaries such as those between nature and human, femininity and masculinity, natural and unnatural. The project includes a 2SLGBTQI+ artist residency in Temagami, Northern Ontario (August 2024), two follow-up exhibitions (Wild Waysides: Queer Ecologies and the New Natural at White Water Gallery, North Bay, and at Red Head Gallery, 2025), as well as public symposiums on these topics, and impacts on environmental justice. In 2023 she co-curated Creative Dissent at the Art Gallery of Guelph (2023), showing hand-made and collaborative protest banners and posters. She was the educational program lead for the exhibition, Queer Futures of Tomorrow, at the AGG (2018). She was the Education Manager for No. 9 Contemporary Art and the Environment, designing and leading public and school programs for IAINBAXTER&’s ECOARTVAN and BGL’s installation, The Don River.

As an artist, Van Geest was a featured artist in Throbbing Rose’s Nuit Rose, an art event opening Pride Week in Toronto, creating the relational aesthetic works, Between Protest and Parade, where participants could make screen and block prints based on photographs of the Toronto protest against the bathhouse raids in 1980, and the subsequent first Toronto Pride March, and Kiss-Up, a video, live-streamed and recording kissing booth. She was Guelph’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence in 2014, and the collaborative work created became part of the City of Guelph permanent collection.

Van Geest was the recipient of the Canadian Art Foundation’s Art Writing Prize in 2015. She has written a number of exhibition essays, and reviews for Memento, C-Magazine and Canadian Art magazine.

She is currently sessional faculty in Visual Arts Department at Brock University. Van Geest has mentored emerging Guelph artists through the Guelph Art Council’s mentorship program since its beginning in 2015. She is a member of the Throbbing Rose Collective and an active member of the Broken Forest collective. She is a member of Red Head Gallery collective in Toronto, Ontario.

Van Geest’s own artwork is informed by theories of queer ecology exploring the connection between the human/animal body and the natural world, working towards the blurring of commonly perceived binaries and dichotomies. Driven by a desire to shed some of these boundaries, she has used various strategies such as placing and integrating the lip-sticked kiss mark into landscapes and onto maps; more explicitly portraying a person consuming or being consumed by flower; physically tracing wave and wind patterns over time and focusing on the materiality of paint. In her most recent work, Van Geest uses rotated photographs taken whilepaddling along mirrored shorelines of lakes and rivers. The resulting bisymmetrically vertical orientation reveals openings, imagery resembling body parts and other-worldly creatures suggesting interconnectivity and fluidity between the macro and micro, the biotic and abiotic, and the human and non-human. Colour relationships – their energetic and vibratory qualities, are a means and an end in much of her work.

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