Liam Mackenzie
Canada
ARTIST BIO
Liam Mackenzie is a multidisciplinary artist who creates using photography, videography, fashion, drag, and physical fabrication. The frequent elements in his work are camp, maximalism, nature, humour, and decay. The two main motifs that Liam tends to use to explore the preservation and celebration of queerness and disability and the cultural relationship between bodies, gender, and sex. Liam is drawn to strong graphic elements, flamboyancy, and eccentricity.
Liam has a diploma in Photographic Technology from NAIT and a degree in New Media, minoring in Disability Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University. Liam has worked as a freelance photographer and artist in Edmonton from 2017 to 2020. Liam has created a couple of projects from an ever-growing series of self-portraits titled Familiar Faces, and a series of film portraits of queer and trans people in Edmonton, titled Preserve Us. He has worked with clients such as Freddie and The Sport Network, and has exhibited works throughout Canada. Notably, Liam has won Special Interest Winner for Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward competition for his Familiar Faces project in 2019. Liam decided to further his education by pursuing New Media, where he focused on using learning new artistic forms to aid his storytelling. From this degree, Liam developed a passion for physical fabrication, videography, and disability justice, which all feed into his practice. In his degree, Liam had the opportunity to study abroad in London, England, at the University of Westminster and created two projects called LAST TIME and Hagstone. This experience has taught Liam how filth and disability are heavily interwoven with each other, and how time can be a malleable embodiment of fear and rejection.
PROJECT STATEMENT
“The Disabling is a project that explores themes of disability aesthetics, technoableism, and the intersection of disability and sexuality. The multiple pieces of this project follow the theme of creating a new body extension to fl aunt disability. Through this idea of flaunting of disability, I can control how I interact with the world, an affordance that is rarely granted to disabled people. Through this idea of flaunting of disability, I can control how I interact with the world, an affordance that is rarely granted to disabled people. Through systematic practices and individual beliefs against disability, disabled people are seen as non-human. With The Disabling, I offer disabled people a choice in how they want to present themselves and challenge the notions working against them. I found power, joy, filth, and community through my disability; why shouldn’t I flaunt it? The self-portraits explore the intersection of disability and sexuality, two qualities that are rarely shown together. That is, disabled people are often showcased in two ways: as feeble, sexless objects or as hyper-sexual deviants where sex is distorted into a threat, and these forms strip the sexual expression of disabled people. The self-portraits sensually portray the mouthpieces. Disability becomes tangled with sexuality, and people can’t separate the two entities.” – Liam Mackenzie
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that the Exposure Photography Festival is situated on land adjacent to where the Bow River meets the Elbow River. The traditional Blackfoot name of this place is “Moh’kins’tsis”, which we now call the City of Calgary. This is the traditional Treaty 7 territory of the Blackfoot confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani as well as the Îyâxe Nakoda and Tsuut’ina nations. It is home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3 within the historical Northwest Métis homeland. We honour and acknowledge all Nations, who live, work and play in Moh’kins’tsis, help steward this land, and honour and celebrate this territory.