Two artists explore personal and social features of gender through humour, grandstanding, coded colours and ambiguous/androgynous characters.

Craig Le Blanc is a Calgary based artist known for a keen sense of the ridiculous and for obsessive attention to detail. What Makes a Man presents works in both small and immense scale that comment on the trappings of masculinity with tongue fully in cheek. Craig has recently completed his MFA degree through University of Calgary, and is currently working on several large public sculptural works to be placed in Sherwood Park and Calgary. He is also working on a solo exhibition for a public institution in British Columbia for 2014. His work has been shown across Canada in solo and group shows and is proudly presented for the first time to collectors in his inaugural exhibition with dc3 Art Projects.

Fierce colour, imaginative and ambiguous characters and a blurred expression of traditional gender stereotypes characterize Travis McEwen’s approach to painting. Currently enrolled at Montreal’s Concordia University in the renown painting and drawing MFA program, Travis is preparing for shows in artist run centres across Canada. Travis mines contemporary queer visual culture and historic closeted publications for images that ferment into his small and potent watercolours, imaginary portraits that straddle the gender spectrum. Figures faces and colours that confound our social construct of gender allow for other ideas beyond the male female binary.