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Mona Lisa with Mustache
March 6 – 27, 2026

Please join us for the Opening of Mona Lisa with Mustache, a three-person show featuring Kristy Boyce, Julius Poncelet Manapul, and P Elaine Sharpe, on Friday, March 6 from 6-8 pm. The artists will be present.

Mona Lisa with Mustache is curated by Connie Nguyen.

Society today exists in extreme juxtaposition. We are witnessing unprecedented LGBTQIA+ representation across mainstream media, yet also seeing the resurgence of hateful rhetoric that pollutes both legislation and cultures.

How can representations evolve, then, to combat this dictatorial power?

In 1919, Marcel Duchamp created an iconic readymade named L.H.O.O.Q. He had drawn a mustache across a cheap Mona Lisa postcard and, below it, wrote the salacious gramogram that reads “elle a chaud au cul” (“She has a hot ass”). In “masculinizing” and sexualizing the revered lady, Duchamp received immense criticism from her devoted, bourgeois cultees. They condemned him for vandalizing her and, rightfully, foresaw how his work would forever change the public’s perception of the painting and diminish the esteemed aura of da Vinci’s “masterpiece.”

The artists of this show, too, are iconoclastic in their work.

Kristy Boyce is an award-winning photographer and artist based in Toronto, Canada, and has been published and exhibited worldwide. Her work, particularly the Queering the Classics series featured in this show, intervenes in the Renaissance and other revered historical periods by inserting “othered” identities into the hegemony of the periods, interrupting their dominance.

Julius Poncelet Manapul is a multimedia artist and professor at OCAD University whose work has been exhibited, collected, and published globally. Their practice and research “examines eternal displacement, complicated by colonialism, sexual identity, diasporic bodies, global identity construction, and the Eurocentric Western hegemony.” Julius’ featured works in this show include the utilization of gay pornographic magazines to disrupt the Eurocentric hegemony throughout history, as well as within the queer community.

P Elaine Sharpe is a Toronto-based painter who appropriates the extravagant Baroque and Rococo styles to explore themes of queer sexualities. She often inserts coital scenes between women into her paintings, set within the ornamental styles of the cherished periods, creating a jarring contrast between explicit queer sexuality and prestigious art movements, thus disrupting the restrictive rhetoric of said time.