Jon Davies

Jon Davies is a curator, writer, and art historian born and currently based in Montreal, Canada. He received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University (2023) where he wrote the dissertation "The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995." He previously worked as Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery from 2008–2012 and as Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries from 2012–2015, both in Toronto. His writing on film, video and contemporary art has been published in many scholarly journals and anthologies, exhibition catalogues and periodicals. Catalogues were published for the touring retrospective People Like Us: The Gossip of Colin Campbell (Oakville Galleries, 2008) and for his exhibition of artists who grew up in the shadow of the first decade of the AIDS crisis, Coming After (The Power Plant, 2012), which took shape during his participation in the very first ICI Curatorial Intensive in New York in 2010. His book about Paul Morrissey’s film Trash was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009 and his anthology More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings was published by Concordia University Press in 2021. He co-edited issues #5 (2015) and #6 (2021) of Little Joe magazine ("about queers and cinema, mostly") with Sam Ashby. In 2023, he co-curated the 68th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar "Queer World-Mending" with artist Steve Reinke. His most recent exhibition is That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2024). He received the General Idea Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2024–25).