Steacy Easton

They/Them

Memoir
Performance Art
Photography

Steacy Easton is a writer and visual artist, originally from Edmonton, who has lived in Hamilton for more than eight years. They have written about music and culture for more than twenty years, including for the Atlantic Online, the Bluegrass Situation, CBC, Vulture, Rainbow Rodeo, and many others. Steacy is the author of three books, one on Tammy Wynette (Why Tammy Wynette Matters for the University of Texas Press). Tammy was reviewed (among others) by No Depression, Publishers Weekly, The Tennessean, and referred to in the New York Times as "thoughtful" and "astute". Their erotic memoir for Coachhouse (Daddy Lessons), was reviewed by Plenitude, Xtra, Prism, and Publishers Weekly (which called it "refreshingly unafraid”). They have an upcoming 33 1/3 volume on Dolly Parton's White Limozeen for Bloomsbury, and chapters on Dolly for the University of Kentucky and Oxford University Press. They are a PhD Candidate at York University in Critical Disability Studies.

They also have a wide ranging visual practice. Their bookworks, and photo zines are in the collection of the Library of the National Gallery Canada, Burlington Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Mount Alison, and Sheridan College's teaching collection. They have done durational performances in Halifax, Toronto, and Hamilton. They have shown photo and time based work in galleries and artist run centers, in Edmonton, Hamilton, Montreal, Toronto, and New York. They were the 2022 Winnipeg Martha Street Studio Artist in Residence, and the 2024 Hamilton Arts Awards Recipients, after being shortlisted in 2022 and 2023.

Artistic Statement:

I am interested in saying in public what has been forced to be spoken about privately–including but not limited to awkward questions about sex, money, and how bodies work or fail to work. I am interested by extension in the small, the awkward, the gaps and fissures where the strange emerge from the common. My work functions through dishonorable genres (pornography, the romance novel, country music), and unglamorous practices (the secretarial, office and paperwork). This is partly due to my continued interest in gender and class discrepancies, and my ongoing suspicion of the monumental.

Creative Vision;

My creative vision is to be at least creative at all. I come from a long line of clerks, administrators, secretaries, teachers, and other office workers. These experiences were often clustered in settler-colonial practice. The daily typing, the word count rolling to some deadline or inevitable ending, is in a tradition of my great grandfather who traded Boer war quartermaster skills in South Africa for land in Alberta; or my mom’s father who worked in the post office, or as a bus driver, as much as he worked on the farm, or my aunts who worked in curriculum offices, agricultural college accessibility services offices, or who taught in prisons, pysch hospitals, or high schools.

As someone who grew up poor, writing or art making was a way to pay the rent or buy groceries. As a critic, in an age where places to write criticism are dying, I come from a long tradition of writers and artists whose creative vision is how they are going to pay the rent. (Penelope Lively on the houseboat, Dorothy Allision and her kitchen table, Candy Darling caging rent money from Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz making paintings out of grocery store posters; Toni Morrison editing for decades before her own novels), I was not able to write full length books until I was granted subsidised housing, having written before in internet cafes, libraries, other people’s kitchen tables, church halls, hotel rooms and other temporary spaces.

Most of my art also, is marked by both a conceptual interest in the ephemeral, but also that I had limited space to create–a decades worth of my practice can be fit safely in a hall closet or the back of a cab. This is because for most of my childhood, I was poor, and for a large portion of my adult, I was on disability.

I treat writing and art making as labour–dull, often repetitive—made by accretion again and again, as opposed to any romantic principle. As a mad artist, I also work through a tradition of mad art, restricted by institutional power, marked by repeating the same forms over and over again. The performance and visual art I do, is intended as much to curate and distribute as it is to create, as commonly understood.

Hamilton

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Biography / Artistic Statement / Creative Vision

Steacy Easton is a writer and visual artist, originally from Edmonton, who has lived in Hamilton for more than eight years. They have written about music and culture for more than twenty years, including for the Atlantic Online, the Bluegrass Situation, CBC, Vulture, Rainbow Rodeo, and many others. Steacy is the author of three books, one on Tammy Wynette (Why Tammy Wynette Matters for the University of Texas Press). Tammy was reviewed (among others) by  No Depression, Publishers Weekly, The Tennessean, and referred to in the New York Times as "thoughtful" and "astute". Their erotic memoir for Coachhouse (Daddy Lessons), was reviewed by Plenitude, Xtra, Prism, and Publishers Weekly (which called it "refreshingly unafraid”). They have an upcoming 33 1/3 volume on Dolly Parton's White Limozeen for Bloomsbury, and chapters on Dolly for the University of Kentucky and Oxford University Press. They are a PhD Candidate at York University in Critical Disability Studies.

They also have a wide ranging visual practice. Their bookworks, and photo zines are in the collection of the Library of the National Gallery Canada, Burlington Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Mount Alison, and Sheridan College's teaching collection. They have done durational performances in Halifax, Toronto, and Hamilton. They have shown photo and time based work in galleries and artist run centers, in Edmonton,  Hamilton, Montreal, Toronto, and New York.  They were the 2022 Winnipeg Martha Street Studio Artist in Residence, and the 2024 Hamilton Arts Awards Recipients, after being shortlisted in 2022 and 2023.

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Artistic Statement:

I am interested in saying in public what has been forced to be spoken about privately–including but not limited to awkward questions about sex, money, and how bodies work or fail to work. I am interested by extension in the small, the awkward, the gaps and fissures where the strange emerge from the common. My work functions through   dishonorable genres (pornography, the romance novel, country music), and unglamorous practices (the secretarial, office and paperwork). This is partly due to my continued interest in gender and class discrepancies, and my ongoing suspicion of the monumental.

&nbsp;

Creative Vision;

My creative vision is to be at least creative at all. I come from a long line of clerks, administrators, secretaries, teachers, and  other office workers. These experiences were often clustered in settler-colonial practice. The daily typing, the word count rolling to some deadline or inevitable ending,  is in a tradition of my great grandfather who traded Boer war quartermaster skills in South Africa for land in Alberta; or my mom’s father who worked in the post office, or as a bus driver, as much as he worked on the farm, or my aunts who worked in curriculum offices, agricultural college accessibility services offices, or who taught in prisons, pysch hospitals, or high schools.

As someone who grew up poor, writing or art making was a way to pay the rent or buy groceries. As a critic, in an age where places to write criticism are dying, I come from a long tradition of writers and artists whose creative vision is how they are going to pay the rent. (Penelope Lively on the houseboat, Dorothy Allision  and her kitchen table, Candy Darling caging rent money from Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz making paintings out of grocery store posters; Toni Morrison editing for decades before her own novels), I was not able to write full length books until I was granted subsidised housing,  having written before in internet cafes, libraries, other people’s kitchen tables, church halls, hotel rooms and other temporary spaces.

Most of my art also, is marked by both a conceptual interest in the ephemeral, but also that I had limited space to create–a decades worth of my practice can be fit safely in a hall closet or the back of a cab.  This is because for most of my childhood, I was poor, and for a large portion of my adult, I was on disability.

I treat writing and art making as labour–dull, often repetitive—made by accretion again and again, as opposed to any romantic principle. As a mad artist, I also work through a tradition of mad art, restricted by institutional power,  marked by repeating the same forms over and over again. The performance and visual art I do, is intended as much to curate and distribute as it is to create, as commonly understood.