I Don't Know What's Come Over Me

Workplace is pleased to present James Cabaniuk’s first solo exhibition with the gallery I Don’t Know What’s Come Over Me.

The exhibition features a new series of paintings that reflect the nuanced, complex, and often paradoxical experiences of queer identity, intimacy, and the subversive joy that comes with embracing personal and communal chaos.

Cabaniuk’s new body of work is a deep investigation into queer communications hidden in plain sight messaging. Drawing from a history of veiled signalling, from violets to the hanky code, Cabaniuk’s work reflects a unique way of communicating through metaphor, gesture, and abstraction.

The title of the exhibition, I Don’t Know What’s Come Over Me, resonates with this duality, speaking both to the sudden surge of emotion that can overwhelm, as well as the cultural pressure to suppress or judge these responses as ‘unbecoming’. Through a carefully orchestrated visual language, Cabaniuk interrogates how the queer body, often caught in tumultuous spirals of identity and expression, has been forced to reconcile with societal expectations. Their paintings confront the messy beauty of being overwhelmed, by desire, loss, and joy, and the liberating chaos that allows one to emerge stronger and more self-aware.

The works presented are both deeply personal responses as well as part of a larger commentary on queer temporalities and the absence of these histories in traditional spaces of culture. The paintings offer a topographical view of Cabaniuk’s experience, simultaneously micro and macro in scope, where the details of personal anecdotes blur into the larger, shared narrative of queer communities.

With thick gestural surfaces that often employ glitter, confetti and soil, the works speak to the queer opacity of experience, where meaning is buried in the layers of colour, shape, and form. The paintings exist in a liminal space between abstraction and figuration, a zone where meaning is not fixed, but constantly shifting and evolving. The works are a celebration of the resilience that comes from chaos, and the moments of kinship that form between individuals in unexpected spaces.