DetourPhotography

The title of the show - If you think your happiness is important - is drawn from a letter my father sent to me in response to the news of my separation and coming out as q***r. The full statement is “If you think your happiness and what you want is important, you are sorely mistaken.”

As a parent myself, I know it must require an incredible amount of pain and suffering to tell your child that their happiness is not valuable. Reflecting on this wound, each of the individual piece titles choose a different way to finish the sentence, “If you think your happiness is important…”. The answers reflect approaches that are deeply personal to me, but perhaps others may also find resonance in these ideas.

If we actually believe our happiness is important, what must we do to protect, honour, and pursue it?

Exploring this question in the context of the geography that I both long for and feel grief within has opened up new ways for hope, joy, and peace to exist in these spaces for me.

In light of anti-q***r rhetoric and legislation growing louder both above and below the 49th parallel, I wanted to create something that reaffirms that not only have q***r people always existed in all spaces, their joy and happiness belong there too.

Rural southern Alberta is often known for its conservative, religious, fairly homogeneous demographics but those are oddly juxtaposed with its geography. The unabbreviated openness, expansive scope, and limitless skies of the prairies exist without restriction. What may look to the untrained eye as monotonous flatland, is endlessly shapeshifting with the slightest alteration in the light’s angle and tone. And the sky is infinitely variable in its drama and expression.

Q***r author, Willa Cather, known best for her love of the prairies of the American mid-west wrote, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away.”

Peter & Ian. Sept 2025