your voice, my throat: Kyle Alden Martens and B. Brookbank

Artists Kyle Alden Martens and B. Brookbank drove all the way from Montreal to Winnipeg together for their first two-person exhibition, “your voice, my throat,” curated by Luther Konadu at the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices (or C’cap). The elegant upstairs–downstairs exhibition staged a series of encounters and mirrorings between the photographer and the sculptor who first met in 2011 as undergraduates at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before becoming artistic collaborators and then life partners.

The first work one encounters, however, is the poem The Voice by the great Trish Salah on the exhibition’s poster. It inspired the show’s title and triangulates the couple’s work beautifully: “The voice is not a thing I can do something with. The voice is a doing of something to me. … The voice is dressed up fancy, the voice is dangling a hard-on. The voice is flying into you ready for resurrection, reanimation, rivets.” 

The C’cap exhibition is populated by surreal arrangements, bodies, and fragments. On entering the ground-floor space, one is confronted by three large figures: Saskatchewan-born Martens’s men’s suit coats, which, while impeccably constructed, on closer examination leave no holes for the entry of a head, arm, or hand. While closed off to any potential human wearer, this is no power move: the suit coats are reliant on wooden stands to hold themselves upright and, hanging there, they resemble garment bags as much as the clothing they might contain. We also notice that the silk lining of these curious coats is worn on the exterior— the wool is on the interior—though perhaps the distinctions between outside and inside, surface and depth, have ceased to matter: “I like it to slip around a little bit,” Martens explains. Each is decoratively armoured as well, one with rows of watches on long bands; another hung with suggestive silver weights held by loops, and the third adorned with thimbles that have been hammered flat, sabotaging their utility in order to open up other possibilities. The thimbles are echoed by the Nova Scotia-born Brookbank’s flattened spoons that are scattered on the ground—which, like the suits, have lost their functionality—demanding an audience that is willing to tiptoe. They note, “Touch is a big throughline for both of us. You can see where the hammer hit the spoon and feel that tension—it’s a ubiquitous object, but you feel the intensity in it, the intimacy.” Martens’s suit accoutrements similarly evoke touch and “the implied pressure of fingertips.” 

In Brookbank’s gelatin silver prints hung around this space—some lurking in nooks and window wells—figures are shown fragmented in staged tableaux incorporating detritus found around the house. In one close-up, a pubic bush littered with berries and baubles acts as a kind of terrain, the navel above cast as a moon or planet. Another evocative photograph captures piles of clothes and discarded cutlery on the floor of a house, with the ensemble being explored by small rabbits. Brookbank’s practice is gestural and resolutely “minor”: the photographs capture simple acts of gathering, holding, laying, puncturing, and bending, shaped by strong chiaroscuro lighting into mysteries and psychodramas.

One thread running through the exhibition is the question of what it means to share a space, something the artists have long mulled over through multiple shared homes and art studios. Both of their artistic practices navigate intimacy through material presence and physical space. The exhibition engages the domestic sphere specifically, all the ways that home can be uncanny—I think of it as the difference between having a home and feeling at home—especially for those who chafe against the heteronormative hierarchies that often govern the family home. 

Appropriately, the exhibition continues in a subterranean space, where Brookbank’s video projection Bed Skirt, Gutter Trough (2025) is the only source of light, reflecting onto another trio of Martens’s sculptures and a floor scattered with more spoons. The dreamlike 16mm-shot film captures subtle acts ripe for psychoanalytic ministrations of some opaque ritual. It begins with a hand pulling at feathers from inside a pillow—which evokes the feeling of picking a scab, especially when a wound opens up in the fabric—before moving through other alchemical actions. Martens’s three sculptures hanging from the ceiling are clusters of ties held together with tie clips. They epitomize the striking manipulation of scale in their work, not for comic exaggeration but for its capacity to unsettle: stretched long while still properly constructed, each tie is the length of a human body. The basement installation acts as the unconscious of the well-lit, airy gallery upstairs.

Brookbank’s and Martens’s aesthetics are quite distinct—the former more oneiric and conjuring, the latter more concrete and virtuosic; this again creates a satisfying tension when they join forces. Brookbank’s work seeks to hold on to fleeting images in all their strangeness without monumentalizing them. Martens is engaged with how to transform clothing, textiles, and accessories from materials typically subordinate to the human into sculptural bodies that can hold their own against us, “refusing to be worn.” These are contrasting approaches to capturing what it feels like to be “a body in a room,” in Martens’s words. Their “garment bag–suit jacket–bodies” are a heavy presence in the gallery, not just visually but physically. The artist notes that if one circles these imposing fabric forms, it creates an unexpected flattening effect, thereby collapsing a body back into an image. Martens strives to recall their genesis: “Why did I make these sculptures so flat? Is it because I was thinking so much in relation to the flattening of an image? It probably bubbled up from our conversations around the show, but now I really see it.” 

The exhibition prods this perennially unresolved relationship between photography and sculpture. Each component seems to vibrate between flatness and depth, image and object, with the gallery acting as a stage for these transformations. (Both artists are also interested in the role that light plays in this, reflection as both optics and metaphor.) Brookbank notes, “I wanted to play with how I bring these still lifes outside of the frame and into the space, layering different methods to see what they can do.” Their photograph of hairy legs in black nylons marked with soap suds—the figure lying on a modernist couch—evokes transit between different states of being: hard and soft, organic and synthetic. The artist reflects, “I’m always trying to understand layers of intimacy, desire, and eroticism, but I’m usually talking around the body—I like the slippage and poetry.”

This aspect of slippage between one artistic voice and another, one form or state and another, is key. Brookbank explains, 

With both our works, everything is within reality, but then also, once it’s played with through our lens, it shifts and changes and goes outside of itself, even though it is still itself at the same time. Maybe that has something to do with our relationship. When you’re in such a long-term partnership, we are ourselves but we’re also each other, and we’re also living between my practice and Kyle’s practice, we’re really in each other’s work, even though it’s separate.

– B. Brookbank

They continue, “That’s why it was exciting to have this exhibition, where Luther wanted us not to collaborate in making work together but in putting our work alongside each other.” With this kind of arrangement, it can be challenging to keep the artists’ voices in balance and to allow each element to breathe: “your voice, my throat” succeeds in not only joining their two practices but in creating space for a third presence, that of their longstanding artistic-romantic relationship. (Curator Konadu, of course, is his own third presence.)

Brookbank and Martens first met in a photography class and soon created sculptural performances together; already, in their late teens and before they were romantic partners, they were making work about boundaries, tension, and interrelationship. Martens recalls, “There’s a connection to what we both do now in a lot of ways, taking everyday objects and making sculptural gestures. That first video used a poncho, and it was the beginning of understanding how our own artistic languages could coalesce, even if we didn’t know what we were doing. …  The whole premise was us entering the frame and then copying each other’s gestures with this raincoat, so lots of tense anticipation-building.” They moved in together in Halifax and then relocated to Montreal in 2016. There, they decided to only apply to Concordia University for their MFAs, and both were accepted, Brookbank in photography and Martens in sculpture, starting in 2018. Martens notes, “That’s where we really started to solidify our practices—I’m doing my thing, you’re doing your thing. We expanded our network out of just each other too; there is a community that I lean on now where before I would just lean on B., this natural sharing that happens between artists.”

Martens raises the question of “where an idea is built—I don’t necessarily think I’m the full author of everything I’m making. I also see something that I say re-manifest in B’s work and vice-versa.” They intuitively share potentially resonant books to read or shows to see with each other. Over the years, they have continued to occasionally make work together, with Brookbank performing in Martens’s work and Martens serving as a muse of convenience, offering a hand or foot for Brookbank’s camera as needed. Martens also trusts Brookbank to document their work and has come to deeply value seeing their work through their partner’s eyes: “another photographer would look at the show in a different way than you’re [B.] seeing it. I really trust this lens … it’s one of the ways we fold in and out of each other’s work that I think is less recognized.” So, your voice, my throat, but also your gaze, my eyes.

How do you work alongside a lover while still respecting their fundamental difference and ultimate opacity? How do you come together while also staying apart? It requires trust, certainly, but also a willingness to respect what must remain unknown and unspoken. 

---

Jon Davies is a curator, writer and art historian from Montreal with a PhD in Art History from Stanford University. He was the 2024–25 General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada and is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the History department at Carleton University, Ottawa.

B. Brookbank is an artist from Nova Scotia, currently working in Montreal. Their practice considers the language and poetics of photography, through an interdisciplinary approach that includes moving image, installation, sculpture, and writing. Brookbank holds an MFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BFA in Photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Kyle Alden Martens (b. Saskatchewan) is an artist who works through sculpture, installation, performance, and video based in Montreal. Martens constructs sculptural work that engages with ideas of how clothing is tailored to fit the body while repositioning queerness to disrupt symbolic and physical structures. They hold an MFA from Concordia University in Sculpture, a BFA from NSCAD University, and are represented by Patel Brown.

This article is published in issue 42.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue