&& (double ampersand) is the collaborative pseudonym of Dillon Lew’chuk and Kegan McFadden, two lovers making art on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Inspired by queer artistic partnerships and the playful ethos of the Fluxus movement, && explores drawing, printmaking, bookworks, and photography through an experimental, deskilled lens. Their practice documents queer joy and intimacy as a radical act of visibility, embracing wonder, mistakes, and the deeply personal.
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Rooted in their love affair, &&’s work blurs the boundaries between life and art. Recent exhibitions include the First Islands Printmaking Biennale (2024), GAZING at SweetPea Gallery (2024), and an upcoming solo show at fifty fifty arts collective (2025). In response to rising threats against queer existence, && is expanding into film and theatre—mediums that offer new possibilities for storytelling, connection, and resistance.
for Robin
Date: 2025
Medium: ink on paper
Size: 22” x 28”
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&& incorporates fingerprints as a font to spell out various allusions to queer acts of love and resistance. The carceral fingerprint as a historical byproduct of the queer experience is used as a form of printmaking on paper roughly the scale of protest signs.
This artwork explores the charged history and intimacy of gay cruising by spelling out a poetic phrase using only the artist's fingerprints. Each mark stands in for a moment of touch, surveillance, consent and desire–blurring the boundations between anonymity and identity. Through this embodied gesture, the work traces queer presence and longing, reclaiming space with both vulnerability and defiance.
The format of the adapted protest sign pays further tribute to the ongoing ecological threat in the 21st Century, where personal politics begin to mirror larger environmental concerns. In essence, the work is an ode to nature … and all of the possibilities it offers for connection.
The phrase, “...an overhanging rock, a stand of trees." is quoted from an interview with Acadian writer and cultural activist/archivist, Robin Metcalfe, on the topic of cruising and is re-imagined through the lens of an exhibition exploring the wonderment of getting lost and/or finding ourselves in the woods.
Social Studies
Date: 2025
Medium: Collage (printed image with layers of transparencies)
Size: 11” x 8”
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Text:
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For the past twenty five years, the Hillside neighbourhood overlooking Quadra, has been shepherded by Jes, a hybrid entity that isn’t quite a spectre, though doesn’t age and therefore will never die.
Their power is fortified each spring with the blooming camas, an ever reawakening sexuality is echoed in the crocus, and a waning melancholy dissipating with the short-lived lily. Throughout the summer months Jes can be found in the curious eyes of the fawns learning how to maneuver the rocks with confidence, and shield themselves amidst the crooked garry oaks. On steamy summer nights, and those not so rainy winter evenings, jes protects wayward bodies finding themselves together, briefly, over and over, from onlooker vigilantes.
A would-be media hound, Jes loves to survey the volume of sky occupied by airwaves, between the rooftops of nearby dwellings all the way to the stars poking through night cover, manifesting stories they’d always wanted to tell – fantasies of overcoming their highschool bullies; teachers who actually listened; parents who weren’t so busy that dinners together happened, or time to talk didn’t have to fall amidst commercial breaks.
On the last Monday of June, 2000, before grade 11 would be all done for good, Jes Arthur drowned in the reservoir at Summit Park.
Quick Change
Date: 2025
Medium: Durational Performance
Location: Gorge-Tillicum Bridge / Underpass – Tillicum Narrows, Victoria, BC
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Presented as part of SAME but DIFFERENT (Equinox), an Open Actions performance event, Quick Change is a live, durational work by && in which the artists ceremoniously disrobed and (re)dressed in one another’s clothing. With each exchange, a flower and kiss marked the transition, continuing until their respective bouquets were fully transferred.
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Performed beneath the Gorge-Tillicum Bridge, where the parkland meets the tidal waters of the Tillicum Narrows, the site holds layered significance. The Reversing Rapids here—where the ocean momentarily resists itself—offered a metaphor for queer resistance, fluidity, and transformation. This liminal space between land and water, city and nature, served as both backdrop and co-conspirator, evoking the queer histories of cruising, coded gestures, and hidden intimacies that often unfolded along waterways.
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In Quick Change, cloth becomes a vessel for memory, identity, and exchange. As outfits are swapped, so too are associations, sensations, and histories. The bouquet of flowers—passed tenderly between the two performers—amplifies the romance and reverence embedded in this act.
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Rooted in &&’s signature deskilled and deliberately clumsy approach, the performance recalls the tradition of quick-change magic acts and theatrical spectacle, while simultaneously undoing their polish. Drawing on J. Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Quick Change positions failure not as a flaw, but as a critical methodology—a way of resisting capitalist and heteronormative ideals through vulnerability, intimacy, and slowness.
Your Feet Next To Mine (Series)
Date: 2024
Medium: chalk pastel on sugar paper
Size: 18”x12’ each
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When we get ready for what is to come
When we close our eyes
When we say goodbye
When we reunite
When we kiss
When we fuck
When we fuck
When we kiss
When we reunite
When we say goodbye
When we close our eyes
When we get ready for what is to come
A collaboration from two lovers on an island in the pacific ocean. “Your Feet Next to My Feet” alludes to the physical closeness between these two men as well as the intimacy in the art making process. Since the feet of each artist is traced in silhouette, the orientation can be understood as seen from above or below. This diptych is also a nod to past queer artists such as Gilbert + George, Warhol, and even the fetish sites dedicated to exuberancy beyond the paradigm of heterosexuality.
Yesterday, Tomorrow (Series)
Date: 2024- Ongoing
Medium: Various Printmaking Techniques
Size: 13” x 9” each
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An index of where artists/lovers, &&, have been over their courtship, both factual and aspirational, is revisited year-to-year in this ongoing series. Printing the list of where they’ve been (Yesterday) using various reverse transfer techniques and where they plan to go in the future (Tomorrow) using letterpress, this series speaks to queer archives as a way of documenting queer presence in the landscape.
With gratitude to Victoria Edgarr at Ground Zero Printmakers Studio and Jacob Dundee Appleby Maddison at University of Victoria’s Farallon Book Arts Lab.
Eighty Eight
Date: 2024
Medium: Artist Book
Published: As We Try & Sleep Press
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This series of drawings was made in various locations on Salt Spring Island in July of 2024 to honour the artist Joan Jonas on her 88th birthday. Intuitive, experimental, and responding to the natural and synthetic materials encountered along their journey, these drawings take as their starting point a video documenting American artist, Joan Jonas, playfully but confidently tracing a rock she found in her Canadian home. The accompanying photo documentation of && in-situ further speaks to the queer lineage of the Intermedia / Fluxus inspired artists in British Columbia playfully engaging with their off-the-grid / back-to-the-land environment of Baby Land in the 1970s.
The artistbook was printed in a lettered edition of 26, through the Tiny Press bookbinding studio at Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin Southern Alberta Art Gallery [Lethbridge]. With gratitude to Heather Kehoe, Su Ying Stang; Collin Zipp; as well as Mona Fertig and Peter Haase from Mother Tongue Publishing.
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CV.
Exhibitions.
2025. Where we live: A DreamCity Community Art Show (Ministry of Casual Living | Victoria, BC)
2025. Together, With. in conjunction with Queer Island Festival of the Arts (Fifty Fifty Arts Collective | Victoria, BC)
2024. AFFINITY: Connected Relationships. Islands Printmaking Biennial. (Cowichan Valley Arts Council| Duncan, BC )
2024. GAZING. (Sweetpea Gallery | Victoria, BC)
Publications.
2024. Eighty Eight (Tracing things, after Joan Jonas). Artistbook, lettered edition. (As We Try & Sleep Press)
Performances
2024. Quick Change. presented as part of "Same But Different" Equinox Series. (OPEN ACTIONS | Victoria, BC)
Screenings
2025. Poem. (TBD | Victoria, BC)
Residencies
2025. Mother Tongue Writers Retreat. Production: Waiting for the Sun. (Salt Spring Island, BC)
2025. OUTstages: Queer Artists in Residence. Production: Waiting for the Sun. (Intrepid Theatre | Victoria, BC)