Be Creative

Juror

Jonah Strub

Artist

Jonah Strub is a Toronto-based gay, Jewish, sculptor, painter, and ceramicist. Jonah graduated with a BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph in 2019 after he completed his degree abroad at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, Germany.

Jonah’s artwork is a visual love letter to the aesthetics of camp, kitsch, musical theatre, Yiddish humour, and drag. His inspirations often derive from strong Jewish women, theatrical costumes and patterns, toys, and the queer Jewish sensibilities of tasteless tchotchkes. One way he marries his Jewishness, gayness, theatricality, and veneration of women in a harmonious coexistence is through his drag alter ego, Loxanne Creamcheese, who is the epitome of a Jewish, vivacious, and fruitacious superstar. Whether she is represented as a beautiful hairy woman or as a cat, with her iconic schnoz and orange moustache, Jonah is channelling what Susan Sontag sums up so well in her famous manifesto Notes on Camp:

“Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture.”

Through both his interest in queer Jewish themes, and through more general character and object design. Jonah intends to project joy and playfulness through his work. Many of his pieces resemble toys and can be interacted with, often inviting the viewer to engage with and activate the clay characters’ personalities and stories. By using humour, bright colours, animal prints, silly creatures, and bushels of body hair, Jonah highlights the joys of Matzo ball-flavoured femininity, effervescent queerness, charismatic characters, the beauty of bric-a-brac, and the opulence of outrageous up-dos.