For just about forty minutes earlier this summer, we got to have a sit down with Zahra Baseri. And in that amount of time we were fortunate to have learnt a great deal from the Iranian-born, Winnipeg based artist. Her individual experiences and observations living in an oppressive Islamic regime has stirred her to take a bracingly honest and critical look in the society she lived through. The absence of the female voice in the Islamic society she grew up in is a palpable assessment in Baseri’s recent BMO’s 1st Art! award-winning Outcry series. Below is our conversation with Baseri: we go into the nuances of her work, her creative process, and where her earliest creative inclinations came from.          Zahra Baseri On Outcry:    The current body of work is related...

At some point between the shift in temperature when we start to slowly do away with coats and sweaters, and dust begins to pick up, it can seem like entering into a new altered world by which we slowly have to adjust to. Some point between this shift we made some time to visit artist, Pablo Javier Castillo Huerta in his now former studio as he was in the middle of transiting out of his studio.“Sorry for all the junk on the floor. I moved a bunch of my books out so I have less junk now than I did yesterday, but I’m just in the middle of moving out of the studio” Huerta modestly explains as we make our way into his studio.  For Huerta, his studio is not...

Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know an artist, designer and other creative types. We get to learn about their current work and some random facts about them and some telling ones too. In our first edition, we recently meet up with artist/designer Nancy Nguyen to learn a bit about what she thinks of the color pink, her tips for online dating, what she thinks is overrated and the highs and lows of putting up a one-person show.      :nancy nguyan    "I’ve always been making work through a graphic design sensibility even throughout school so the work wasn’t personal until I started on a project where I had to ask myself what I was interested in, and why. And that led me into making a...

It’s certainly something to applaud for when people (which is not many) look at the made up distinction between what is considered to be high culture and low culture and just says fuck all that, and goes on to create a succulent smoothie that blends everything together nicely while raising the populist substance of the internet to art. Winnipeg-based artist Erin Jung easily achieves this with her current body of work which concerns itself with how identities are formulated particularly in relation to pop culture. She created an online persona named Megan Irwin. Megan Irwin was born out of her experience of other users who take on alternate identities informed by pop culture. Jung plays Megan, a devoted fan of pop star Zayn Malik who creates detailed renderings of her...

Somewhere between brilliant playful colours and overt terror lies the now Vancouver-based artist Anwen Liu’s new body of work. She's interested in how those contrasting sides can be used to portray personal narratives. We catch up with Liu to talk about why nightmares can be productive, why it’s important for her to make work that directly involves the viewer/the audience, her natural inclination to build oversize spaces and sculptures, her recent interest in death, and why she’s obsessed with Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared among other talking points.     Luther Konadu: Did people know to grab a piece of your sculpture?   Anwen Liu: I had to stand there the whole time, talk to people and assure them that it was fine to take a bottle of origami stars. I feel like...