A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
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Su-Ying Lee
I have poor time perception, or chronoception, often fumbling with questions about when past events occurred. Air travel, an experience that fucks with routine spatial and temporal rhythms, is made particularly difficult to grasp. In November 2021, taking my first break from hyperlocalness under COVID-19 measures, I flew to Vancouver for a six-week stay. Flights are strange ways to spend hours. Although from Toronto it only takes five-hours, one of the shorter transit times I’ve gotten through, I experienced the trip as exceptionally long. For once, I’m confident that the sensation of elongated time is more connected to our state of pandemic-induced inertia than my characteristically flawed perception. It’s incredible what you can lose in eighteen months. In February of 2020, I wrapped up the 3rd Kamias Triennial (with co-curators, Allison Collins and Patrick Cruz) in Quezon City (Philippines), arriving home to Toronto on March first. Province-wide physical distancing came soon after. Home became nearly all there was.
Monday, June 20, 2022
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Mahlet Cuff
Adrienne Huard is a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer Anishinaabe curator, academic, art critic, scholar, and performer. As a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer, Huard brings a unique focus and position to their research on desire within Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous visual culture on the prairies where they are embedded in the community and draw on these networks in inspiring ways. A citizen of Couchiching First Nation, Ontario, Huard was born and raised in Miiskwaagamiwiziibiing/Winnipeg. After graduating in 2012 from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in photography, they pursued and completed a Bachelors in Art History at Concordia University in Tio'tià:ke/Montreal. Thereafter, Huard completed OCAD’s graduate-level program in criticism and curatorial practice in Tkaronto/Toronto. . Huard is the co-founder of gijiit, a curatorial collective with their collaborator, Jas M. Morgan. In September 2020, Huard began a Ph.D. program in Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. Formerly, they worked as an Editor-at-Large at the national art publication, Canadian Art magazine [now defunct].
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
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Emily Doucet
Cwynar’s collections of objects and images are just as mobile as digital images. Evident in her work is a profound appreciation for the long life-cycle of objects and images. Sorted by colour or subject, among other metadata, their fate is not unlike the images on our phones: sorted, searched, organized, collected, but often forgotten. And yet, these images take up space, on our phones, in our minds, on servers. Our collections take on weighty forms, drawing us into a constellation of extractive industries in inescapable ways. This extraction is material (not least in the minerals and exploitative labour practices which form the matter of analogue and digital photography alike) but also psychological. Participation in systems designed to circulate, store, and collect images also ensures that we are never forgotten by any device or service ever encountered. This too, Cwynar reminds us, is true of objects and images; we can’t quit their material forms. The plastic and celluloid detritus of the twentieth century is a kind of data, exchanged for convenience and forevermore with us.
At this point, you may have noticed that I have not provided much description of the visual content of the objects that Cwynar uses in her work. This is because the mechanisms and apparatuses of image circulation are the real subjects here. Perhaps, as she suggests, we have “lost the plot on the image,” mesmerized by movement. In a 1963 speech entitled “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Lewis Mumford described the relationship between the public and technological systems under capitalism (what Mumford calls “authoritarian technics”) as a kind of “magnificent bribe.” Mumford’s concept of the “bribe” describes the process by which individuals abdicate autonomy in exchange for convenience—forgoing personal data privacy in order to use corporate social media platforms, to use a contemporary example.
Monday, May 30, 2022
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Luther Konadu
The first impending signs of Saint-Pierre’s May 1902 cataclysmic event became visible weeks prior, in the latter half of April. Months earlier, however, there were faint intermittent rumbling sounds and steam coming from the direction of Mount Pelée. The steam persisted, travelling outward to the town adjacent to it, St. Pierre. The residue of the spewing gas left a foetid odour in the air and this kept on for weeks before worsening. This was followed by an increasingly loud banging like that of a thunderstruck or cannon fire, but negligent authorities continued to overlook the power of one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in history that was to come.
Prior to May 1902, St. Pierre was a small idyllic town northwest of the then French colonial island of Martinique. About 64 by 20 kilometres in size, the island is the result of millions of years of successive volcanic activity. Sprawling throughout the island are countless volcanic peaks and in 1902, Mt. Pelée was one of the youngest, constantly on the brink of erupting. Often shrouded in mist around its peak, it rises about 1500 metres above the ground. Roughly seven kilometres southward from the mountain, past valleys, a swamp, and stretches of open land, is where the town of St. Pierre was situated—right at the foot of Mt. Pelée, with its face towards the Caribbean Sea.
Thursday, May 26, 2022
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Gabrielle Willms
Last summer, I biked to Point Douglas, an eclectic, old Winnipeg neighbourhood dotted with stately historical buildings and defunct industrial sites, to find Tsēmā Igharas’ installation, Tailings Pool. Housed on an empty lot, the piece seemed, from a distance, to be a large, nondescript pile of gravel, not unlike the rubble of a construction site. But as I approached, the smooth, angled sides of the mound came into focus, and a jaunty neon yellow swimming ladder revealed itself, straddling the edge. Climbing up to look in, I found a bean-shaped pool of tantalizing blue, glinting in the dry heat, noxious yet seductive.
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
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Alifiyah Imani
Curator, researcher and writer Kamila Metwaly’s dedicated long engagement with Egyptian born composer and musicologist Halim El-Dabh (1921-2017) has involved digging through university archives and libraries, connecting with his friends and family, and collaborating with a transnational group, who has followed El-Dabh’s work closely. Originally from Cairo, Metwaly moved to Berlin in 2017. She encountered El-Dabh’s work, Ta'abir Al-Zaar—one of the earliest known electronically composed works—purely through a chance encounter, and connected with him shortly before his death.
Thursday, May 19, 2022
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Khairullah Rahim
The best time to catch pigeons in action is when the sun is up. Like us, these diurnal birds carry out most of their essential activities under the sun. When it sets, they retreat back to their warm and hidden shelters. Pigeons are also very hardy and are known to be unfastidious when selecting their homes; almost any spot that provides them with some kind of temporary cover, such as roofs, trees, and building ledges, will suffice. I used to always find excuses whenever friends asked to come over to my place after school. After I turned 18, I gradually stopped turning up at family gatherings. Even after five years of being in a committed relationship with my then-partner, I would quietly sneak into his bedroom by climbing through the window from the corridor whenever we had a sleepover. I wished everyone would have stopped asking why our families weren’t more hospitable to us. If only we were not so poor. Visibility and light are commonly associated with safety for the majority who fit in, but certain lights illuminate more intensely on some than others. For people like me (queer, brown, and poor), exposure comes with a fair share of risk and a lingering sense of shame. It was often the gentle shade and not the glaring light that offered me security when I needed it, especially in environments presumed to be safe, like around my family.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
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Omi Rodney
Oreka James’ Untitled 1 sculpture features fabric stretched over plywood fastened to a brushed aluminum anchor. The sculpture bursts out of star-shaped soil to come to a star-shaped point. The structure spins continuously, flashing between two abstract paintings that evoke the beginning of life. As the pulsing sound of the motor mimics the relentless tide of the ocean and fills the room, I am moved to a beginning when our life was first dreamed up and summoned out of primordial sea. I see the sun as it shines down and pulls earth up from out of the abyss and strikes it to make black Earth. Breaks the earth apart to give way to new life. As the evocative midnight purples meet life-bearing reds that then spill past James’ sky to meet earth, green life pulls through to give way to us. Before me, time and space break apart and I see that we were many things.
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
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Nawang Tsomo
The last couple of years has seen an immense surge in the toppling of monuments of white European colonizers across the Americas. The monumentality of these long overdue take-downs is also met with mixed feelings, even for the communities who have experienced and continue to live with the atrocities of centuries of “new world building.” It goes without saying that the repair, the re-building, the re-imagination of world orders does not happen overnight. I am reminded of the many who go on living, resisting colonial figures well outside of their bronze bodies and into the aftermath of their fall. Much of the conversation in mainstream media focuses on the taking apart and breaking down—the theatricality—of colonial structures. What remains and what persists after the fact is seldom addressed.
Monday, April 25, 2022
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Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba
Noo was a fashion blogger until June 2020. Then she wrote a piece on the removal of the infamous statue of English enslaver Edward Colston by Black Lives Matter protesters in England. Someone popular shared her blog piece on Twitter.
The viral blog post was her reaction to the language the media used in describing protesters’ removal of the statue. “They use words such as FALL, TOPPLE, DEFACE, TORN DOWN, TARGETED, VANDALIZE,” Noo wrote.
“These words work to turn the real act and force of violence on its head. They signal that protesters’ removal of the statue is a violent act—not remedial. Even more pernicious is the underlying meaning suggested in these word choices. The language of toppling and falling is loaded with grotty double entendre. In addition to calling protesters violent, this language positions the statue as a sovereign authority and protesters as its subjects. Rhetorically speaking, pulling down the statue becomes an act of rebellion—an insurrection—by subjects seeking to overthrow the sovereign. Such a cheeky use of language!”
So much has been written about media representations of the struggles of oppressed people that you get easily wearied reading any new thing. But when you read Noo’s post you were captivated by her idea that the language of media reports positioned colonial statues as sovereigns. It struck you that this language might inadvertently be describing a struggle against a condition of power exercised in excess. After all, besides their manifest presence in physical spaces marking land and time, statues appear to convey a sense of surplus presence. Their adamant visibility in the public sphere is a demonstration of power over physical and mental space. Could the protests against these colonial statues be coming from an equally tacit recognition of a condition of power so profoundly manifest, insuperable?
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
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Lena Chen
My Zoom background depicted a Catholic confessional. Clad in a bra of dollar bills, I stood at the virtual pulpit, removing each dollar piece by piece, as a congregation of online audience members reported their sins via the chat window. Combining my experience as a stripper and my penchant for the unholy, this performance was one of several that made up E-Viction (2020), a “virtual arthouse/whore gallery” organized by New York City-based sex worker art collective Veil Machine.
Monday, March 14, 2022
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Angel Callander
Melanie Jame Wolf is a Melbourne-born artist currently based in Berlin, whose practice uses moving image, textile, and sound to broadly analyze the complexities of performance as a discipline, and in everyday life. Wolf eloquently describes her concerns as being “the poetics and problematics of ghosts, class, pop, sensuality, gender, narratology, and the body as a political riddle.” In 2021 she released two new works that marked significant changes to her practice. Acts of Improbable Genius (2021) follows Pierrot the Clown and Wolf’s persona of Stand-up Ron performing the same monologue on the nature of comedy, culminating in the death of Wolf’s years-long character study of Ron. Understudies (2021) is Wolf’s first scripted and choreographed film, featuring seven actors performing fragments of Nina’s monologue from Anton Chekhov’s 1896 play, The Seagull.
Monday, March 7, 2022
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Daniel Sharp
A society that prioritizes a one-way, single-use system of consumption will, at some point, have to deal with its unsustainable methods of disposal. Instead of redefining waste or prioritizing cyclical systems of reuse, we might just come up with new names for the same systems. Some people call this green colonialism—the idea that infrastructure for renewable resources will continue to exploit and displace rural, Indigenous, and/or under-resourced communities, both at home and abroad. This translates to mercury in Indigenous waterways, hazardous waste behind Black elementary schools, and 1.07 million metric tonnes of plastic waste exported to nearly every continent on the planet. Oil companies can rebrand into wind power companies. Flattening buffalo ranges makes way for American and Canadian corporations to frack the land for energy; they keep grids, companies, and corporations up and running, which in turn keeps the TV on, tuned to stations like Fox News.
Thursday, February 17, 2022
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Kayla Guthrie
Spanning several decades of practice, Gavilàn Rayna Russom’s work explores the social, embodied, and transformational potential of music. Known mainly for her solo musical releases, both eponymous and under monikers including Black Meteoric Star, Paper Eyes, Child, and Pain Slut, her elemental approach to analog synthesis is grounded in an intimacy with her medium’s constituent parts gleaned from hand-building synthesizers in her early career. With predecessors in the New York City avant-garde tradition of Jack Smith and Arthur Russell, Russom views her electronic compositions and research-informed performance works as a way to “restructure time,” derived from a creative process marked by the awareness that “ideas about music emerge from social contexts.”
Monday, February 14, 2022
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Adam Whitford
Lauren Crazybull and I met in the fall of 2019 on Treaty 7 territory while they were in the midst of gathering research as the province of Alberta’s first Artist in Residence. A year later, the research culminated in an exhibition, TSIMA KOHTOTSITAPIIHPA Where are you from? presented at Latitude 53 and subsequently at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG). While working with Lauren on the SAAG iteration, I was struck by the depth of personal and historical experiences contained within Lauren’s exhibition. This multimedia project of audio, photographs, a book, and paintings culminated in an immensely thoughtful intersection of personal, cultural, geographic and linguistic Indigenous issues. Through discussions with Lauren, I felt that there was still so much about the travels, stories, and historical context of the exhibition that went unsaid.
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
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Ren Ebel
In the summer of 2020 two identical catamarans sat docked end-to-end in the port of Mahón, Menorca. Blown-up photos of sea creatures plastered along their sides advertised glass-bottom boat tours of the island’s giant natural harbour. I took Hanah (my daughter, then nearly three years old) on one of the tours. She was restless onboard as a distorted voice produced facts in five languages about certain landmarks along our route, including a few small, rocky islets floating in the port. Our boat stopped at the edge of the open sea and we were escorted below deck into one of two cramped viewing compartments, where haunted-looking fish materialized out of the green ether to snap at mud-coloured pellets flung discretely overboard by the crew.
Monday, January 31, 2022
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Beatriz Paz Jiménez and Zoë Heyn-Jones
Researcher-artists and cultural workers Beatriz Paz Jiménez and Zoë Heyn-Jones work together as Dupla Molcajete: dupla meaning duo in Spanish, and molcajete (mohl-cah-HEH-tay) referring to the Mexican mortar. From the Nahuatl word molcaxitl (molli = sauce and caxitl = cup or bowl), this prehispanic utensil, usually made from volcanic stone or clay, is used to grind spices and other ingredients, and often to make sauces that are served directly in the mortar itself...As Dupla Molcajete, Paz Jiménez and Heyn-Jones have an emergent collaborative practice that creates spaces for experimentation at the nexus of art, food, and culture from Mesoamerican perspectives. Dupla Molcajete works to centre food justice and sustainability, leveraging the resources of art and university spaces to engage with wider communities. They centre ancestral knowledge and (perma)cultural practices between Mexico and Canada—and across the hemisphere—through cooking, eating, talking, writing, curating, publishing, collaging, and making plant-based photochemical images, among other actions.
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
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Sam Weselowski
The pig taped to the wall is the colour of smog. Hung vertically by the snout, its pear-shaped body has had a sizeable chunk sliced from its back, revealing the hammy flesh within. A knife sticks out from the pig’s side, but this looks less like a wound than a sheath. The exposed blade has a bag of cigarette filters stuck to its base, and a blister pack lies close to the pig’s forelegs. An upside-down bunch of white daisies hangs down its centre. Superimposed onto the pig’s body, the orange space behind the daisies suggests some kind of dimensional rupture, a gulf between two worlds—pig and wildflowers—haphazardly sealed by blue tape. Strapped with trash and plants, the animal serves as both feast and landfill, producer and consumer, pork and pig.
Monday, January 24, 2022
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Hannah Berger
I bring up the concept of “stuffedness,” because it has been whispered as the unofficial cause of death. Following the burial, my boss said that if we hadn’t buried Spackle so soon, we could have opened her up to look inside. We saw nibble-marks on the blue insulating foam on the walls of the duck hutch. Before then, I had assumed that the cause of death was “being in service to a children’s summer camp,” because this appeared to be the cause of all other destruction on the farm: the muddy patches of dirt where grass used to grow; the infant vole that the white-blond child grabbed and squeezed; the hand-soap bubbles that piled up under the outdoor sink; all the plants ripped from the ground in elated fits; and, more obliquely, the old hen’s scabbing back patches, plucked bare by the rooster; the sheep’s lost horn; and, finally, Spackle. It was Spackle, stuffed or sick or exasperated, in whom we decided to place our remorse. The bird is swathed in its own Manila sympathy cards and flowers. Only the hard parts remain.
Thursday, January 20, 2022
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Olivia Klevorn
1.
You go out dancing with the gay boys. Afterwards, you all decide to get pancakes because only sugar can soften the blow of leaving with the same people you came with. At the diner you settle easily into a purple vinyl booth, place your orders, and take solace in the vast blue light horizons of your phone screens. The table goes silent as it always does when gay men re-enter the visual ecology of their natural habitat, mollified by pixelated rivers of naked flesh, retouched ass cheeks as firm, sweet, and stale as a bag of Haribo gummies, luscious trunks dripping with boughs of cheap leather and tacky lace, marbled cerulean skylines sculpted by modernist mansions, and white lily petal buttons of friends, lovers, mentors, baristas, and “that guy” at the gym, each waiting to be plucked.
Thursday, January 13, 2022
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Jessica Félicité
In April of 2020, the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote: “The pandemic is a portal.” As we continue through the portal, navigating the emergence of new variants, it is a fertile time to collectively embrace liminality as our mode of existence. Oscillating between states of lockdown and re-emergence felt like constantly taking flight towards the unknown. In the foreword of Borealis, an essay by Aisha Sabatini Sloan published in 2021, editor Youmna Chlala reflects on the tension that exists in trying to situate oneself within the ever-changing spaces we occupy: “It is as if you are trying to land your gaze somewhere but the landscape won’t let you.” We have yet to arrive on solid ground, as we traversed another year shaped by the pandemic.
Thursday, January 13, 2022
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Olajide Salawu
On both the Anglophone and the Francophone sides, Africa was on the podium of literary delight in 2021. It is true as in the words of Samira Sawlani that African writers took the world by storm. Boubacar Boris Diop won the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature for his book titled, Murambi: The Book of Bones, which explores the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, . It is the fifth decade of the prize and Diop is among the few Africans who have won the prestigious award organized by World Literature Today of the University of Oklahoma. The Ghanaian writer, Meshack Asare, also was a recipient of the Children’s Literature category in 2015. Neustadt International Prize for Literature is considered one of the most prestigious awards only in proximity to the Nobel Prize, amounting to $50,000.00. More than the visibility benefits, this award would position Diop not only in the African literary market more, but also across uncharted territories where his works have not been read or studied.
Thursday, January 6, 2022
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Mike Curran
On Interstate-94 between Minneapolis and southern Wisconsin, flattened farmland gradually gives way to sandstone buttes. 18,000 years ago, this ground held a glacial lake. When the glacier receded, an ice dam broke, unleashing a violent flood that forged the buttes’ contours. Eventually, in the flood’s wake, the Waterpark Capital of the World™ would be built.
Since the first waterslide was installed in 1980, “the Dells”—shorthand for this area—has become a land of “COUNTRY’S ONLY” and “PLANET’S BIGGEST”. Among these achievements is the United States’s largest inverted monument: the Upside-Down White House. This imitation of the presidential palace is the reason for my visit. I hoped that, a year removed from the U.S. Capitol insurrection, walking its upturned halls would bring some clarity to a democracy forever taking on water, now sinking to impossible depths.
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
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Hannah Doucet
Hannah Bullock is a visual artist and writer based in Toronto. Her work explores her lived experience with chronic pain, through printmaking, video, sculpture, drawing, performance and writing. As part of a poetic essay video 2020-09-16 at 11:19:28 AM, Hannah’s voice calmly and firmly recites, “I can’t stop my immune system from failing me from time to time or maybe I could if I took better care of myself. But it’s hard to take care of yourself when your own body doesn't take care of you.” With this work, Hannah draws you into an intimate space of her personal computer desktop and her own world of grappling with chronic pain, the medical system, and her own theorizations around illness.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
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Lauren Prousky
My boyfriend’s opinions about my body generally swing amorously between ecstatic enjoyment and appropriate indifference, and for that I am grateful. There is one outlier, however. One spot pokes a small hole through his studied feminist temperament to reveal a well-meaning but not necessarily welcome qualm about my physical form: he regularly informs me that my belly button is dirty. The first time this happened, my response was disbelief followed by a defensive boast about my usually superior hygiene. He then showed me his own immaculate navel and told me to look at mine in comparison. Realizing then that I had never really looked around in that part of my body, I fearfully peered down, jutting out my pelvis to get a good view. Contorted and vulnerable, I was thus confronted with a surprisingly dark naval cave, unmistakably specked with stalagmites.
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
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Mark Pieterson
“For me, the improvisational skill and experimental language of jazz artists like Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra, gave me permission to seek a plane of creativity that allowed for freedom and liberation, in all its valences”, artist Oshay Green tells me during our conversation outside a Los Angeles cafe. As far as influence, he leaves nothing on the table. Whether it’s the gritty, urban environment near his Dallas studio -- which provides him with an ample source of metal scraps and concrete that compose his sculptures -- or the conceptual approach of 20th-century Japanese and Korean artists such as Nebuo Sekine and Lee Ufan, Green channels his resources and influences to create objects that explore the interdependencies of being.
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
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Emily Doucet
Oliver Husain is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. His exhibitions and films combine elements of cinema and performance, drawing on a range of objects, stories, and materials to create lush, curious environments that denaturalize architectures and histories alike. I first wrote about Oliver’s work in a 2016 review of an exhibition of his film Isla Santa Maria 3D at Gallery TPW in Toronto. Then, as now, I was mesmerized by the way Husain kaleidoscopically interrogates his subjects. I spoke with him this summer over Zoom while we were both in Germany (him in Berlin and me in Essen) about several of his recent projects, including DNCB, a collaboration with Kerstin Schroedinger which explores the communal history of Dinitrochlorobenzene (DNCB)—a highly toxic chemical used in both colour film processing and alternative treatments for individuals living with AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s—and Streamy Windows, a collaborative experiment in producing for live streaming.
Thursday, October 28, 2021
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Ruby Chijioke-Nwauche
Francesca Ekwuyasi is an incredible storyteller. Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, she is currently based in Halifax(K’jipuktuk), where she produces poignant literature and multidisciplinary artwork from within her own universe. Her debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread has received much acclaim for its honest and heartfelt approach to themes of queerness, belonging, faith, family, and femininity. Notably longlisted for the 2020 Giller Prize, the novel was a finalist for CBC's 2021 Canada Reads competition, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General's Award, among a host of other recognitions. Moreover, Ekwuyasi goes beyond the literary form to tell stories. One of her film projects, Black + Belonging was screened at the Halifax Black Film Festival in March 2019, as well as the Montreal International Black Film Festival, and the Toronto Black Film Festival in February 2020. As is evident from the title, the film explores what it means to be black while occupying different spaces and places; the difficulty of navigating others’ perceptions of oneself while also discovering what that self is, and how that self might expand or contract according to the space which it occupies.
Monday, October 4, 2021
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Maria Isabel Martinez
Erotic life is a treasure we hold close until we believe its delight might multiply in the hands, eyes, ears, or mouth of another. One such place for sharing is “Erotic Awakenings,” an archive primarily containing writings hosted on the website of Toronto artist-run gallery Hearth Garage. The project is a collaboration between the gallery’s programmers Benjamin de Boer, Philip Ocampo, Rowan Lynch, and Sameen Mahboubi and writer and facilitator Fan Wu. Each piece of writing is singular in form and content, reflective of our varied erotic experiences.
Thursday, September 23, 2021
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Olajide Salawu
Dan Hicks has been at the center of conversations on the violent history of colonial museums and on how cultural objects pillaged from the Benin Kingdom can be returned to their original homes. His recent scholarship has focused on the colonial histories of cultural objects, work which has intersected with recent global campaigns against racism, continued imperialism in the Middle East, and ongoing ecological disasters. His two most recent books, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (paperback 2021) and A Cultural History of Objects (2020) are both diligent interventions that investigate the underbelly of colonialism and the foundations of Western cultural institutions, with a particular focus on museums where artefacts and valuables that have been expropriated from other regions of the world are displayed for visitors.
