Before officially meeting Séamus Gallagher, I knew who they were, and every now and then, I would pass them walking through downtown Winnipeg. On more than one occasion, they were wearing an excellent yellow suit. And each time, this dash of colour against the dull beige and brown facades of Portage Ave shifted the tenor of my day. A little jolt of visual pleasure, in a city whose harsh climes reduce most of us to down-filled neutrals, is always welcome. Over time, it also struck me as a bit irreverent or even challenging, like a little ripple in our staid visual language, or an invitation, maybe, to play with our own public performances. As I’ve learned more about Gallagher’s practice, it’s become clear that they excel at pulling their audience in immediately, and then letting the critical questions their work poses simmer over time. Gallagher’s work is typically gorgeous, in the sense that it’s vivid and saturated, a delicious, over-rich eye candy. It’s also gaudy and strange.

Hannah Godfrey was working at the Cube Microplex in Bristol when she first realized she was an artist. Training to be a 35 mm projectionist—“it took me about seven years,” she jokes—in the Cube’s “anarchic” environment provided the perfect, scrappy setting to experiment creatively. For someone who didn’t go to art school, the Cube offered an incredible “sense of possibility.” Putting on exhibitions, booking bands, and screening alternative cinema, she was learning how to make things happen while trying them herself. “You could do anything,” she recalls fondly. She was part of a noise band that only ever played in the crawl space under the audience. She joined the skate team—“Some of us were really shit,” she laughs— and started making zines. One night, she was invited to do an improvised performance.  A wild New Yorker persona, “The Electric Kasey-O,” emerged, playing beats on her sister’s champagne-hued casio keyboard and making up songs about people in the audience. It was the ideal incubator for an eclectic, subversive DIY artist and programmer coming into her own. 

After spending time with Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies, your attention starts to shift. Suddenly, you’re attuned to small moments and encounters. What might seem mundane – a conversation with a stranger, a discarded offering on the boulevard, the warm afternoon light –  takes on an unassuming beauty. You start to suspect that everyone around you is secretly a delight, and they’d tell you a good story if only you’d ask. As artists and arts facilitators, Baird and Gillies bring a generosity to their work that’s infectious. In their world, ideas abound in everyday life, and anyone can make art, even if they may not know it yet. In fact, the city is full of budding artists in unexpected places, tapping into their creativity under the duo’s gentle facilitation.

Owen Toews’s debut novel Island Falls (2023) is hard to describe. Half tale of unfolding friendship, half clinical report of a segregated mill town in the Canadian prairies, the enigmatic text plays with genre and form, raising questions about how space is produced and contested. The result is both charming and unsettling. Characters wrestle with how to respond to the violent structures that surround them and never really figure it out. In the end, we’re left to ponder the thorny relationship between trying to make sense of things and actually creating something better. Overall, the effect is galvanizing. Toews invites the reader to join him in the murk by asking timely political questions without prescribing answers. 

Theo Jean Cuthand’s videos are full of good lines, but there’s no time to dwell on them. They’re delivered without pause, almost matter of factly, in unhurried monologues that span the video’s run time. In 'Extractions' (2019), he describes the terrifying lumber scrap incinerator in Merritt, where he spent four intolerable months as a teen, “like something in a Disney movie symbolizing death and anguish.” Earlier, over footage of a series of explosions in an open pit mine, he notes benignly, “I like to think there are alternatives.” In Less Lethal Fetishes (2019), he uses gas masks to meditate on kink culture and the art world’s toxic relationship with industry. As the video concludes, Cuthand laments the loss of a “simpler time” when he could just appreciate the “horny joy of watching a woman wearing a gas mask while in bondage” and not consider its political implications. 

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.