A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
Monday, November 16, 2020
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Elliat Albrecht
Halfway through this unusual year, Steven Cottingham opened two back-to-back shows. The first, 'Worldwide Cobweb', was an online exhibition presented by Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver. Unlike most now-ubiquitous online shows—which largely comprise photographs of physical objects in actual gallery spaces—Worldwide Cobweb’s artworks and venue were created entirely with open-source rendering software; in short, beyond electronic data, none of it existed in the physical realm. Digital works included further explorations of bleach-and-vinegar dyed canvases, blow-torched receipt paper, and folded LED curtains glowing with representations of heat emitted by undercover cop cars. Alongside the exhibition, Cottingham published a detailed text on the implications of realism in the technological age which reflected his long-standing interests in semiotics and perception.
Thursday, November 12, 2020
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Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
The sugar cube had left an acrid taste in his mouth. Its sweetness became a delusion, yet he kept twisting and turning his tongue in search of it. Suddenly his tongue was paralyzed. “Have you ever doubted the presence of your own tongue?” he felt a growing desire for empathy. Alone, leaning on the wall, he looked outside the window. People were busy preparing for the storm in their cubic condos. The identical apartments formed an infinite horizon like a row of epitaphs, dividing one person’s differences from the others.
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
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Nora Kovacs
“These are days of confusion and contradiction”, begins the editorial introduction to the September 1917 issue of The Crisis 1, the official magazine of the NAACP. Published a couple of months after the East St. Louis Massacre, the issue provides detailed accounts of the labor- and race-related attacks that left between 40 and 250 African-Americans murdered 2 at the hands of white rioters and another 6,000 African-Americans homeless as a result of burning, vandalism and property damage. Founded by writer and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis shares the stories and perspectives that are often ignored, overlooked or downplayed by mainstream publications. The publication continues to fill the gaps in our knowledge and refuses to allow histories of violence and oppression to be silenced.
Often citing Du Bois as a source of inspiration, the late artist Terry Adkins permeates his works with a similar sort of resistance. Moving seamlessly between sound and form, Adkins spent mu...
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
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Bessie Rubinstein
After Taylor Swift’s album Folklore premiered—an album whose associated videos and imagery are rife with idealized isolation—W Magazine ran an article titled “Taylor Swift Has Discovered Cottagecore.” This headline doubly reiterates the relationship between postcolonial America and the natural world: it celebrates a white woman “discovering” an aesthetic trend that already celebrates the myth of discovery. Cottagecore’s linen, lace, and pleated cotton skirts return to Victorian England, or 17th and 18th century colonial America—periods of imperialism, in which culture was synonymous with hegemony. Across platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest), cottagecore is an online community formed around the antithesis to community: isolation. As a pop singer-songwriter, Swift adopting cottagecore as her own makes sense; its digital presence mushroomed during COVID-19, marked by a look of bucolic seclusion created with elements of nature, gathered and arranged to emphasize their naturaln...
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
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Michel Ghanem
Carmen Thompson (Diitiidaht/Kyuquot/Coast Salish), 46, has lived and breathed costume design for the last 15 years. Her given name by her uncle is Tl’aakwaa (Nuu-chah-nulth), meaning copper. Copper is a versatile, malleable material with high electrical conductivity, twisted into jewellery, coins, and metal alloys. Copper is a trace dietary mineral, it lives in our bones, and seems to be everywhere else. Thompson’s career embodies malleability. She has played a vital role in the complex visual language of costume on multiple full feature films, commercials, award shows, television, theatre, and opera. Her father, Art Thompson, was a prominent Victoria artist working in carving and painting. She was trained in fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles, and mentored in costume design by costume designer Warden Neil. She knew it was time to leave L.A. when she turned down a costume design job for a Rihanna music video, and made the decision to...
Thursday, October 15, 2020
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Aliya Mazari
A particular feeling arises when a news headline confirms what you have felt but did not have the hard data to confirm. A few months ago marked this moment for me. I remember reading the article A Crisis of Whiteness in Canada’s Art Museums, which surveyed the nation’s four largest public art museums—Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Vancouver Art Gallery—to ascertain that their top leadership is predominantly white and lacking in racial diversity. For BIPOC artists, curators and art workers operating within this industry, this is hardly news.
In fact, a number of prominent figures (such as Syrus Marcus Ware, Zainab Verjee, Devyani Saltzman, Lou-ann Neel, Amanda Parris, Paulina Johnson, Rea McNamara, Nataleah Hunter-Young, Sarah Mason-Case, Armando Perla, to name a few) have recently spoken about the representation, equity and systemic racism present within the arts landscape and its intrinsic connections to larger system...
Friday, October 9, 2020
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Katherine Adams
The wall label is an apparently simple documentary form that has substantial effects on how we understand and interpret art. Often the most public-facing piece of documentation in arts institutions, it stands out as a minor text within broader institutional records. The wall label’s standard categories distill a specific, historically entrenched model of artistic production. Artist, title, date, medium, dimension, collection—these categories best represent work for which creator and product are relatively stable and distinct. Certain tendencies within contemporary artistic practice challenge these categories so deeply that the innocuous wall label—and the broader institutional archive—may conceal key aspects of the work. Time-based media art, born-digital works, and even historical avant-garde works challenge restrictive ideas of medium by working with digital and other networked sources, subverting the static substructure exemplified in highly compressed form within the wall label. Tr...
Monday, September 28, 2020
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Basil Soper
Hadassah 'Hazy' GreenSky is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and visual artist based in the Metro Detroit area where she was also raised. She is a member of the Waganakising Odawa peoples from the lands now referred to as Harbor Springs, Michigan. Like many other young Indigenous women in the midwest [and across the Americas], GreenSky was subject to cheap ill-mannered name-calling like “Pocahontas” by non-Indigenous people when she was growing up. Her personal experiences of racism is a condition of systematic structures and barriers held up by white supremacy all throughout North America.
Speaking to GreenSky, she shared with me that the area we now call ‘Detroit’, was originally named Waawiiyatanong by the first peoples of the land. The name translates to “at the curved shores”, as it was a place for trade and supplies. "Oftentimes the Anishinaabe peoples passed through on their migratory routes. Wild rice was grown in the river, fishing was also a big part of our lives, and many p...
Thursday, September 17, 2020
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Nolan Kelly
All my life, I have been compelled to write my way through stretches of time alone, and I have never spent so much time journaling alone as I do lately—living through a global pandemic where nearly every form of socialization is either mitigated for our safety or mediated onto a screen. A notebook is a welcoming alternative to the digital sphere, where participation can blur into performance. Conversely, It is empowering to produce something only for oneself. Yet spending too much time in this mode can often feel a little absurd. Are we documenting our lives or rationalizing our private behaviors? Where does the line fall between the two? The way we tell our stories can change so much of what lessons we learn and what others take away from them, and one only needs to look at notebooks of the past to see that this has been true throughout time.
Monday, September 14, 2020
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Jameson Paige
As we move towards reshaping the world into a reality where the most marginalized and oppressed people are able to thrive, unimpeded by state and racial violence, the mediums in which identity manifests are a moving target. Racial and ethnic categories continue to shift, dodge, and take on new forms simultaneous to the expanding social consciousness of systemic racism’s histories. Whiteness in particular continues to evade blame and repercussion for the historical, structural oppression and volatility it has and continues to systematize. Instead, we have witnessed performative allyship from individuals and institutions of power that is as ineffectual as it is performative, undergirded by the circulation of empty rhetoric for change that doesn’t attempt to dismantle the foundations of violent systems. The project of abolition is further troubled by the current Covid-19 pandemic as so much of our knowledge sharing becomes disembodied and mediated by the screen. Much of movement buil...
Thursday, September 10, 2020
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Ryley O'Byrne
Time is slippery, expanding, and contracting simultaneously. Forward, back, forward, back, searching for balance. Micro-movements make a dance of the fall (like the dances we do on the sidewalk, keeping our distance). Mid-slip feels endless, somehow senseless, we have no idea where the ground is or when it will arrive. (In the meantime, maybe we grow wings?) Everything is expanding and contracting now — lungs, bravery, optimism.
—
The flowers came late this year. Laggard blooms, stamens tightly swaddled, all wrapped up in pink. I heard it again and again, the cruelest month, the cruelest month, as if no one could think of anything new to say of April. Now I’m sure that May was worse, then June, July — August was horrific.
You never know what form your blessings will take. Your curses too. I find myself saying this like a mantra, prayer, or cliché.
—
Back in spring, when limbs dripped in blossoms and discarded petals floated through the air, I paid artist David Horvitz one dollar to...
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
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Bahar Orang
The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it endeavor to cover up this nature of things. Every statue of these conquistadors ensconced on colonial soil is a constant reminder: “We are here by the force of the bayonet.”
- Frantz Fanon
Now the statue is bleeding. We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.
This is not an act of vandalism. It is a work of public art and an act of applied art criticism.
- Monument Removal Brigade
What are the aesthetics of carcerality that organize and regulate our psychic lives? Monuments are carceral art objects that overcode and overdetermine public memory. They are symbols of state power and affirmations of the status quo whose function in urban psychogeography is to preserve and advance particular nationalist memories. They interpellate us, the public, as docile subjects and we pass them by, we become accustomed to them, we take them for granted, and our capacity for conceiving otherwise is blunted1. We walk...
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
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Ruby Chijioke-Nwauche
Ekene Emeka-Maduka is a master of her own visage. She is not the first, and undoubtedly will not be the last in a long line of artists that have explored the world of auto-portraiture. Her work so far has mostly consisted of images featuring the artist’s likeness, depicted against a variety of set designs, and artfully orchestrated scenes to communicate whatever she wants to send across to its viewer. At the age of 23, Emeka-Maduka is on a bit of a rising streak. Having recently come out of art school, she is already gaining recognition from the prestigious auction house, Christie's, on their Instagram. She has been the recipient of several grants and awards such as the Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys initiated, The Dean Collection Start-up Grant. She has completed commissions for writer/activist, Janet Mock, for American actor/activist, Jesse Williams, and for stylist to the stars, Jason Bolden. She also got a glowing shout-out from Mock in a recent Marie Claire feature lauding Emeka...
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
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Yani Kong
I met Cindy Mochizuki when I attended the artist talk for her residency at the Burrard Arts Foundation, culminating in her most recent installation work, The Sakaki Tree, a Jewel, and the Mirror (2020). The work brings out her gifts as a fortune teller and builds on Japanese myth, light, shadow, ceramic art, and puppetry. Not to play too much into the destiny of it all—but when I entered the gallery, Cindy’s eyes met mine in a warm and familiar way. I don’t want to say that she knew I was coming, but when we spoke, it felt like she already knew me.
For years, people have been telling me that I must meet Cindy Mochizuki because my research interests in aesthetics are akin to her work which thinks across multiple timelines: Asian and immigrant diasporas, ghosts, and the monsters that are left behind in storytelling. Her large body of work is nourished by the histories of Japanese-Canadian communities in British Columbia and Japan, and her multimedia installations, animations, clay work,...
Thursday, July 23, 2020
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Luther Konadu
It started with a found photograph, then another, and another. This discovery would later give way to a would-be thesis paper. But the confines of a single essay just didn't do it. Instead, curiosity and ambition grew to allow the initial inquiry to spider out, creating this new labyrinthine collection of writing. It precedes a work of visual art, and although this textual work does not necessarily speak for the artwork in any direct way, it enriches it. Together the written and visual works culminate in the still-evolving project titled Yours to Discover.
The title of this project, which centers around the province of Ontario, aptly takes its name from the former Ontario license plate slogan. The found photographs in question are from the author and artist Zinnia Naqvi's family album. They depict the touristic moments from the late 80s when Naqvi's family first visited Canada from Pakistan with the possibility of migrating permanently from...
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
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Stephanie Wong Ken
My conversation with Montreal-based artist Kandis Friesen was far from routine. In the lead up to our chat, I planned to visit Friesen’s most recent exhibit, Tape 158: New Documents from the Archives at TRUCK Gallery, here in Calgary. But just before this the province went into lockdown and the gallery was closed to the public. Rather than an in-person experience of the show, I had to rely on documentation of the exhibition provided by Friesen: an archive of the archive. While looking and listening to the documentation on my computer, in the comfort of my living room, I was drawn to the intricacy and beauty of Friesen’s show: exploring the ghostly presence of history through video, sound, photography, and installation. As an artist from Canada with Russian Mennonite roots, Friesen’s work looks at the complicated role of the archive, and asks us to consider how identity, nationhood, and historical objects are formed through us, and with us.
Her multi-media work seems particularly suited...
Friday, June 19, 2020
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Sarah Nesbitt
This past February, I attended the Berlinale Film Festival for the first time. My partner, Omar Elhamy, had a short film in the competition, and we took the opportunity to make a holiday out of it. I was particularly curious about the Forum Expanded and went with ambitions to write about this unique program. However, for a variety of reasons, including the 300 + minute run-time of films in the exhibition portion, distance between venues, scheduling conflicts, and the looming shadow of other (overdue) writing deadlines, I decided it was good enough to just absorb what I could, and learn for next time, if there ever is a next time.
I was, however, taken with one of the Forum’s curators, Maha Maamoun, who I first encountered as the moderator for a screening that included a film by mutual friend, Ahmed Elghoneimy. The program went quite late, and was prolonged by a heckler in the audience who proceeded to offer his “critical” (and therefore important) contribution—a monolog about the deat...
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
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Emily Doucet
Since the early days of the internet, people have shared information and experiences virtually when doing so in person was physically or socially impossible, but the current moment arguably represents something different. I hesitate to be prescriptive about what we should be watching instead, since that should and will look different for each community affected. But all this emphasis on “liveness” and narratives about how we’re going to get out of this have left me yearning for a bit more reflection on how we got here in the first place. Maybe solidarity looks a little bit less like representing the crisis and a little more like telling a story about how things could be different next time.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
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Luther Konadu
At least for now, the Jersey City artist Brandon Ndife seems to suggest that we take a few steps forward with him towards the future. Or maybe more likely, shuffle across an alternate space/time that mirrors the one we currently occupy. Keeping in touch with history, this hypothetical in-between terrain is murkier, more eerie. It is dystopian like the one we know, and perhaps it is nearing a threshold of something hopeful; but I won’t say it is optimistic. This is where his budding practice in sculpture thrives. It is a place to imagine, think, and speculate alongside felt realities. Even though what we encounter in Ndife’s work is grounded in sculptural thought, it is just as wrapped up in painting, makeup effects, and meticulous preparatory drawing.
Over the last six years or so, Ndife has been burrowing progressively through object-making: wandering, feeling out, and retooling. In the show Just Passin’ Thru held at Interstate Projects the bricolage in his work looked...
Friday, May 15, 2020
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Cason Sharpe
Phat Le and Benjamin de Boer took different paths to arrive at their current collaborative practice — Le is a student of architecture and de Boer is a poet. Their projects are united by their use of concrete. They embrace the material’s malleability and ubiquity, positioning it as an entry point for civic engagement. In 2016, the pair facilitated a workshop in which participants learned how to cast concrete by pouring rockite into condoms to create moulds in the shape of butt plugs. This tongue-in-cheek approach to materiality and collective action continues in Meditation in Concrete II, Le and de Boer’s latest exhibition, which opened at Alexus Projects’ Grab-a-Slice Gallery this past January.
The subject of investigation this time around is hostile architecture, a concept that describes design elements that intentionally impede the use of public amenities. The middle armrests installed on many public benches are an example of this insidious strategy. Their placement prevents people f...
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
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Mark Pieterson
For the last four decades, American artist Tishan Hsu has made a mark through his focused investigation into the embodiment of technology. His multimedia work exists in a terrain both familiar and unfamiliar, sublime yet accessible. From the early stages of his career in the 1980s, he’s been interested in technology’s impact on affect and its phenomenological implications. Making art was then an opportunity to respond to the accelerated changes of biological and digital infrastructure.
“I speculated that the world I would inhabit would be a technological one, for better or for worse. As a result, I wanted to get closer to technology, as a way of understanding it as a potential inspiration for creative production”, Hsu describes.
It is this desire to trace the corporeal conditions of the then new normal that has sustained Hsu’s unique visual language. From his choice of materials like tile, alkyd, ceramic, video and sound, he continually demonstrates an awareness of the rhizomatic...
Friday, May 1, 2020
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Madeline Rae
I made love to the Earth on ecstasy. I dug my nails into it and held it in my hands. I pressed my pelvis against it and inhaled deeply, like I would the neck of a lover. I cried and pushed into the ground, trying to move inside it and feel it all around me. John Berger wrote, “When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.” 1
Soaking and pulsating
You are Springtime
The wind smells different, the earth is defrosting and remembering how to grow.
I press one finger into the mud and its tight caress is cold still. I wiggle my finger around until I know the dirt is under my nail and closer to my blood.
My mother is my best friend. I thank the universe for her every day. She rocks me in her lap through heartbreak and tells me I am still her baby. While snot runs down my face and my eyes are swollen she calls me beautiful, and I believe her. She laughs out st...
Friday, April 24, 2020
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Greta Hamilton
The architectural residue of abandoned Pizza Huts, a tote bag full of receipts for Gatorade, Cheetos, NASCAR memorabilia, the giant rotating bucket outside of KFC— these are uncanny images which to some extent are synonymous with American iconography. Though the imagery of the American Dream has shifted into absurdity, there remains an underlying urge to participate in the fantasies of American commercial culture and to produce images of American identity. In the conversation that follows, artist/curator/arts facilitator Philip Leonard Ocampo discusses the paradoxical ways the ideals associated with the American Dream have impacted his family and artistic practice in a Canadian diasporic context. Born to Filipino parents, the Toronto-based Ocampo recently completed his studies at Ontario College of Art and Design and alongside his own studio work, he has since engaged in a number of curatorial projects including The Bald Eagle’s Claw, at Xpace Cultural Centre in the summer of 2019. At...
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
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Tatum Dooley
If there’s anything that captures the concept of “spectacle” famously theorized by Guy Debord in his 1967 text “The Society of the Spectacle,” it’s social media, followed closely by sporting events. “The decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing” constitutes the society of the spectacle, wrote Debord, who then aptly declared that commodity has colonized society. It’s a bit obvious for me to say that Instagram represents the manifestation of Debord’s words, but what isn’t obvious is the nuanced way that Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes blends these concepts into her photographs, disorienting the viewer.
Advertisements. Instagram grids. A race track. In our conversation, Kriangwiwat Holmes points out that in terms of visual literacy, as a culture we’re best at reading advertisements. She uses the language of advertisements—the colours, composition, and position on a sign—as a framework for her art practice. The result is a dystopian jest, images tha...
Thursday, April 9, 2020
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Adrienne Huard
Indigenous ways of being lie fundamentally in the strength of our people and the land that carries us. Beading falls within our embodied knowledge and celebrating these practices encourages our modes of sovereignty and resilience. Beading can and is often done alone, though the practice also brings our community together in powerful ways. Evenings spent with kin, or lunch time beading groups, like the one I hosted weekly at Concordia University, provide meaningful spaces for intergenerational learning and healing. The act of beading prevails as an Indigenous knowledge system–it integrates modes of map-making, displays our understanding of the land and our bloodlines–while including encoded stories, language and teachings. With hundreds of beaders connecting at a distance through social media, and other means over the last ten years, the need for larger scale beading events has given rise to two in so-called Canada within as many years.
Friday, April 3, 2020
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Kate Kolberg
Julie Oh relies on instinct; an uncritical trust of feelings elicited on a first encounter. The Saskatoon-based artist collects found objects which are often commonplace and recognizable to many, and then initiates a period of sustained engagement with them. Very little of the object will be physically altered during this time. Instead, Oh looks to isolate an encounter, providing the audience with an obscure and novel perspective. In this new light, it is almost as if the familiarity of Oh’s selected objects is exactly what makes them seemingly so foreign — it is a practice that lowers the partition between these two outwardly opposed conditions of perception. Through this understated gesture, Oh contemplates more far-reaching questions regarding the relevance of context, value, perspective, and engagement.
I first encountered Oh’s work through the documented performance accompaniment of the installation lines, a piece she produced in 2018 as part of the RBC Emerging Artist Series at t...
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
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Madeline Rae
Document 3. Beside this file is an image I saw on Tumblr. It is an ad for a scent called E’au D’Héroïne, and on the bottom it reads: by Jork Weismann. There's a close-up shot of an opened mouth, a tilted back jaw, with oozy champagne-colored liquid spilling out generously. I was attracted to this image because of its wetness, vulnerability, and sexiness.
I became obsessed with the notion of oozing substances in my third year of art school. But the curiosity started at an earlier age. It began with the first nutrients I ever consumed—the milk from my mother’s nipples. That is, how it came to be and how her body could produce it for my consumption. Later in life, there was a different kind of ooz that caught...
Friday, March 20, 2020
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Jameson Paige
In recent years, the United States has finally started to formally acknowledge its volatile relationship to the original peoples of the land, despite their long protestation and resistance to erasure. In the U.S. and Canadian art worlds, this recognition, though late, has come with a host of reparative institutional tactics, some of which include the performance of printed and spoken stolen-land acknowledgments or dedicated space in exhibition calendars for Indigenous artists. Though these efforts are certainly worthwhile and should continue, it is important to note that they are merely first steps on a path towards the rematriation of land and cultural autonomy for Indigenous folks in the U.S and Canada. Santiago X is an artist based in Chicago whose work contends with the growing pains of making space—physically and intellectually—for...
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
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Angel Callander
Leigh Bowery, Carmen Miranda, “Love Shack,” Showgirls, Björk’s swan dress at the Oscars, Macy Gray’s outfit emblazoned with the release date of her next album at the 2001 MTV VMAs, reality television, just about everything Lady Gaga has ever done—in a truly nebulous set of relations, references, and time periods, these things all have in common that they are beholden to the legacy of camp. Last year’s Met Gala put camp on our minds again, reviving Susan Sontag’s prominent essay, “Notes on Camp” (1964), and distributing it to celebrity stylists in what was itself a campy gesture of mingling pop culture and intellectualism.
Camp has not really been at the forefront of discourses surrounding cultural production over the past decade; though, in actuality, it has operated heavily in the background....
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
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Mariana Muñoz Gomez
Ming Hon’s production Exciting Consequences is set up to engage with the re-examinations of psychoanalysis, voyeurism, and scopophilia (the desire to “take other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze”)1 that occupied feminist film theory for the last quarter of the 20th century. Thematically, the performance is based on the gaze, sexuality, and self-awareness. Hon includes sex toys and 1980s porn in her re-enactments of accidentally learning about sex as a child, later including internet culture to allude to contemporary access to porn and sexual self-education. These materials are used by Hon to perform a narrative stemming from a childhood in which she finds and looks through her father’s dirty magazines and VHS tapes.
As audience members, we are given various voyeuristic opportunities throughout the performance. The stage is set up as a bedroom without walls so we can see the “backstage” of the production including makeup artist (Rachel Lynne Jones), as...
