Have any of you ever imagined logging into your Cloud to find your phone after your death? The strangeness and a sheer, frantic-like ineffability of it? Would a ghost remember a password? Would it qualify for a face recognition app? Perhaps not. I mean, how would or could we? How could we know that? Inside the bardo realm of Amie Barrodale’s novel Trip (2025), Sandra—the protagonist’s soul or its clumsy scraps—attempts to access her former Cloud on her laptop. The habitual memory of what’s left of her reels in between the astral realm of death and rebirth. Within a baffling waiting room with a tapestry of bizarre shapeless entities and spaceless anti-matter, she experiences a perpetual drifting hallucination: all’s twisted and helter-skelter. As though an eidolon from another sphere—never starving, never sleeping, Sandra finds herself always lurking among wispy realities. Hence, quite likely, facial recognition software would not perceive the presence of a nocturnal “bardo-normie.” At least not yet. Such is the karmic sap that sifts through Trip (2025), Amie Barrodale’s first novel published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. A writer and editor, Barrodale is the author of You Are Having a Good Time: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), a critically acclaimed, unsettling short-story collection of compressed tales that expose the chaotic, hidden desires of its characters. You Are Having a Good Time was named a Best Book of 2016 by the Wall Street Journal, Vulture, Financial Times, and Guardian. In January 2026, Trip was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. It was selected as one of the New York Times’s Notable Books of the Year and one of The New Yorker’s Essential Reads. Barrodale’s stories and essays have appeared in publications including The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, VICE, and McSweeney’s. In 2012, she was awarded The Paris Review’s George Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story “William Wei,” the first of her ten stories in You Are Having a Good Time. From 2014 to 2017, she served as the fiction editor of VICE, shaping a program that brought together established and emerging writers in an unlikely setting. To the ones who read the novel: There’s a before and after Trip. As a reader, you linger from one surreal perception to another. You’re looking through a person’s fingers and flesh, their former self, the soul-substance, and what’s left out of it, occasionally awakening to pinch yourself and possibly question your own existence. You are exercising to unfear it for whatever it is. Straddling the unhinged and the mundane, the incompleteness and unpredictability of life, Amie Barrodale’s Trip will clench you by your mind’s throat. During our early February tête-à-tête Zoom, Barrodale (raised Buddhist in Texas) and I spoke about the birth and behind-the-scenes of writing Trip. Publishing her second book nearly ten years after the initial success of her first, the author’s aura emanates from the pages with stark, comfortable interiority. “I like messier sentences now,” she said. I mean, that's the truth about motherhood. [...] In some ways, you just can’t win as a parent. Your first book, You Are Having a Good Time: Stories (2016), is a collection of 10 short stories. Trip (2025) is your first novel. There’s a shared, interlinked eeriness present in both books. But how different was writing Trip? How did you come up with its premise? I’m asking because I’ve never read anything describing a mother-son relationship and the bardo of such a surreal and unsettling, “impish” fiction. The novel really left me wide-awake in a great awe. I was in Kathmandu with my son when he was one year old, and my Buddhist teacher invited us to breakfast. He is a film director, and suggested that we should work on a novel together, a love story set in the bardo. I thought it was a good idea, but he just never wanted to talk about it again after that. I would email him some thoughts, no answer. I would write something, like Bradley Cooper in his living room on a spaceship or whatever I was thinking the bardo would be at that time. Nothing. So I started to write the book myself, but over time I realized that I wasn't really interested in romantic love at all, probably because I had a small child. And slowly the novel became about a mother and son, probably because that was where my head was at the time. From the beginning of the novel, there are several dramatic indications—as though bad omens are foreshadowing Sandra’s early death. It’s in a short detail when Trip plays with his phone and says, “It’s this game where you go inside people’s bodies. You can help them.” Afterwards, the whole journey to the local naga cave felt like a huge warning for Sandra. A picture of a snake is nailed to the wall in the hut. Then a rung from the ladder snaps. Sandra eats from the sacred vine—“I took food in the dark realm.” Before she tries to pass through the cave, she asks if she fits, and a shrine keeper says, “Only sinners cannot pass.” But she gets stuck there and fears this is her death. Except her actual death is quite comical—in its low-key bluntness, but the process of dying is written with a stellar plasticity! I loved the irritation of that hard-core, wry-wrought humor and softer sentient parts which felt “tectonic,” like grinding plates. And I wonder how you have intended to write that death build up? Was this something that you wanted to play with and construct through the narrative arc of the novel? I felt that for Sandra’s death to be plausible, I had to prepare readers for it. Actually, I had this agent ten years ago who really annoyed me once. She criticized one of my stories, saying that the problem with it was that there was no foreshadowing. That seemed like the most stupid thing I'd ever heard. Like, are we in eighth-grade English? What are you talking about? But it stayed with me, and I slowly came around to her point. In a story, we do need to have an idea of what's coming. Such an ordinary death of slipping on the hair brush felt wicked, and at the same time, it’s written with a great sense of hedonism, chaos and relief collaged altogether. More untethered was how you marveled at the whole process of Sandra’s dying. The hairbrush thing was borrowed from life. I knew a woman who died slipping in the shower. I'm a bit out there in some ways, and I do have friends who claim that they can speak to someone after they've died. One of them said she spoke to this woman, and the woman said, “At first I was really confused, but then I figured out what had happened.” That always stayed with me, because it sounded so true. It sounded like what someone would say after dying that way. Also, I have an acquaintance who almost died that way. He slipped in a hotel room, and had a really bad injury. So it just seemed plausible to me. That plausibility, precisely, was a great part of it. Because, as readers, we could identify with it. It was comical, but it was also very mundane in a way that this could happen to anyone. Yes, I think it is a common way to die. A quintessential element is the novel’s complicated mother-son relationship. The introspection we’re granted as readers. The bizarre and wry parts rebound in the more slowed and mundanely familial. Sandra’s made to understand that her son needed to be a different person, and that it was her job to change him. A maternal nexus clashes with what society expects from a mother, and how Sandra experiences it—that is a very unique portal into her character. She feels watched, evaluated, and judged on what kind of mother she is to Trip. It pressurizes and moves the story further. What was your construct behind this? I mean, that's the truth about motherhood. These descriptions are taken from life, mostly. In some ways, you just can’t win as a parent. I remember once, my son began to despise the place we took him for play therapy. He just was done. At first, we tried to work through it. Maybe we come five minutes late, we enter through the back. Maybe the speech therapist comes to the car and escorts him in. Just quick fixes. At one point, the people who run the clinic asked for a meeting with us, and they’d made this whole slideshow with this bullshit ladder of developmental needs. And at the bottom of the ladder, the first rung, was something called “felt safety.” And they said to us—and they believed it too, which was the worst part—that our son didn’t have felt safety. And we asked, you know, what are you talking about, and they told us he was afraid to come into their clinic. Like… they couldn’t see that maybe this had something to do with their clinic. No, it went back to our original failure as parents. And that’s something you’re dealing with all the time. I really hoped that Sandra would ultimately meet with Trip. I imagined that while he’s lost at sea, decrypting the stars in the night sky, he could draw some inner connection to his dead mother, whom he doesn’t know is dead. Despite that, Trip is portrayed as a highly sentient teenager, and a sense of eerie mirroring runs between the two of them. Trip’s knowledge of stars and objects in the universe is somehow metaphorical to how the novel operates in a realm of Sandra reeling in the bardo. Trip says: “The night sky itself is associated with Kali, goddess of death and destruction. But then they also say she is love itself,” and “I looked it up once, and read that it is a mistake, thinking that life is about being happy—that it is much more interesting than that.” and “He listened to the water. He thought if he listened to it long enough, it would reveal ancient wisdom.” I thought that Trip is more prone to perceive his dead mother. Was this “mirroring” essential to you? Yes, initially I planned for her to get to him inside of Donald’s body, but then I felt that was misleading. I didn’t want to suggest that if you really really try hard, you can reach the life you left behind. Also, if she were to reach him, that wouldn’t be the greatest parenting, or the greatest representation of life. I think in life, you can’t fix things for your children. I did let her influence him. She does get a message to him, you know. Through Donald. I guess like, this life, this being, this Amie and this Filip, are doomed. We’re going to die. But whatever awareness is experiencing us… whatever that is… is going nowhere. The dialogues radiate with quirkiness and loom with a madcap, wry energy. Even the seemingly most normcore exchange plummets into a tragicomedy, a satire, a loony place to feel. And I had a great time laughing a lot! Whether I’m thinking of Sandra and her colleagues at the death conference, the caretaker and Trip’s teachers, then Trip and Anthony’s journey, and Sandra’s new consciousness with various bizarre deities in the bardo. The crow and Sandra’s incomprehensible talk when she’s inside Donald’s body. That wit and wryness—is this something you consciously employ to “enlighten” and de-sentiment the story? Or do you regard it as something inherited in your writing in general? What do you think of it? Maybe a little bit. It’s who I am. I used to go see stand-up comedy in my twenties. I remember one time we had sort of attached ourselves to David Cross’s table. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to make him say out loud what he was thinking. I was like, “Hold on. Do I drink too much?” And he was like, “Amie. Yes.” I don’t know why I feel like telling that now. There’s something very specific about the uncanny craft of your sentences, which are, at times, cut short to deliver the profound “high.” But what’s even more enthralling is how you leave “chapters in a hang.” Each seems to hang in an open suspense, perhaps semi-finished; some are at their bleakest. Like hanging off the crumbling cliff—edging the reader to nudge further and through. From 2014 to 2017, you were the VICE fiction editor. How do you feel this role has contributed to or formed your fiction? When I was an editor, I was a lot more in touch with what would be interesting to read. I was opening a lot of things and starting them. I wanted my work to be immediate; I wanted it to be scene-driven, to move quickly. But now I'm getting all the vices of writers I used to be impatient with. I'm comfortable with interiority, and I like things that go long. I like messier sentences now. I don’t know why. It just appeals to me now. That’s interesting because I find your sentences stylistically nifty. And that niftiness is quite perceptible, and it culminates at the finish lines of some chapters. What do you mean by nifty? What I mean by niftiness or nifty in connection to your writing is a craft the author develops, or possesses and it becomes their very own DNA. A hallmark. Like a stream that runs through their mind and hands, without them perhaps really registering it, at first. Can you give me an example, maybe? “Trip found the star called Algol. ‘The demon's head,’ he said. ‘Okay,’ Anthony said. ‘Good.’ He stood, unsure what to do. Trip took the wheel. Anthony said, ‘I'll bring back some hard alcohol.” I just opened a random page to point to such an example. I don’t know. I remember once interviewing Renata Adler. I came in with a lot of specific questions about her work, and she deflected them all. So we ended up gossiping the whole time. She asked to cut the gossip, so I had nothing to send my editor but pages and pages of me saying, “Why’d you do this?” and her saying, “I’m not sure.” And he said I’d basically spent thousands of dollars to ask a fish over and over again what it’s like to be wet. While reading Trip, I have been thinking about “longevity,” and how this term invades and operates in public spaces and media now. It’s quite alarming and panic-striking. However, with the novel, you ponder and vector toward the contrary of that experience. Like, into a forever escape room. To me, the novel is less about transformation and more about transcendence. A vaster, cyclic and spiritual form of the soul’s longevity. Rei Kawakubo, a Japanese fashion designer (Comme des Garçons), was once asked how she wanted to be remembered. She replied, “I want to be forgotten.” And I’m bringing this up because forgetting and letting go is one of the ingredients the protagonist and deities fear but undergo in the novel. Eventually, they’re consumed by it, they’re swallowed by time. You wrote a book about bardo, afterlife, and rebirth in a world that’s obsessed with physical longevity, and seems mostly performatively-transcendental. How do you think about and relate to that? Does that affect your writing? At one point before my son was born, I went up to a drupchen in Maratika, this remote area of Nepal, and the Rinpoche leading the retreat said something about long life being unattainable, but deathlessness being in reach. This is based on a memory of something that I heard a long time ago. But I feel your question is touching on that. I guess like, this life, this being, this Amie and this Filip, are doomed. We’re going to die. But whatever awareness is experiencing us… whatever that is… is going nowhere. Book cover for Trip (2025). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  What really got me was when Sandra’s consciousness in the bardo revisits her past and then tries to locate her iPhone. Such parts to me were truly crispy, like this one: “I went upstairs to the bedroom. I opened my laptop to do 'find my phone,' but the cloud wasn’t accepting my password.” How have you imagined what souls-in-waiting in bardo do? It came slowly. I researched what the Tibetan Buddhist idea of it would be. And it changed. Initially, I had a view that it would be crazier, more like a story of Jacob's Ladder. As if everything were changing all the time. I thought it had to be like that, because I've read that. I think I mentioned this a few times in the book, that when you think of a place in that realm, you're there. I thought it would just have to be like changing channels all the time. But then, as I researched it more, I started to feel like it might be more normal. Like a normal part of life. What’s really startling in the book is how you imagined and wrote the surreal descriptions in the consciousness of the dead Sandra in the bardo. Creatures with tentacles surrounded by flames, ghouls, spirits, deities, a dog’s digestive tract, a woman with the head of a horse, the dead waiter, owl-faced lady, a man with a dull black crow’s wing instead of his arm, or “a pyramid who feels stupefied—physically dirty and lethargic.” At one point in the bardo, Sandra is not even sure if she was a man or a woman; she has only a memory of her hands. The surreal intensifies toward the end when Sandra switches with another soul inside Donald’s body. The whole descriptive tract is totally madcap, I mean, it’s just insanely great. A kind of fourth dimension penetrates the narration. There’s this liquidity of some sort hazing the novel. It reminded me of some of Remedios Varo and Dali’s paintings, perhaps even Hilma af Klint. Were you working with some visual maps while writing a novel? Those weirder characters were some of the first ones that I wrote. That was when I thought the bardo had to be crazy. And I kept some of them. That waiter, he came at the very end, and I really liked him. The crow is from one of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s talks about the bardo. One of the examples he used was that you might suddenly have a crow's claw. You might be putting a sock onto your claws, finding it’s not working, but not feeling bothered about it. In the novel, Larry, one of the academics refers to The Shining by Stephen King, and a movie by Stanley Kubrick. Some scenes in the novel brought the utmost neo-Hitchcockian perspective. I had flashes of films like Birth (2004), Ghost (1990), or even Transcendence (2014). My unconscious was perhaps registering them as references while I read, although these movies are totally Hollywoodized. Have you seen them? What have you recently watched? I haven't seen Birth and Transcendence. I've seen Ghost. One thing I think Ghost does really well is, right after—Is it Patrick Swayze? Right after he dies, he sees these other ghosts wandering around. A woman who's dropped her son off at school, sort of just wandering through a cemetery stops and waves at him, and I think that's really good. I think they really got that right. I also saw Enter the Void (2009) from Gaspar Noé. It was helpful, because he started out with a character doing DMT. I was like, oh, this is so stupid, and then I cut my DMT scene. You have studied and adapted a selection of traditional Buddhist writings. Apart from that, I’m curious what other literary writers and works have influenced your writing. And, what have you been reading recently? I really have been liking Ben Lerner. I know people get annoyed when I say that, because everybody knows him and everybody likes him, but I came to him late, because when 10:04 came out, I was so jealous that I couldn't read it, and I was able to read it just a year ago. Then I started reading all his stuff. And I've been enjoying that. I finally read Don DeLillo this year, and I liked him. Oh, which one from DeLillo? I read White Noise and Mao II. Actually, I was a little disappointed, maybe because I spent my whole life hearing about them and starting to read them, but not finishing them. And when I finally finished them, I was like, “Oh. Okay. I mean, sure.” We were exchanging DMs about Szalay’s Flesh. You read it, too, right? Yes, I read that. I loved it. He's a unique writer. For a while, I lost interest when he married that woman. The scene when they’re at the estate sitting by the pool got me nervous. But I finished it and felt a little bit destroyed. I admired what he did, but it made me nauseated and afraid, also. I really liked Susan Minot’s Don't Be a Stranger. She’s a special writer. What I really liked about the book was that she's writing about an uneven relationship. A 53-year-old woman is in love with a younger man. And when it gets to the part where he's pulling away, I feel like most people just can't bear to write that. They exaggerate it, or they gloss over it. The experience of being abject is just too painful and too embarrassing to see clearly, but she does it. I was wondering what you would do if you got a proposal to turn Trip into a script and film. Would you consider something like this if that were an option? Yes, of course. I’m not Sally Rooney. I’m not in a position to turn an opportunity like that down. Also, I love movies and I love TV, so of course. I really thought about Trip being turned into a series. Something like White Lotus could be fantastic. Oh, yeah, I loved White Lotus. That would be great. I thought about Steve Coogan, actually. He was cast in the next White Lotus 4, and he came to my mind as a good person for embodying Donald. As I was finishing the book, for some reason, I kept seeing Steve Coogan as Donald; it's weird. The above conversation was conducted by Filip Jakab, a writer and editor based in Brussels.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Amie Barrodale. Photo by Chase Castor. Sourced via.

When I reflect on the films of Christian Petzold, a host of indelible images return to me. The end of Phoenix (2014), for instance, when Johannes (Ronald Zehrfeld) finally catches a glimpse of the serial number on Nelly’s arm (Nina Hoss), and cannot bear to bring himself to face her: the weight of his betrayal and deception, both within and beyond the film, crashing down on him. Or, in Jerichow (2008), when clandestine lovers Laura (Hoss) and Thomas (Benno Fürmann) are forced to embrace by a rose bush in order to obscure their faces from a group of school children walking past, and the gentle breeze that caresses them. In Afire (2023), which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival—where Petzold also won Best Director in 2012 for Barbara—it is the shot of the corpses of gay lovers, who’ve died in a forest fire, wrapped in golden emergency blankets. These images return to me in the realm of dreams, they feel plucked from reality, are portals to the souls of their characters, evoked through sight and sound alone. Since the turn of the century, Petzold has cemented his position as a singular, key voice in world cinema. Every film by Petzold is an event to be attended to, even if sung in a minor key, for they drip with their distilled intentions and their classic executions. Across 11 German-language features, each of which are in dialogue with each other, he has established a body of work that is, by turns, reliable, sensual, elegant, and enchanting. The living and the dead; the past and the future; the real and the double; these are the inextricable preoccupations he has been deepening with each of his gem-like constructions, conjuring up cinema magic en route to instances of revelation. In recent years, his attention has turned to the cares and conditions of the contemporary world, from the importance of myths and historical foundations in Undine (2020) to the isolating effects of climate catastrophe and pandemics in Afire. His newest film Miroirs No. 3 is his most subtle and unassumingly devastating. It tells the story Laura (Paula Beer), a music student on the verge of a nervous breakdown who loses her boyfriend in a car accident and then immediately falls into the orbit of a broken family headed by Betty (Barbara Auer). Over a certain period of time, as each member of the family is touched by Laura’s mollifying presence, the entanglement grows complicated, and the enigmatic absence at the centre begins to glow. On a balmy afternoon during the Toronto International Film Festival, where Miroirs had its North American premiere, I met with Petzold at a French-inspired restaurant located inside Le Germain Hotel. When I entered the room he placed his spectacles back in their case and, as we waited for the waitress to bring cream for his espresso, I pulled out my copy of filmmaker Robert Bresson’s book Notes on a Cinematograph from my backpack and handed it to him. Awe-struck, he leafed through it, and from behind his glossy, green eyes I could see the gears of a fierce cinephile begin to turn. As much as he is a filmmaker, Petzold is, first and foremost, a student of cinema, his mind a generous archive of indelible images. He returned the book to me and I placed it on the table so that, over the next hour, it remained there between us, an emblem and an anchor. He started to speak about Bresson before I realized the conversation was already under way. When I asked if I could start recording, he playfully pouted and his eyebrows jerked up as if to say: if you so wish. The object is not the cinema. Cinema is not interested in the object—it’s always interested in the people who are watching objects. Objects are for commercial advertisements. So the people who are staring at the object, this is cinema. You were saying: a flight over Tokyo? Bresson saw this film, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, in a French cinema, at the beginning of the 50s I think. It’s footage of a flight over Tokyo by an American interceptor during the war. He said: “Nothing happened. In reality, everything happened.” You know, I’m a Protestant and Robert Bresson is Catholic and it’s very interesting. The Protestants, we have music, we have Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Catholics, they have pictures and colours. For me it’s Bresson who makes Catholic subjects and themes like a Protestant, because they’re clean and clear. On the other hand, I was in church when I was a very young boy because my parents believed in God until my father lost his job at the beginning of the 70s. He was unemployed andlost everything about his identity, lost his trust in religion as well. But until he lost everything I had to go to church two times a week. I hated church. I hated it completely. But there is one moment in church I loved. It’s at the end of the session when the doors open. You’re sitting and behind you the doors open to the world and Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is there. You stand up, turn around and you go back into the world with the music, with something you have seen. This, for me, is cinema. It’s the same moment. Therefore, I understand what happens in David Chase’s The Sopranos because he takes the music out of the score. He leaves the songs for the final credits. So in The Sopranos I have the same feeling as in the Protestant church. At the end, the doors open. The music is coming. You have to go back to your life. But something stays inside of you. This was something. For me Bresson is doing the same. Mouchette is my favorite film by him. When Mouchette commits suicide the second time, when she’s rolling down into the water, the second time the music starts, it’s Monteverdi. It is as if the Catholic director uses the Protestant view of the world and souls, and this I like very much. After watching Miroirs No. 3, I actually thought of Mouchette.In her introduction to the New York Review of Books re-issue of George Beranos’ Mouchette, the late poet Fanny Howe writes that “suicide, like little else, makes people aware of chance…Suicide is detachment beyond recognition…Suicide is the answer to one question…Suicide is a lonely surge of unhope.” When I looked back on your recent films, I noticed how often suicide appears as a way for the secondary characters to add pressure to the narrative: in Phoenix, the sister, Lena (Nina Kunzendorf) who has survived the loss of her entire bloodline and faced the horrors of the aftereffects war, suddenly erases herself; in Transit, it is the icy, privileged character played by Barbara Auer, who suddenly slips out of view. In Miroirs, this element is placed into the narrative in a different way. The film opens with the character of Laura—played by Paula Beer, in your fourth consecutive collaboration together—standing on a bridge, contemplating, about what we don’t know, before a man in all black paddles across. It brought to mind Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer as well, meaning that it reads as suicidal ideation. And later, too, we learn about what exactly happened to Yelena, whose absence allows Laura’s presence to exist. Why suicide? It’s all in the question. For me, I saw Mouchette for the first time in my life I was 17, 18, and I later read a critic who said that the suicide of Mouchette says the whole world is unjust. The whole world is not right. This suicide says you are all bad, you are mean. I have the feeling that in my movies the suicides are without any morality. The people are just vanishing. This is, I think, because the world doesn’t notice them. So this has something to do with modern societies. Students are on a bridge near water, they see a symbol of the boat with the guy who brings you over the sticks. But he is a sportsman. For her, it’s a guy. It is death, I thought, a figure of death, like in a tarot card. The Germans, they have images from the 18th and 19th century from their painters. Arnold Berklin was a very famous German painter, he’s a painter of the Romantic period. The German Romantics have something to do with it. We have a modern world which is coming, then industrialization starts, capitalism starts and the German intellectuals and artists want to re-enchant the world. This was something. So Novalis and Frederich Hölderlin, they’re talking about Greece, about the wind, about the flowers and Arnold Berklin made a painting called The Island of Death. There’s an island like a big stone, like a rocket, and there’s the sea and a boat, and on the boat is a white angel with a stick, a paddle. The guy who died is sitting there in the boat. It’s a moment when you’re coming from living to death. It brings you over the sticks. This is a very, very popular painting. When I was a child, I was afraid of this picture. Because this island is like the place you're coming through when you are born, there are two thighs of a woman. In the middle, the vagina, but in the middle is the death in this picture. You’re going back into the...like in the album by Nirvana…you’re going back… In Utero. It’s a little bit like this. It’s in utero. It is as if the romantics want to go back into the mother’s body because the world is too complicated and when people…it’s over-interpreted now. No, no, no. But I think like this. I’ve never told the actors about this. I don’t want to make them crazy. They come from all over the world and you can’t find a way. You’re reading ten books at the same time, they’re lying on your bed, you have a new idea and then the next idea. It’s the idea that when you have problems and these problems are complex then this romantic picture says to you: “Death is the answer. Go back into the utero of your mother. Then you’ll have the possibility of a restart.” It’s fascistic. It’s a fascistic vision because the fascists, they don’t want to work with the complexity of our world. They want to be like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. There must be a big frame to wash all this shit away and I want to have a clear world. So this young woman is standing there under a highway in a very, very ugly place. But the reminiscence of the German romantic is there. I think at this moment, when you make a film, you have to think about all these meanings behind it. You have to think about them, but then when you start shooting you have to also forget them directly. But what was interesting there, you can see it also in the movie, is that when we changed the camera position to the other side of the sticks of the river, where you see the guy with a pedal, and Paula Beer is standing there and he’s passing her you can see, in the back, there’s graffiti there, very old graffiti. It says “Beer.” “Beer” and “Undine.” And Paula said to me afterwards, “What’s this? Did you do this?” I said, “No, I’m innocent.” It’s very old. It has nothing to do with Paula Beer. It has something to do with the fact that during the world championship of soccer there were poor English hooligans who had lived under the bridge for the two weeks of football and they had beer, and because they were swimming in this ugly water they were thinking about girls and had written down “Undine.” But it was a coincidence. Circling back to the in utero part, when she sees the mother, it’s almost this…when they were driving by, it’s almost this…an escape. She wants to be outside. It’s a perverted thing to say “I want to be someone else,” but so many people in the world want to be someone else. When she's in the back of the car with her friends, it reminded me of the end of Barbara Loden’s Wanda, which you have previously talked about as a major influence. I want to read you this passage from Nathalie Léger’s Suite For Barbara Loden, which interprets the end of Wanda: “We don’t know what she will lose, or what she is going to find. She is coming back to herself. Perhaps she would prefer to disappear into a life of solitude—exhausting, but her own. At this point Barbara decides to let Wanda take control of her life.” Despite the fact that critics have related the character of Laura in Miroirs No. 3 to the protagonist of films like Yella and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, I saw her as a shadow of Wanda, one who doesn’t belong, isolating her from whatever nucleus she finds herself in, as though she were the ghost of a normal, so-called well-adjusted person. At the start of your film, there is this car accident—you’ve said before that accidents need to happen in cars in order for the narrative to take place—but it is the same way the murdered man in the bar in Wanda caused the plot to swerve. The thing about all of your films is they swerve away from the starting point but then they always swerve back, but with its essence forever altered. She’s from method acting, Barbara Loden, but she’s playing the opposite of it. There’s no energy in her. She’s slow and in the final scene when the guy, the bank robber, is dead and she’s sitting there with strange people, she’s looking in the direction of the camera. This is something which impressed me totally. Like with the death of Mouchette. These are things which are deep in my mind when I’m making movies. But in this moment, when the car is passing the mother the first time, she is like Wanda: you don’t know where she can go, where she can live, she’s like a leaf on the surface of a river, and in this moment when someone is staring at her I wanted to create the impression as if the mother is taking her. It’s not her who has made the decision to go to this place. It’s the mother who says, “Come to me.” Like a spider, for a moment. “You could be the one.” And she knows: “Oh, this could be a possibility to find an identity. It’s a wrong identity, but it’s mine. To be the wrong daughter.” It’s something. The wrong daughter is better than nothing. It’s a perverted thing to say “I want to be someone else,” but so many people in the world want to be someone else. When the tsunami was in Indonesia and Thailand there were many, many people who vanished. They never found the bodies. So many people who everybody thought was dead tried to find a new biography. They went to another country, to have a new life. Then there was research five years ago that found ten people who everybody thought was dead. Now they lived in another country with another identity but they had recreated and copied their life from before: they had two kids and a woman again, they couldn’t get out of this. But the dream, the desire of people to have new identities, I think, it’s great for Laura to have this wrong identity. The first morning, when she’s coming out of the house and the mother is painting the fence, she says to her: “Yelena.” She knows about it, from the very beginning, even if she acts like she didn’t at the end. She knows, but she never asks. The mother never asks her, “Where are you coming from? What are you studying? What is your family name? How old are you?” She says, “Here are your clothes. Here is something to eat. Here is the bed. Here is my warm embrace. Here is a wrong name.” “So it fits,” she says. It fits. So it’s something perverted. I like people who say it’s a wrong identity but it’s mine and I’m working with this. I can be deliberate and myself and I can find relief and comfort with wrong things and this thing has something to do with cinema, where everybody’s playing actors, playing the movies, playing with our dreams. It is interesting to me that in 1895 the Lumière brothers made the first movie ever, Workers Leaving the Factory, at the same moment that Sigmund Freud discovered dream work. It’s the same moment in history: dream work and cinema have something to do with each other. The content of your films are always informed by outside forces—for instance the suicide of the daughter that happens before the time of the film—but here you also allow all of the events to happen off-screen: the car accident, the dishwasher malfunctioning, the son recording Laura in the public park. I’ve read that you cut out a few scenes from the start of the film; but even in the writing process, how do you go about figuring out what can be removed and what must stay? How do you measure this and create the balance with the ellipses? It’s something I learned with Harun Farocki in a seminar in 1989, my first year at the German Film Academy in Berlin. We saw the movie The Soft Skin by François Truffaut. In this movie, there is a sequence where the sexual desire of the man begins. He’s a professor of literature and he’s on a plane working like everybody nowadays, with a notebook, but then there is a stewardess. Played by Françoise Dorléac. Yes, and she’s working there and the flight is going to Lisbon. The captain says: “Now it’s time for landing.” It’s always the same, the stewardesses go to their part of the plane and close the curtains. So she’s closing the curtains and you can see, because there is a gap between the curtain and the floor, you can see how she’s changing her shoes. For a long moment you see her naked feet and the professor is watching, looking at the naked feet and falling into his sexual desire because of a partial object, not because of the stewardess, but because of the naked feet. But it doesn’t work in the movie really, and we asked ourselves why it doesn’t work. We read an interview with Truffaut, who said: “I really made a mistake with this scene.” His mistake was that he showed the naked feet for one minute then showed the literature professor for 10 seconds. It must be the other way around. The object is not the cinema. Cinema is not interested in the object—it’s always interested in the people who are watching objects. Objects are for commercial advertisements. So the people who are staring at the object, this is cinema. I learned this in 1989, a very long time ago. It has something to do with your question. When you see the car passing and you see the woman who’s watching the car and the car is going away then you have to stay on her face and hear the car crash. I’m not interested in this fucking car crash. It’s better if you hear something and you see the face of a woman and you are with her and you understand everything but you don't know it 100% and then she’s running and you see her reaction before you see the object, the car. These are things I learned from cinema. When you see a bad movie, they like the car crash, they think this is something. This is, in Marxist terms. This is, in Germany, called the money shot. But it has nothing to do with cinema, the money shot. I like when you see Godzilla destroy these houses in the old movies of 1954, because there’s nobody living there, it’s all very cheap. Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film. Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film. Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film. In Miroirs, the money shot occurs sonically. In the days leading up to watching the film, I played Maurice Ravel’s “Miroirs No. 3” on loop, because I wasn’t familiar with it, and I was on the look out for it. The first time we hear a snippet of it is in the car with the father; the second in the house with the mother; and the third is with the son in the car. The fact that the final scene in the film is a culmination of these brief moments, in which the song acts as a sort of homage, an act of redemption, deeply moved me. We don’t see their reaction to it—how cheap would that be—but the way that the music has changed the air in the room. Like how you said, the Bach music at the end of church, it feels like the doors are opening in the film. For some people, the film might not make sense if you're not familiar with the music, but you build up to this moment. The money shot is a sound. You’re totally right. That’s what moved me. This music by Maurice Ravel. The father has the music, the son has the music, and the mother has the music, and at the end my idea was that when she’s playing it, she’s playing it for herself and also for this family. And so, the decision, that when the editor goes back into the house, when they’re preparing eggs and coffee, the final scene, the music is there too. She’s making the music for this family so this family can live on. They’re hurt, they’re wounded, they have scars, but they can live on now. This is a comfort for them. The music says goodbye to them. And so, I can live on my own now, too. I can play my music and it’s also music for you. We can separate in a good way. I could live as a daughter. Okay, I must say it like this: the real daughter, Yelena, committed suicide because the mother is too strong. That was the idea. You can feel it. She’s always there at the bed, always staring. She’s so needy. She’s always asking Laura to come back. “I need you, I need you.” I showed Barbara Auer the movie Rebecca by Hitchcock because Rebecca was the dead wife, and when John Fontaine is coming to the castle, there is the governess and you never see her moving, she’s always there. When Paula Beer, on the first morning, makes a ding, ding, ding sound she’s like the governess from Rebecca, Barbara Aucher is there. So with the music at the end of the movie, Paula Beer’s Laura can live this life, this independent life the other daughter didn’t reach, who found in her suicide an exit door, but she can live on. This was the idea. The mother and the whole family understand this for the first time. This is just made by music. Therefore, you’re totally right to say this is also a money shot. The money shot, yes. It’s a money shot. I wanted to ask you about your approach to including “the uncanny” (das Unheimliche) in your films. In this film, there is the scene when Betty introduces the men to Laura, but they assume that she has lost it and is speaking of a ghost, so that when Laura does appear, having made dumplings, they are shocked to see her. In a sense she is presented to them as a ghost—which is a representation of a living thing. It also brings up the idea of “the return of the repressed” that marked Phoenix, and it is also in relation with Transit’s conceit of taking over the identity of another man. So when father and son arrive with their American car, with this green car, what you see is them through the window of the kitchen. Which you also do at the beginning of Afire, with a shot of Paula Beer on the bicycle the first morning, where she goes through the back of the forest. But in Afire you see the guy who is watching: in this movie, you don’t know who’s watching. This was the idea. It sounds very intellectual, but it’s like this. For me the whole scene is about these two guys who are invited to the house of a psycho woman, who always thinks: “My daughter is coming tonight.” It’s like the Sigmund Freud story: “I know my daughter’s dead, but she’s coming in five minutes.” This is a dramatic situation. And so, these two guys, they’re coming to this place and they think, “Oh, it’s a dinner like we have seen and we have had in the last two years three or four times, and that means that we have to bring her back into the mental hospital.” Like this. And the first thing you see is their arrival from the point of view of someone. If I make a second shot of Laura, who is watching them coming, it doesn’t work anymore because I wanted to make her a phantom, a ghost. Because I don’t show her, I just show a view. And so I’m on the side of father and son and I’m on their side of the fear when they hear a noise from the kitchen. There’s a plate, there’s a noise from the kitchen and this noise is made from someone whose view we have seen, but who doesn’t have a body. Sometimes, for me, in cinema we must help the audience, not the characters. [...] That means we have to respect the audience, and this, for me, is freedom, relief, comfort, everything. You are a filmmaker who is steeped in literary theory, and have spoken about how you like to liberally bring in constellations of inter-text into your work. Your films have led me to discovering W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Ella Fitzgerald’s “Speak Low,” the novels of Anna Seghers and the short stories of Ingeborg Bachman. This film features a brief anecdote from Tom Sawyer. In the past, you’ve also said that your films are the result of trying to remember the plot of a film you’ve seen, but remembering it like a faint dream. In the past you’ve misremembered with The Postman Always Rings Twice, Carnival of Souls, Eyes Without A Face. When I heard about this film, I thought of Pasolini’s Teorema. In an interview with Dennis Lim for Film Comment, you mentioned Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room. What are you productively forgetting, or subconsciously referencing here? Nanni Moretti was for the actors. I wanted to show them a movie where they can see how death would destroy a whole family and how they can find comfort with someone from the outside. But it has nothing to do with my movie. There’s no suicide and no guiltiness there. For me, Teorema was more interesting, and also a movie by Jean Renoir called Boudu Saved from Drowning. It’s about a homeless guy coming into a rich family and everything changes. The girl finds her sexuality, the boy gets into anarchy. There was a remake made with Richard Dreyfus called Down and Out In Beverly Hills. So, for me, it was like someone is coming from the outside into a traumatic structure and this arrival is something like an angel or something like that. And so, the structures are open and can change. But on the other hand, because it’s a mirror, I want to show both sides of the mirror. We have the mirror of death on the one side, and the living on the other side. We have the side of death is Yelena and her family, and on the side of living is Laura. Both sides are coming together. This was the mirror theme. Everything is in this movie, I see some people in it I know very well. Everything in this movie is based on two things: the mirror, the picture, the reflection. We have the wind. The wind is sometimes a symbol for ruins. The wind is going through open windows and destroyed doors through a house. Sometimes the wind is refreshing when you open a window. So, you have a house, as if this house of death, like the island of death, the house of death. And on the other side, Laura is bringing a fresh wind into the house and they are rebuilding something. Then you have things that are totally destroyed and they start to repair them. So, their behaviour starts to be like a dance. The moment when the two young actors are sitting there with a bottle of beer hearing this Frankie Valli song, I said to them, “OK, there is no dialogue for you. You’re just drinking beer and hearing a song and there is no meaning, nothing, just five minutes for yourself.” This is very hard for actors. Because in this movie, where everything is so built, in this moment, to sit there without any text is very hard. I just knew that after one minute they would start laughing because they’ll feel ashamed to be there by themselves without a character to play. I just wanted this moment because this moment means there is a new breath, the new wind inside. This is freedom. Now they are young. Everything, the whole luggage and baggage is gone for a moment and they can feel what could be. So it was like this. The more that I think about your films the more that I realize that, despite the loss that marks them, you are always arguing for the fact that people happen to come into our lives and change them for the good, that it is only through other people that we might find meaning and return to who we were. Unlike your other films, where the politics might be more explicit, the four-part dynamic in this film acts as a metaphor of the desire for re-unification after a central trauma has occurred. Your films have the power to, and are designed to, perhaps, fall to the other side and devastate us, but they don’t. You never let it. In our oppressed times, why do you choose hope? I think hope is a good word for this because we started with the Protestants and the Catholics. Hope is very deep inside of this. But I think at the end of Wanda, or the end of The Searchers, or a movie like Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin, the hope and the relief I feel as part of the audience is not something to do with something that happened on the screen. It’s something to do with having the feeling that now the characters don’t need me anymore. They are for themselves. Charlie Chaplin goes away and the iris is showing him out. In Wanda, it’s a freeze frame. So now it’s hers, and now it’s ours. So we have to go back to our life and they go on in theirs. For me, this is relief. It’s a little bit like this crime novel by John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl, the first sentence is something like: “What we have to do is to help the people who love us to get independent.” It’s something to do with parents and kids and love affairs. We must help them. Sometimes, for me, in cinema we must help the audience, not the characters. We must help the audience to get independent. That means we have to respect the audience, and this, for me, is freedom, relief, comfort, everything. I love the final scenes. I remember when we made Phoenix, the final scene was written by me but the last camera movement was improved at the end. We made this movie chronologically. It was the last day of shooting and the director of photography, Hans Fromm, wanted to follow Nina Hoss when she left the room and went outside. But at this moment I said, “Oh God, we are Germans. We can’t follow. We have to stay. And our work for the future is to stay and to repair and not go to Palestine as if we are guilty. We are the killers. Or sons of killers. And we have to stay.” But Fromm said: “I want to follow her.” Everybody wants to follow her. But we have to stay. This is our position of morality. Therefore the final scene is much better. She’s going out of focus into the light. It’s hers. It’s for her to have. What are you working on next? I’m making the fourth movie with the same actors from this series of crime stories for TV. I will make two movies for cinema in two years. One is based on the Bertolt Brecht movie from 1932, Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World? and now in the same era in Berlin. It’s also a fight against capitalism for a small group of people. They work with curses. Very hard curses. I have to write the last sequences and can do it in one and a half years. Then I will make a movie about a group of a theater which will be erased by the government and their opening night and the fight against it. I want to do anti-capitalistic movies. I have all the actors and everything is there. I have to work in the next five years. I want to make a movie with Nina Hoss and Paula Beer together in the next three or four years too. I don’t want to go to festivals anymore. I want to stay home, read and meet the people I want to work with. The company, the distributors, they send me everywhere. It’s stolen time. I lay in the hotel room, like a serial killer, waiting for the call. For me, it’s like this. The above conversation was conducted by Nirris Nagendrarajah, a writer and critic from Toronto. Editorial support by Alana Traficante.Cover photo: Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film.

I met Rhayne in the summer of 2020 in Winnipeg, shortly after I moved to Canada for my PhD. She was DJ’ing, already with a visible spark, already operating beyond recognizable structures. There was a sense, even then, that she was not simply participating in a scene but quietly rearranging the conditions of it. Our friendship grew slowly, largely through what we did not exchange: not turning proximity into possession, not forcing disclosure into currency. I’ve come to understand her films in much the same way. They refuse extraction. They withhold resolution. They linger, knowing that true confrontation and disclosure is impossible in the wake of large-scale catastrophes—genocides, cultural genocides, residential schools, ecological extinctions, and their afterlives. Rhayne Vermette is a Métis filmmaker, visual artist, and animator based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her practice spans experimental animation, short films, and feature-length works, often created through small, intimate, and deliberately non-industrial modes of production. Her films are deeply rooted in place, family, and Indigenous presence, while resisting the demands of legibility often imposed by settler and international film circuits. Rather than explaining catastrophe, Vermette treats it as an ongoing and quotidian condition. As she states plainly in our conversation: “We’ve been living inside of it.” Her debut feature Ste. Anne (2021) marked a breakthrough. Premiering at the Berlinale, the film went on to win the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at TIFF and received international acclaim for its allegorical reclamation of Indigenous land, memory, and familial reconnection. Shot in Vermette’s home community and featuring her relatives alongside herself, Ste. Anne established many of the formal and ethical commitments that would come to define her work: non-professional performers, cyclical time, and a refusal to translate Indigenous experience for an external gaze. Her second feature, Levers (2025), premiered at TIFF Wavelengths and screened at NYFF Currents and other international festivals, further solidifying Vermette as a singular voice in contemporary cinema. Set against a day-long disappearance of the sun, the film unfolds through tarot-structured episodes, dense soundscapes, and dreamlike opacity. Catastrophe is not climactic but procedural, something endured rather than explained. Inspired in part by the endurance of Manitoban winters, Levers also gestures toward the province’s historical and ongoing experience of colonial violence—what Vermette understands as an apocalypse that has already happened, and continues to happen. “I don’t think about the audience,” she says. “It’s me looking inwards, prodding those places I don’t quite understand.” This inwardness does not result in isolation. Vermette’s films are made through proximity and care: friends, family, cousins, parents, and animals recur across her work not as symbols but as collaborators. Her approach to collaboration extends into material conditions—non-hierarchical wages, shorter workdays, and a deliberate refusal of exploitative production models. The credits, she suggests, function as records rather than acknowledgements: scrolls of who is actively participating in culture at a given moment, and who is usually excluded from it. Music—particularly experimental jazz, hip-hop production, and looping structures—shapes both her editing practice and her philosophy of time. Influenced by figures like Sun Ra, Madlib, and J Dilla, Vermette treats film as a rhythmic art form, where interruption, drift, and return matter more than narrative clarity. Language, for her, is increasingly insufficient. Throughout this conversation, Vermette returns to unknowing as both method and ethic. Her films do not protect themselves from misreading, nor do they attempt to resolve contradictions. What remains instead is an invitation: to sit with opacity, to endure without resolution, and to recognize that some images—once chased—may begin to reorganize your life in return. I was really trying to create a beautiful mirror to hold up to the very messy, contradictory and deranged world we are experiencing today. I’d love to start with a classic from the Proust Questionnaire: What is your current state of mind? My current state of mind is deranged and unstable. I’m thinking of rebranding my life, and likely too open to public suggestion and opinion. Got any thoughts for me?[Laughs] I’m definitely not the right person to give advice but that sounds less like a crisis and more like a mind in motion. I don’t have guidance so much as curiosity: do you experience that openness as disorienting, or as a condition that makes new forms possible? It’s more like I’ve been putting the brakes on my mind. Seems like all artful thoughts are dead thoughts so why bother. I’m trying to take a break from my abstract headspace by focusing on the body in preparation for the end of the world. Trying to both soften (in terms of my capacity for love, honesty and compassion) and harden (muscle, strength, and endurance). Speaking of the end of the world…In Levers, the sun’s disappearance evokes responses that feel deeply procedural—people simply performing their roles, while, in the background, televisions quietly register the fear of a possible apocalypse. Rather than explaining the event, the film sustains an almost-end-times tension. How did you approach working with that atmosphere as something to be held rather than resolved, and what kind of attention did you want it to draw from the viewer? I was really trying to create a beautiful mirror to hold up to the very messy, contradictory and deranged world we are experiencing today. It’s a crisis film, but sets a stage where ideas of survival collide with the idleness or pettiness of the contemporary every day. A large universal crime occurs, but is eventually clouded by the individual, or personal events: some more trivial (a fight over cribbage rules), some more consequential (the loss of a friend). At first, I was also really inspired by how Manitobans endure the winter. The central idea to the story was: it’s the end of the world, a literal ice age has taken over, but in Manitoba, life goes on as usual. And the more I developed this idea I recognized it both as a prosaic suggestion in regards to our winters; but also as a catastrophic ongoing reality in terms of the province’s historical and ongoing relationship to the Indigenous nations on this land. Collectively, the end of the world has been experienced here many times over, it's an ongoing organization of happenings, always precariously near, occurring at both micro and macro scales. Do you see apocalypse less as an ending than as a condition people learn to live inside? We’ve been living inside of it. I see how your thinking about catastrophe, endurance, and eternal return shapes the film. Levers doesn’t follow a strict linear story, and the sun feels like the central pivot around which everything orbits. The chapters marked by tarot cards seem to invite the audience to inhabit or interpret the film in their own way. In that context, whose eyes are we seeing the world through, and who or what guides the perspective of the movie? It’s my eyes. I don’t think about the audience. It’s me looking inwards, prodding those places I don’t quite understand, or ideas which I am curious about. Levers is a collage of lived and dreamed images. It’s also a set of contradictions playing against each other. The film making is just me, trying to make sense of it all. I think a Manitoban audience may get the most of it due to the symbols used, the metaphors, the acutely regional sense of place, so I guess it's for them. I think of prophecy a lot, and the power of prophecy and manifestation which presents itself in image making. Thinking of prophecy urges me to meditate on Louis Riel—a central metaphor for Levers. I don’t know where a lot of these images come from, they just come to me through some channel. It takes me years to understand what I make and why I make it. Sometimes I think it’s like my future self talking to me in the process of filmmaking, flagging things, premonitions, highlighting information… You mentioned not thinking about the audience and seeing the film as your inward collage, with images arriving through channels like prophecy or future self. Does that mean the tarot cards and fragmented images are more for your own sense-making—or do they leave space for viewers (especially Manitobans) to find their own connections or stories? Yeah it’s my own sense-making. Each film I make is an exercise in thought. But, I think, as someone who is living in this world, it’s absolutely relevant to others, whether people think that or not. It’s open for audiences to jump into and derive their own reading from it. What I generally notice with my films is that, when someone alludes to what a film is about, it gives me an insight into their life, things they’ve experienced or witnessed. It’s more interesting to me to center unknowing, rather than a western-logic of knowing, it's more like interpreting a dream or something, but just as relevant. My interest in the tarot cards came out of a desire to subvert the bureaucratic approaches of scriptwriting, it became a new model to think about approaching a story, outside of a 3 point narrative. Instead of introducing a problem and solving it, the writing was motivated by thinking of how one chapter can oppose or mirror another, or be the sum of two other chapters, these sorts of ideas. I really just kept with the cards in the film as a means to keep time, for anyone who could pay attention. Still from Levers (2025). 89 minutes. Still from Levers (2025). 89 minutes. Still from Levers (2025). 89 minutes. Your films are so closely tied to where you come from—your Métis roots and deep connection to Manitoba—yet they don’t feel confined by identity or place only. You often appear alongside friends and family, bringing people who might otherwise remain unseen into a shared public frame. How do you think about the responsibility of presence, exposure, and care when working so intimately with people and places that are part of your life? I follow what comes naturally. My first animations came from a natural impulse to destroy other filmmaker’s films (likely some subconscious instinct driven by the patriarchal space which surrounded me at the time), and that compelling moment to deconstruct and reconstruct with other filmmakers’ 16mm film prints in many ways naturally embodied who I am, where I come from, my state of mind, and in turn a sense of Indigenous innovation—yet these works still remain far beyond the reach of the somewhat stiff conception of Indigenous cinema. Collaboration is approached as a natural process as well. Working with friends and family was not really something I actively set out to do, it just occurred through proximity to my very small orbit, as someone who likes to remain fairly isolated, comes off as standoffish in public, and has zero interest in networking. My dad is likely my most faithful collaborator. He’s helped me on many short films and appears as concept and image throughout many of the works, as well. There is a lot of love there, he is always around to help me and I trust him the most. He also was the one who taught me how to conceive of an image (using his 35mm camera when I was a teenager). My mom is also very supportive but behind the scenes most times. She’s the one who listens to me cry about the films, the tribulations of making them, etc… And there’s also Manners, my cat, who is in many ways the hero of each film I make. His fur is also found on every frame of my animations, as he loyally sits next to me whenever I work. The presence of all of my cousins, my godfather, and extensions of my family in Ste. Anne happened naturally: we were all at a funeral, and I was talking about the film project, expressing that I needed to find actors and didn’t know how to go about it, and everyone just said “We’ll be your actors.” So I just wrote everyone into the script, and that was it. There are some deliberate choices when it comes to certain ways I think of whom I will collaborate with…Ste. Anne was an all female crew, mostly Indigenous women, peers and friends who I met over the years or who were part of the Indigenous Filmmakers Collective in Winnipeg. Levers was a natural progression from the network built in Ste. Anne, with a lot of family members also lending a hand. I try to care for the cast and crew through the line production: the money. Providing non-hierarchical wages which are higher than the exploitative industrial wages from American and other Canadian films taking advantage of our Manitoba tax credit. We also run shorter days, we try to keep it around 8-10 hours. And the films sort of get formed around this decision. We prioritize labour so that means there’s less money for expensive gear, rental trucks, etc—so we just use 3 lights and some broken cameras. I consider the credits at the end of a film as a record. It’s a scroll of who is actively participating in the culture of Winnipeg or Manitoba at a specific time. You look at other Winnipeg films, and there are a lot of recurrent names, which, to me, points to a glaring omission—folks who are here, but don’t have the privilege, the network, or “on-paper” skill set to participate. This is also why I like to work with super emerging people, non actors, and artists from different backgrounds to transform the scroll. It’s so much richer than a handful of seasoned union guys. In terms of the feature films, I’ve been portraying what lies beyond the patriarchal lens of a particular “Winnipeg,” which has been propagated by more internationally recognized films. I actively focus on feminine experience, Indigenous presence, and Manitoba ie: the land beyond Winnipeg, as someone who grew up in rural Manitoba, and who works often in the North. I try to showcase the beauty of the province and capture its spirit as a means to balance the more deprecatory and whitewashed images which audiences are used to seeing. I’m not interested in making jokes about this place. Instead, I try to make space for all the contradictions that we as Manitobans endure, to converge. Things like the hardships of 7ish month long winters, the innate tensions which arise in a city densely populated by Indigenous people and immigrants, the difficult paradox of our province’s Indigenous leadership and the myriad of ways they’re selling off the land and their Nations, the persistence of colonization, the fact that the North burns every summer, the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people…All of this is swirling in my films, I don’t feel the need to explain it, or dumb it down for a European audience. Either you get it or you don’t. But, the energy of dissension is real here, it’s always present, everything is happening though it feels like nothing happens at the same time. You said you’re not interested in explaining or translating your work for an external gaze—“either you get it or you don’t.” How do you protect that refusal in a film world that often rewards legibility and simplification? These days, I don’t think it can be protected, honestly. I only make films to fulfill some desire to chase the unknown. I keep myself interested in the work through titillation and unknowing. I’m not interested in making something that looks like what was written on the paper, but interested in what occurs off the page... The film opens with a Sun Ra quote, and music is clearly central to how you work. You’ve said producers like Madlib and J Dilla taught you the most about editing. Sun Ra’s experimentalism often disrupts time, structure, and causality, while beatmakers rely on looping, sampling, and fracture. How do those musical approaches translate into concrete editing choices in Levers—particularly in moments where rhythm feels interrupted, delayed, or allowed to drift? Music is the ultimate art form, it’s the most universal language. The more films I make, the more I want to take the words out, reach for some universality that’s not really grounded in this rotten Earth. I think films are losing touch with the fact that they are moving images, there are too many words, too many explanations, too much dialogue, too much voice over—it’s exhausting. The moment I begin thinking of a story through the word (a script), the idea of a loop is innately part of my creative process. In large part due to my fascination with producers like Madlib and Dilla—but also since I started making films as an animator—the loop is really how I start thinking of building a film. In writing for Ste. Anne, I really thought I was sampling Paris, Texas—taking the shiniest bits from that film and remixing them to appease my own narrative interests. The idea of the sample also instructed a lot of the moments in that film, yet I was approaching the written sample through revisiting these spatial details, the window or the dining table, but each time you see them, they’re evolved, they’ve changed. This is also how the script of Levers came together, it was all poetry, constructed through this idea of looping images, reoccurring symbols presented in a new way each time, etc. So any notion of time is written into the project under these influences. Even in production, music is always playing on set. It’s always wafting in the air, influencing my mood and the mood of my collaborators. Part of my choice to use Bolex cameras for Levers was to remove the ability to have synched sound, so we could even play music while we were shooting. I also have a deep, deep natural hatred for slating. It’s like once I’m ready behind the camera: let’s go. I remember reading Ahmed Abdullah saying that when Sun Ra would count down he’d be like “Ready one!” and start. He never got to “two,” you just had to be ready. I feel a deep likeness to this avidity when on set. I keep thinking of when we saw the Arkestra perform in Winnipeg, that one night in June on the equinox. Industrial film sets are so constrained, and this oppression is heavy throughout most of the process. But it was enlightening to watch the Arkestra, see how rigid and tight they performed (required for the complexity of the musical compositions), but there was always space for them to drift away and improvise. Then, when they needed to hit that specific note, they’d all converge, together, precisely at the right moment. My ideal film set runs this way, the chaos that comes on my sets comes from this desire—it’s not a working machine yet, but maybe one day it could exist. The edit is sort of forcedly intoxicated under these written and collaborative impulses. But, I can also accredit my editing approaches to my interest in djs, and always listening to dj mixes at home. I’m very interested in transition, always listening for how a dj transitions from one song to another. My favourite mixes are built from transitions between vastly different sonic rhythms or beats. So in the edit, I’m thinking of the dance floor, bringing people up, bringing them down, surprising them, giving a moment to take a breath…Building on how you described the script for Levers as poetry, looping images and recurring symbols that evolve each time, and your desire to strip away words for something more universal—I had the chance to read it, and it felt visceral and visual rather than literary. How does starting with poetry help you arrive at those images and rhythms that can ultimately stand on their own, without needing words at all?The choice of poetry was to gather on set at the crossroads of individual interpretation versus some bureaucratic outline of events. With Levers, it really felt like the crew, the cast and I were finding our way in the dark while making it, but I was holding onto the flashlight, centering the logic. I only make films to fulfill some desire to chase the unknown. I keep myself interested in the work through titillation and unknowing. I’m not interested in making something that looks like what was written on the paper, but interested in what occurs off the page, as well as the evolution of an idea and especially this sense of eroticism, disrobing the filmic figure to see what it's really about, or looks like. In some ways, it’s about chasing the shadow self, prodding into questions of my relation to the material and the immaterial planes. And ultimately the ways in which the seams of the imaginary (the film) cross over in my life, sometimes it's a blessing (Ste. Anne), other times it’s a curse (Levers). It’s an invitation. Images can really fuck with your life when you start chasing them. Can you say more about that eroticism or danger in prodding the shadow self through filmmaking? It comes back to centering the unknown versus the known, writing an obscured figure in the script, and then chiseling away the matter to find the true form of what is at the core of the project. During production the eroticism plays out often, behind the camera, witnessing the words come off the page for the first time. There’s also a sense of titillation in the ways the frame reveals or hides the intentions of the script. On set, we played around with this a lot, trying to find ways to skew the images, frame events so they don’t necessarily give us what we expect from an image. The thrill for a project is then reignited when the rushes come in—it’s another moment of revelation. Revelation is what keeps me interested during the edit. Sorting out the mystery of the work, and also the drive of the work—that outside hand which helped me form it. Figuring out the metaphysical plan onto which it exists, that’s what keeps me interested in the work. It’s like, while editing Levers, there was something pointing to an inner-knowing, this inner logic which held the whole together, which I wasn’t necessarily aware of—but it came to light in the ways certain images cut together, you know. For instance, the first moment I saw the image of the sun on the tv screen followed by a cut to the beam of a film projector. These small moments point to something much larger at play. The above conversation was conducted by Kadir Yanaç, a poet, editor and researcher based in Philadelphia. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Rhayne Vermette behind the scenes for Levers. Photo by Junior Whitefish.

At a moment when many artists and arts workers feel increasingly distant from the institutions that shape their professional and cultural lives—and determine their income—questions about institutional leadership and operations have taken on new urgency, especially in light of ongoing controversies around donors and financial transparency. Institutions are sites of power and control, but also of possibility. They shape our understanding of art through the exhibitions they present and the structures they create. For many people, a public art museum is their first encounter with art and what they see there often defines what they think art is. Curator, writer, and researcher Kate Wong brings this question into the local context: why do arts institutions feel so disconnected from artists, arts workers, and communities in Toronto? This line of inquiry forms the basis of SITE Toronto, a newly formed not-for-profit that positions itself as a new kind of institution for contemporary art. Wong’s approach to shaping SITE Toronto is informed by an awareness of what the word “institution” means: how it affects people, and how institutions, in turn, shape society alongside the communities they serve. She understands the term within a broader framework that spans national museums, kunsthalles, university galleries, and even artist-run centres and grassroots organizing. For Kate, institutions at their best are not fixed structures, but ongoing processes and active sites developed in relation to place and people, grounded in relationships and shared responsibility. Wong has held curatorial and leadership positions in Canada and internationally, including commercial galleries like Sadie Coles HQ and artist-run centres and non-profit arts institutions like V.O Curations, Serpentine Galleries, and MOCA Toronto. I first met her a few years ago, somewhat fittingly, while I was interviewing for a job at an institution. We reconnected more recently to discuss how our thinking around institutions has shifted over time, and what kinds of structures might be possible moving forward. SITE Toronto first took shape as independent research undertaken in part during a curatorial residency at Fogo Island Arts, and then as part of a three-part public program at Mercer Union in August and September 2025, engaging local artists and communities in conversations about what an institution could be. The project draws inspiration from a range of international models, including SESC in Brazil, RAW Material Company in Dakar, and Park Fiction in Hamburg, examples that demonstrate how institutions might operate differently depending on their local social and cultural contexts. With SITE Toronto’s first initiative, a residency program designed to support both local and international artists and curators, set to launch in March, I spoke with Wong about her curatorial practice, what “institution” means to her, and the significance of this new project. When I talk about SITE Toronto as a new entity and use the word “institution,” I can sense that it brings up strong emotions for people. It does for me as well, and that’s why I’m invested in this work—to unpack these feelings, this complexity, and to build from it. You’ve described institution-building as a form of curatorial practice. How do you define “institution” in this context? I use the term “institution” very intentionally, rather than “arts organization,” because we live in a world structured by institutions. For me, shaping an arts institution is about creating something that extends beyond an individual, something that lasts beyond a single person or moment. It is a form of curatorial practice because it is deeply relational, and because it shapes the long-term social, intellectual, and material conditions through which art is produced and experienced. Ideally, an institution is a framework that can shift and adapt to changing times and to the evolving desires of artists and communities. That’s why this work is so important. When I talk about SITE Toronto as a new entity and use the word “institution,” I can sense that it brings up strong emotions for people. It does for me as well, and that’s why I’m invested in this work—to unpack these feelings, this complexity, and to build from it. Could you tell me more about how you came to your work as a curator? My father is a painter, and my mother—after running a framing shop and art gallery in Vancouver for two decades—founded a charitable organization supporting the education of women in rural China. Yet despite growing up around art, I did not spend my childhood visiting museums, nor did I know what a curator was until much later in life. After moving to London in 2012 and working for over seven years with artists such as Sarah Lucas and Ding Yi within different commercial gallery contexts, I felt an increasingly urgent pull to develop my own curatorial practice. Working closely with artists and being able to travel and experience culture in many different parts of the world allowed me to understand that I too had something urgent to contribute to contemporary artistic discourse. Over the past twelve years, my approach as a curator evolved into a form of social practice. Across all my work, I seek to create the conditions in which contemporary artistic production can reveal—and contend with—the power structures that shape how we live. How do you understand the role of the curator today? For me, curating is about observing, interpreting, and imagining. To do the work well requires both an attentiveness to the specificity of an artist and their practice, and an ability to situate that work meaningfully within a world that is constantly shifting. Increasingly, I understand my role not only as interpreting or framing artistic production, but as creating the conditions—the environment and infrastructure—through which art can be encountered, questioned, and lived with by the public. Shaping an institution is an extension of this same practice. It involves negotiating power dynamics, positions, and competing desires. It requires a clear understanding of existing structures, alongside the capacity to imagine and build forms that can hold nuance and complexity. How do you think your experiences working at different types of arts institutions have shaped the way you think about what an institution should be? My perspective on institutions has been shaped by the galleries and arts organizations in which I have worked, but even more fundamentally by who I am. I grew up in Vancouver—a city structured by ongoing colonial systems, layered with successive waves of immigration, and marked by profound social and economic inequality. From an early age, I felt a strong sense of justice and a desire to work against inequality and exclusion. My curatorial practice is inseparable from this orientation. I believe institutions—whether artistic, academic, or civic—do not merely reflect society, they actively shape it. They are sites where meaning and values are negotiated and contested. Institutions are not neutral containers; they are active structures that distribute power, as well as possibility. Living in Vancouver, then Montreal, more than a decade in London, and now Toronto—alongside my family’s experience as immigrants with roots in China and Hong Kong—informs my curatorial practice and my understanding of institutions. They can reproduce inequity, but they can be shaped as sites of resistance and solidarity. You mentioned that your curatorial practice is focused on social practice. I’m curious what kind of artists you work with and what draws you to their practices? There’s definitely a social practice element to my curatorial work, but there’s also an interest in experimentation. I feel very stimulated by artists who are exploring new forms of contemporary artistic production. My work as a curator is not bound to any particular medium, geography, or temporality. What draws me in are artists who are putting forth something new—through the mediums they’re working in or the visual languages they’re employing. It’s about a perspective that feels fresh, like they’re saying something we haven’t quite heard before, a new way of seeing. It could be an artist using paint in a way I’ve never seen before or using photography to propose something unexpected. That sense of newness often comes from how they’re thinking about living in the world. There’s a connection between the artistic output and the social conditions that shape it. SITE Toronto Workshop: "Why Are Toronto's Arts Institutions in Crisis?" Courtesy of Mercer Union and SITE Toronto. Photo by Miao Xuan Liu. SITE Toronto Workshop: "What Alternative Funding Models Are Possible?" Courtesy of Mercer Union and SITE Toronto. Photo by Miao Xuan Liu. Toronto is celebrated for its diversity and sense of community, but it also faces inequality and resource challenges. How does SITE Toronto respond to these realities? I think the way arts institutions frame and present artwork has a real impact on who feels invited into that work and who feels excluded. For public institutions funded by the government, there is a civic responsibility to move beyond historically elite models and to broaden access and engagement. In Toronto, our arts ecosystem largely operates within a set of legacy frameworks. These range from the national museum model—emerging in the late eighteenth century, with the Louvre as an early example of a public museum built around a permanent collection—to the Kunsthalle model focused on commissioning and temporary exhibitions. Within this spectrum we also have university galleries and artist-run centres. These are the dominant institutional forms in the city, and they are the structures I engage with in my institution-building work. What has become increasingly clear to me—through research over the past several years and especially through the community visioning process I facilitated at Mercer Union during the Groundwork exhibition—is that these models were developed in very different historical, economic, and social conditions. Artist-run centres, for example, emerged primarily in the 1960s and expanded across Canada in the 1970s. Many of Toronto’s existing centres were formed during that period. We are therefore working within structures that were designed sixty or seventy years ago, under radically different funding landscapes, property markets, and political realities. My work is not to question whether these institutional models are valuable—they are—but to ask why they often feel out of sync with artists and publics, and why their underlying structures have remained largely unchanged despite profound social, economic, and cultural shifts. SITE Toronto emerges from that inquiry. It asks how we might rethink funding frameworks, governance models, and organizational design so institutions can respond to contemporary conditions rather than inherited ones. How do we build arts institutions in the twenty-first century that are both sustainable and equitable, and that genuinely serve the people who call Toronto home? How would you describe Toronto’s art scene and its dynamics? Having lived in Toronto for three years, I still consider myself a newcomer. Through situated research, lived experience, and building relationships with artists and arts workers deeply embedded in the city, I have come to understand Toronto as an arts ecosystem coloured by collectives and sustained by grassroots organizing. At the same time, there is a significant disconnect and mistrust between Toronto’s larger arts institutions and the local arts community. I felt that early on while working as Curator at MOCA Toronto, and over time I’ve come to see it as structural—rooted in funding frameworks and systemic inequities. After October 7th, and in the context of the genocide in Palestine, that fracture became even more visible. As David Velasco wrote, those events “broke the art world”—not because they created new tensions, but because they exposed existing ones. Long-standing disparities and institutional failures have been laid bare. Within this context, what kind of art institution do you think Toronto needs today? For me, the question isn’t whether Toronto needs major institutions—it does—but what kind of institutions can genuinely serve artists and communities today. The models that inspire me are grounded in place. Their relevance comes from sustained relationships with artists on the ground, rather than aspiring to generalized global templates, even as they remain in dialogue with international discourse. Toronto doesn’t need to emulate MoMA or replicate another MOCA. It needs institutions focused on this city, our communities, and the specific conditions shaping them. That thinking is embedded in the name SITE Toronto. It signals an institution that is grounded rather than aspirational—one that reflects the city as it is and, like still water, holds it clearly enough that we can see ourselves in it. It is about building a nimble, flexible, process-driven structure that remains responsive to changing conditions and to the artists and communities it serves. I’m thinking about the three-part public program you organized at Mercer Union. Can you tell me more about these sessions? The program unfolded across three sessions, each combining talks, public conversations, and workshop elements. The first session introduced my research through dialogue with Theresa Wang and Aamna Muzaffar from Mercer and opened into a broader discussion with participants. The second session focused on funding models. I invited Sally Moussawi, who joined virtually from the UK and has worked with organizations such as the Mosaic Rooms, not/nowhere collective, and Cubitt Artists. Sally describes their work as developing anti-capitalist approaches to funding not-for-profit arts organizations—language I rarely hear articulated so directly within the sector. Our conversation connected funding conditions in the UK and Canada and was followed by a workshop examining short- and long-term strategies for ethical and sustainable funding models. The third session considered how institutions respond to place. Emilie Chhangur, director of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, joined as the guest speaker. We discussed her institutional approach alongside the work of architect Lina Bo Bardi and the organization SESC in Brazil, particularly its deep integration with the surrounding community. That session also concluded with a workshop. The format was about knowledge production through exchange—it was also an extension of my individual research, allowing it to live and breathe in dialogue with the community. The conversations and workshops directly shaped the thinking that later informed SITE Toronto as a new kind of arts institution. I’m curious who attended the sessions and what kinds of conversations emerged. In terms of who was there, my intention was to cast a wide net. Initially, I had intended to bring in people who were not just visual artists or arts workers. I was inspired by Park Fiction in Hamburg in the 1990s, where artists mobilized a broad-section of the community—café owners, children, elderly folks, creatives, tenant class—to prevent a park from being turned into apartments. I thought this program might start that way, but after the first session it became clear that the people most invested in these questions were arts workers. For me, an arts worker is defined as anyone whose livelihood comes from the arts sector. The term “worker” is inherently connected to labour, so it includes artists as well—anyone primarily sustaining themselves through the arts. The majority of people who showed up were those impacted directly by arts institutions through their work—people who had worked in institutions or on institutional projects in Toronto, also public and private funders, foundations, private donors, and people from the city. There were individuals in their seventies and sixties alongside people in their early twenties. Bringing those cross-generational perspectives into the same conversation was incredibly valuable. The word “community” is used constantly—and I care about it deeply—but within contemporary arts institutions it has become diluted. For now, I’m focusing on the sector itself: labour, funding, sustainability, censorship, and equity. These are the conditions that determine whether arts workers can build and sustain careers in Toronto. I appreciate that you invite the local community to contribute their thoughts. Could you share a few examples of what participants brought up during the sessions? Participants broke into small groups with large sheets of paper to brainstorm. One prompt asked what felt urgent, missing, or overlooked within Toronto’s arts institutions. Some responses were emotional or conceptual; others were concrete and data-driven—for example, the need for rent support, the desire for protected spaces for art, and references to city polling showing declining public support for funding art and culture. Each group then presented their key points, and we mapped them collectively in a live format. We also discussed the tools needed to address what’s lacking: fewer barriers to entry, less siloing, art more embedded in daily life, and institutions that say “yes” rather than defaulting to “no.” People spoke about reducing alienation, increasing public buy-in, creating more opportunities for exchange, and dismantling hierarchical or colonial structures. Some proposals were practical, such as free access and eliminating ticketing. What I’ve been thinking about since is how to sustain that momentum beyond the workshops. It felt like a beginning. I believe we need to band together more deliberately as an arts sector. The word “community” is used constantly—and I care about it deeply—but within contemporary arts institutions it has become diluted. For now, I’m focusing on the sector itself: labour, funding, sustainability, censorship, and equity. These are the conditions that determine whether arts workers can build and sustain careers in Toronto. These conversations are happening, but often in silos. Change happens when people organize, come together, and articulate shared interests. That was the intention behind the program, and it’s what I hope to continue through SITE Toronto. Can you elaborate on your intention in organizing the program? One thing I was very conscious of when developing the program was that it wasn’t about what I think arts institutions should be. I don't think there is a definitive answer. I was interested in creating a format where knowledge could be produced collectively and through exchange. I have my perspective, but it was really about learning through other people's opinions and experience. In that sense, I very much welcome debate. I wanted critique, I wanted people to be critical of my approach, because I'd been working on these questions alone. And that's also a very crucial way that I like to work as a curator. It's a relational process for me, and it's about working in collaboration and dialogue with other people. This is how I wanted this program to function. What do you hope participants take away from the program? The questions we explored in the program are already very much alive in Toronto. Many people are thinking about and building new ways of working, often through collaboration and pooled resources. What I hoped was to learn from others, and for the sessions to function connectively—to bring together conversations more intentionally across the sector, so artists and organizations working in parallel might recognize shared interests and begin working together more often and deliberately. I also hope participants left with an expanded sense of what constitutes contemporary art in this city! Too often, disciplines are treated as separate—visual art here, performance there, music somewhere else—when in reality they are part of the same contemporary moment. For me, expanding this understanding of what contemporary art is creates the conditions for more interdisciplinary exchange and experimentation. When we think of contemporary art as a porous and evolving field rather than a fixed category, it becomes easier to collaborate across forms and to build institutions that reflect how we actually think and work as artists and people. This kind of openness not only fosters creativity but also strengthens and sustains the cultural sector more broadly. What are some of the upcoming initiatives that SITE Toronto is planning? SITE Toronto is a new institution for contemporary art—not only because it was recently formed, but because it proposes a new methodology for how an arts institution can function. At its core, SITE focuses on strengthening the cultural landscape in Toronto by building a just and equitable infrastructure that supports critical inquiry and rigorous creative practice. Toronto is deeply diasporic, yet the arts sector can feel insular. SITE bridges local commitment with international networks and connections. The first initiative is a residency program launching in March that supports both local and international practitioners. The inaugural session, which runs for three months, will bring an international artist to Toronto while supporting a Toronto-based curator in undertaking research abroad. This reciprocal model is further rooted in Toronto's layered histories, foregrounding questions of land, colonization, migration, and belonging. In 2026, we also plan to launch a mentorship program focused on strengthening local networks. Artists and arts workers will be able to share projects in progress, receive feedback, and build professional relationships. The program will also connect participants beyond the city—for example, pairing a Toronto-based curator with someone internationally to foster sustained dialogue. We are also planning a symposium on institutions in the twenty-first century, with a focus on understanding institutions as processes rather than fixed endpoints. One of the first questions I’m often asked about SITE Toronto is whether we have a space. A physical space is certainly a goal, but it isn’t the starting point. For an institution to meaningfully support artists and remain connected to the community, it must recognize that artists and communities are not static—they are constantly evolving. Institutions, therefore, must be responsive and adaptable. We are living at a time when many people feel constrained in what they can say publicly, particularly within Toronto’s arts sector. One responsibility of a contemporary arts institution is to create space for discussion and disagreement—for criticality. The language of debate may have receded from our cultural vocabulary, yet it remains essential if we are to live together in this city. At their best, institutions can serve as spaces of exchange—bringing people into dialogue not through consensus, but through the differences we hold. If they are flexible and responsive, our arts institutions can make room for complexity and contradiction, and in doing so, play an active role in shaping Toronto into the kind of artistic city we have the potential to be. The above text was written by Gladys Lou, a curator and critic based in New York. Editorial support by Emily Doucet.Cover image: Kate Wong. Photo by Gloria Wong.

The book I’m holding is sturdy like a rock but appears as vibrant gradation, like a spear of light in a prism or the memory of a peacock in flight. I thumb open the tome guided by one of three ribbons, each a different shade of red, to mark the start of something, or my eager return. Inside I find lines of instruction, but also many other kinds of lines, some that provide directions (“Journey inward toward new exteriors”) or pose questions (“What are the heroics of a lack of heroic qualities?”). Still others simply stretch open the mind. I’m describing here the properties, physical and psychic, of Lucy Ives’s latest volume, three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing), out this spring on Siglio. The book is an abundance of things, depending on how you choose to use it. Not least, it is a marvel to behold. Designed by Nathalie Kraft and featuring a suite of drawings by the artist and writer Nick Mauss, three six five aggregates more than a year’s worth of everyday ways to conjure, bend, or arrange time and language, to give shape and contour to the wild movements thought can make, when you let it. Every time I read something by Lucy Ives I’m compelled to write. That’s true of her novels and poems just as much as the vertiginous essays in last year’s An Image of My Name Enters America, which take her readers to the brink of that genre’s form. That is just the kind of writer she is. So it made perfect sense, when, in 2021, Ives used her Instagram account to circulate prompts for writing, exercises for the mind, and ideas for working collaboratively, many of which now appear within three six five. With this publication, I’m once again provoked by Ives to consider how writing exceeds the fact of being a private symptom. It can be a way to make things, and to make things happen, a reason to gather, a defiantly social act. I spoke with Lucy about her longstanding interest in the writing exercise or prompt, as well as the process of making this boon of a book. We also talked about her collaboration with Nick Mauss, about the past selves she writes for, and about how writing gives access to ways of living that this world so wrongly tries—but fails—to deem impossible. It's a relief to realize that the thing we ostensibly don't care about, or don't notice, can become the most precious resource.  Do you remember your first encounter with a writing prompt? It would have been in school. But it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learned a prompt can be more than “what I did over summer vacation”; that it can be a game with language. When I was 16, this kid who was into punk rock was like, “Hey, did you know there's this cool poetry thing, ‘Killing a Word’? And I was like, “No….” And he was like, “Yeah, it's super cool. You choose a word, then repeat it.” And I was like, “What happens then?” And he said, “The word will die. If you keep saying it, eventually it will stop meaning anything.” And I was like, “You can do that?” A light went on and I thought, oh, here is a way you can get around suffering—if I'm not being too dramatic. I'm not exactly a spiritual person, but there is, for me, an aspect of emotional and personal survival, which I could extend to a larger community, that is associated with this sort of practice. (“Killing a Word” is prompt 102 in three six five: prompts, acts, divinations.) I held onto that first prompt, and over time I found that language-based prompts like this are a way of doing something that's also, simultaneously, nothing. They can help us find balance, a sense of being absorbed or held. They might help us be surprised, or love something that isn’t an object or another person, but that is instead a quality of ourselves and a quality of the world. It’s this enmeshing of the objective and the subjective that is so beautiful to me, and that I think art is good for. Visual artists often come up with exercises I see as analogous to these writing exercises: thinking of ideas or words as material, as opposed to something that's for expression. This is part of the reason I’m very drawn to visual art. I love artists, as the poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge once wrote in a book title. I first encountered your prompts—which I also think of as poems—on your Instagram account, starting in 2021 or so. How did the idea for this book come about? I think it all started—by which I mean, the material for the book—around 2014, when I was teaching regularly. There must have been a day when I had forgotten how long the class was or we had extra time, and there was an extended, possibly awkward silence. I was like, “Now we will do a writing exercise that I've planned for a long time! It’s called…Exercise for Writing from Memory.” (This is prompt 72 in three six five.) I had everyone take out a piece of paper. I asked them to write about things that happened in the past, but in a ridiculous way, like something that happened exactly five years ago yesterday, which is a hard mental gesture to execute. At the end of the exercise, I asked everyone to describe something that they’d completely forgotten, which is, of course, impossible. I was responding to how patronizing or sentimental some writing exercises can be. I wanted it to be impossible to do the exercise “correctly.” The next year, I invented another prompt, “A Group Novel,” which is a multi-part exercise included as an appendix in three six five. I didn't know at first if it would work, but it works! When you are done, you’ve created a novel authored by a group, and you can publish it, if you like. I don't think of myself as the author of these exercises, exactly. They're co-created, and they aren't about me expressing myself, as much as they are ideas for organizing time and work and imagination that I thought of while working with others. Maybe because of this, at some point I put them on Instagram. It was soon after the pandemic, and I felt out of touch. I thought posting exercises could be a way to reach people without trying to tell them something—like trying to workshop these ideas. What would people respond to? What would they pass on? In the beginning, I tried to post one a week. Then I tried to post daily, but that became exhausting. It wasn’t the right rhythm. Lisa Pearson of Siglio press and I had worked together on an edited collection of Madeline Gins’s writing, The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words, and she asked if I had other projects that were a little unusual, that I wouldn't be able to find a trade publisher for. I mentioned these prompts. We decided to try it out. three six five is a way to have a relationship with other people through the idea of the prompt. It’s also for readers who are interested in poetry in a broad sense, which I think is many people. I like the format of the book—the experience of reading the prompts together—because it becomes clear that they don't have to be used as tasks. You could “use” them the way you would use a poem, aphorism, or very short story. You can read one and think about what's happening, then you can read another. Having them in a book lets you engage with them more as literature than as something related to productivity or creativity in the way these are often iterated on social media. I read a lot of children's literature, and to me, this book functions like a long bedtime story or episodic verse. It’s immersive. Cover of three six five: prompts, acts, divinations by Lucy Ives (Siglio, 2026). Courtesy Siglio.  Some exercises in three six five are an invitation to write, some are an invitation to do other things: go on walks, take the day off, do nothing. Long non-writing sessions lead to very short writing exercises, as well as the opposite, short spells of non-writing lead to more durational writing exercises. What’s the relationship between writing and not writing? How, for you, does writing relate to other forms of living? One of the things I discovered in my early 20s was that you can write things and not know what you're saying. I know that’s obvious, but I still find it profound. I learned you can say things about your life as you're living it that are true. You might not be able to read your own account correctly, or you might not understand everything right away, yet something true is still touched on. There's a form of contact. I don't know what makes this possible. Is it a feature of language? Does it have to do with the writing utensil, the medium? Is it about doing something with your body? Is it about some inaccessible part of a person, like the soul, that is finally at liberty? You could think about this in a religious or psychoanalytic light; there are lots of different schools, but definitions don't interest me. The possibility and multifarious grace that writing engages are things I was told would not be available to me as a human. I don't know who told me that—if it was culture, America, or my family. But I do know I was told that those things weren't available. Then, through this practice, I came to see that they were. The prompts that seem paradoxical, like, walk ten miles and write five words, or go across the room and write 10,000 words, are maybe jokes. But they are also very serious attempts to get people out of the clutches of certain ideas we have about what is consequential; getting people to see how broader social measurements we have for what matters are wildly inaccurate. For example, we tend to think of a single sentence as inconsequential. It's like, who cares? Throw that away. But if you have the experience of taking a long walk and writing a sentence, and you feel satisfaction doing that, you might see a single sentence as really meaningful. You might see how a sentence is amazing, how it's totally worth it to walk ten miles to find it. By the same token, what if you went across your room and that act generated thousands of words? What does that tell you about just being present in your room? How can this be? That's a thing to think about. It's a relief to realize that the thing we ostensibly don't care about, or don't notice, can become the most precious resource. These prompts might knock you off kilter a little and help you uncover something that possesses a value that can’t be measured—that refuses measurement. It’s something I discovered a while ago and found useful in terms of navigating the world. That's what I meant earlier about survival. I’m thinking about this claim you make in the book’s introduction: “[Memory] already belongs to you. You have endless amounts. You can never run out.” It reminds me of the fact that even one’s first attempts at writing are fundamentally acts of remembering. When you first learn to write the letter A, for instance, you’re trying to recreate a shape you saw moments earlier. Do you often use prompts or exercises to produce writing? More broadly, do you think writing is always, in some way, responsive? In my life and writing, I'm often thinking about my past self and how I could help her, how I could write something for her to read that would make her feel hopeful. I know she can't read things I write in the future until she gets to the future, but I'm always trying to write things for her anyhow, so that she can have a reason to make it here, to my present. In the past, I promised myself I would get us to this present, where we have what we need and aren’t in great confusion. I know that's a little cheesy, but that's a big reason I write. My past self is my main audience. With this book, I wanted to say to the reader, “You have agency.” This said, you don't have to use agency to make meaning from words. You can go into the world and do stuff, or think about the past, or invent something. You can do all these things in a nonsensical way, and that can be gentle, that can be magic. You don’t have to serve reason, or, for that matter, any institutionally certified or certifiable meaning. To go back to the practice of a young person learning the alphabet, I personally had a long period of not being literate. I didn't learn to read until I was 9. So I know the feeling of being a person who's not literate but is able to watch people read and write and observe their fluency with things that seem strange and difficult. I'm drawn to holding on to that strangeness because I think that there's meaning and value there that isn’t reducible to semantic or linguistic meaning. There are other forms of meaning that are important, that I want us to have access to. And I do think, paradoxically, writing can give us access to those rare meanings, if we handle it thoughtfully. Spread from three six five: prompts, acts, divinations by Lucy Ives (Siglio, 2026). Courtesy Siglio.  Spread from three six five: prompts, acts, divinations by Lucy Ives (Siglio, 2026). Courtesy Siglio. This book not only encourages collaborative modes of writing and making, it is also the beautiful result of one. The artist and writer Nick Mauss contributed a suite of drawings that appear very incrementally over the course of the book. How did you and Nick come together for this project? I've known Nick for a while, I think we met in 2011 or 2012. I admire his sensibility and the way that he works in different media. He's a person who's so careful and painstaking and simultaneously so prodigiously talented. I wrote an essay about his work once that was called, “There Once Was a Person Who Could Draw Anything,” and that's sort of how I think of Nick, like, he can draw anything, you know? He seems invincible to me. The book didn’t begin with the idea that it would be illustrated, but when we thought to ask an artist, the first person I thought of was Nick, in part because a lot of his drawing isn't representational in the sense of photographic realism. He's a dancer and works a lot with dance, and dances in different ways. Dance creates communities and leaves an archive, in Nick’s orientation to it. It’s also a way to negotiate movement with others or across spaces. I thought about the fact that this is a big book, and what it needs is a line that's very good at navigating complexity. I think Nick's way of drawing and thinking about lines is germane to what I'm trying to do with the book—the sort of aphoristic nature of it. What the drawings give us isn't exactly a representation of something that would be in the world. Sometimes they refer to things that are happening in the prompts, but often they seem to have just absorbed some energy that's in them. They're beautiful, and I like them as moments that are also mysterious. It's not always clear what the thing is, and I think it's important for there to be some interpretation that's coaxed out of the person who's looking at the book. Like, do you see this shape as a door that's opening? Or a stop sign? Or an unusual birthday card? What is that thing for you? The fact that this could change over time is important to me. Going back to childhood and literacy, that's something I remember loving as a kid—noticing myself seeing something in a book and interpreting it differently on an alternate occasion of reading. I wanted that to be possible with this book, too. If you look at the book again, it will reward you. Nick's drawings contribute to this metamorphic quality of the pages. I like this connection: that writing, like dance, can be used to make things—even a whole archive of things—that are bigger or stranger than the self. Writing, in this sense, is freed from the task of self-expression. As a person who also enjoys purposelessness, I want to ask: When does a response to an exercise become something that resembles or is a “work”? I can only answer this in a personal way, and the way I think about this is very old-fashioned. Like, somebody has a notebook, and sometimes they write in it, and one day, they either finish writing in the notebook, or they decide to read it, and as they're reading, they find something that surprises them, and they're like, “Oh, maybe I should do something more with this, maybe I should type this page up, because the writing has started being something independent that needs to be more alive.” I know a lot of people, probably all people, struggle with thinking: “Is this something? Is this anything? Should I keep working on this? Is there any point? Even if it were published and people liked it, would that matter?” We all struggle with this. But I think you can have an experience of certainty. I mean, it's probably temporary. But you can see it for a second, and you can think, “Yes, this is real. I believe in this.” Like, you've enchanted yourself so much that you start to believe your own story. Once that happens, that's when it stops being practice or an exercise and starts to be something that approaches a work, so called. But that's just a guess. I know people love to hate him but Lucy…I feel like you might be the new Rumi! It’s not that I find three six five to be either a very mystical or moral book, but I do think it is intensely philosophical. The exercises compiled here suggest that daily writing gives one access to any number of otherwise impossible things. How is writing similar to or different from spiritual activity? One difference between Rumi and me(there are many!) might be that, instead of something like scripture or the soul, I’m interested in a more material notion of writing, because it is a preeminent medium for movement through the world and transformation. Mine is a secular experience of this movement and this transformation, because that’s what I’ve got. Not because I'm down on anybody's beliefs, but because I just don't have access to certain levels, like the divine—although I do go in for the irrational and the intuitive, and various hints, upheavals, and impossibilities. I'm flattered by the comparison to Rumi, so thank you. As I was saying earlier, the one thing I know about writing is that it shows me there are things in the world that, by and large, people in technocratic society are told don’t exist. It would be difficult to enumerate all those things, but the main takeaway for me is that the self (I mean, it's an Emily Dickinson truism) is way bigger and older than we generally comprehend, and for whatever reason, I don't know if it's culture or what, we have severe and even tragic limitations in terms of sensing the vastness and diversity of the self. That vastness is a thing that makes what’s happening here on the planet a bit less overwhelmingly corrosive for me—the vastness and ancientness and plural-ness of the self. It seems that if the self is connected to the past, it's also connected to the future—and therefore aspects of the future can become accessible through writing. I don't feel comfortable saying more than that, because I can't promise anyone that they're going to be able to, like, make a lot of cash on the stock market if they do the right writing exercise. I’m not in that line of work. But I have tried to be interested in the pathologically secular world I exist in, and respect that, and not try to fake it. A teacher once told me, “Acceptance has a form.” This statement made me incredibly angry at the time, given certain human activities, but I continue to ponder it. Maybe what I ask myself is what I plan to do if acceptance, as such, is not possible. How will I meet death? What will I eat for lunch tomorrow? These prompts represent one person’s attempt to think about agency differently, to expose herself to other, denigrated aspects of it. This is important to me as a teacher, but also as a person. Agency is troubling. It doesn't work the way we want it to. On that note, many of the prompts invite readers to channel or spend some time with moods or thoughts that are conventionally negative, including obsession, paranoia, or conspiratorial thought. There's even a prompt called “Ugly Feelings” (no. 154). How are abhorrent feelings related to writing? Fear and hatred can be extremely exciting emotional experiences. They make your hair do funny things, and they make you feel compelled in certain ways. There’s a Frank O'Hara poem where he's like, “Hate is only one of many responses.” And he says, “Why be afraid of hate, it is only there / think of filth, is it really awesome / neither is hate.” I find that question useful. “Is it really awesome?” I ask myself that all the time. Extreme feelings like fear and hate can be easy to have. They dissipate quickly, or you can stockpile them, if you want. They often feel portable, contagious, volatile. They’re everywhere. There are other feelings more difficult to have than, say, fear or hate, feelings like disappointment, for example. Disappointment can be one of the most difficult feelings to experience, because it can range from something like, “My mom didn't love me,” to something like, “I forgot the card I need to get into the swimming pool today, so I can’t go swimming.” But it's not about getting over or blotting out these liminal feelings as much as it is actually having the experience we're already having. This book is less about a feeling like fear than it is about a feeling like dread, less about hate than disappointment. It's about trying to find ways to turn into those feelings, or back toward them, or treat them like they're a familiar character you’re in dialogue with. When you can be in dialogue with ugly feelings, there's so much material. Once you can have that relationship, it's like a superpower. You can endlessly create from that dynamic. Now, who knows why things are like this? I don't know. Fear and hate make us do destructive, irreparable things. These other feelings that are more ambiguous and difficult can help us do other things andhaveother forms of agency that are challenging to have, and that people later admire. I often notice that visual artists are engaged with one or more of these difficult, ambiguous feelings to produce whatever they're doing, and it's the reason their work is so engrossing. It has those same features of ambiguity that difficult feelings have. This book is a form of hoping—that you don't have to be those ugly feelings, because it's very hard to be them, but instead you can enter into a relationship of mourning or grief with them, a relationship of irony, or even something more joyful. There's an exercise in the book I've never done but wish I could. It's an exercise to make a list of all the mistakes you've made in your life. (This is prompt 167 in three six five, “exercise for recovery of joy.”) I would like to be able to do that exercise. I think it would be an incredible autobiography. It's hard to explain the emotion that would accompany this writing but I have the intuition that writing something like this would give life back to me. That's the reason it’s so difficult. Because it's frightening to get life back. We’re more comfortable with having lost life, for whatever reason. I don't know why. In My Life, Lyn Hejinian writes, “I saw my life as a struggle against my fate, that is, my personality.” I often think about the equivalence she makes here, of fate with personality, and life as that which is made despite them. Your book does a similar thing, reminding me how writing enables a liveliness that personality, or memory, or experience alone cannot. I’m sorry, this is not a question. That’s a beautiful statement. There's a commonplace people use about the “hand” you’re “dealt.” I think the personality Hejinian is talking is an orientation to that “hand.” It’s how you play the game. You could think about it like perspective in a video game—first or third person, for example. Fate is a format. When a format becomes narrative, it has consequences, right? It’s particularly consequential if you don’t know what the format is and you’re stuck in the narrative. That’s what Aristotle thought theater could be good for, helping people learn about format so tragic loss would stop befalling them. In some peoples’ conception of this innovation of Western culture, you can create narratives that allow for full recognition of the format. I’m speaking broadly. Freud might have touched on this. However, I have doubts about recognition as the thing that solves for fate.I'm not sure recognition allows us to understand the origins and consequences of action, which is another way to talk about fate.I think it's an interesting paradox that even perceiving your actions may not be enough to save you from whatever caused them or their reverberating aftermath. These prompts represent one person’s attempt to think about agency differently, to expose herself to other, denigrated aspects of it. This is important to me as a teacher, but also as a person. Agency is troubling. It doesn't work the way we want it to. The reason these prompts aren’t lyric poems or philosophical aphorisms is because I'm so interested in agency, in the many things it might be or become, once you begin to contemplate it in its most forgotten guises. Which are actually the only parts of it that are, in my opinion, possible and truly alive. The above conversation was conducted by Shiv Kotecha, a writer and editor living in New York. Kotecha was a 2025 editorial resident with Public Parking. This is his third contribution as part of a four-part creative exploration with our publication. Return to discover his final piece. Special thank you to Lucy Ives for participating so generously in the above conversation. Cover image: Lucy Ives. Photo by Will Matsuda.

The art history of Toronto is specifically and heavily indebted to performance artists. Accepted definitions of what constitutes “performance art” vary depending on who you are asking, and the landscape of spaces that make room for it has changed drastically. But where there is institutional neglect there have always been those who make their own opportunities. Describing her practice as a mix of “prop comedy, experimental theatre, performance art, absurd literature, existential anxiety, and intuitive dance,” Bridget Moser has been making audiences laugh with her performances and video works since 2012. Her characters and vignettes lampoon real people, or more accurately personas, that we are all more or less familiar with from the celebrity manufacturing machines of reality TV and social media. She has worked with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), 7A*11D International Performing Arts Festival, the 35th Rhubarb Festival, and many others. She was also shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017. Over the past fourteen years, Moser’s performance practice has made use of her talents in observation, adapting her characters, set designs, and monologues to changing cultural currents and the people responsible for them. Originally conceived for a residency at the Banff Centre, Moser describes her performance Baby Don’t Understand (2012) as “the performance that launched a thousand ships.” These early works show Moser’s experimentation with the structure of stand-up comedy, including using a microphone and incorporating furniture and props. Today her works feel more like scrolling through a feed, being faced with belligerent personalities that don’t quite seem real. Through a process of collecting objects, dialling into internet culture (and subcultures), and watching television, Moser has developed a unique framework for her performances—an approach which has unfolded noticeably over the course of several works since 2020: Hell is Empty; All the Devils Are Here (2025), Dreams of Dusk (2025), A Malevolently Bad Map (2024), When I Am Through with You There Won’t Be Anything Left (2022), and My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists (2020). Moser takes our new cultural archetypes and points us towards what I would call neoliberal brain rot about self-optimization and the capitalist posthuman subject, extracting and presenting us with the absurdity of these mindsets. According to Andrew James Paterson, Toronto’s performance scene today has some purists who maintain strict boundaries for what counts as performance art, what is theatre, and what doesn’t belong; he says there are some who do not consider Moser a performance artist, but rather an avant-garde stand-up comedian. The implication being, perhaps, that no serious performance artist can be funny. While Paterson recalls that he’d seen her perform previously, the two first met at an AGO party in 2014. They would meet up a few times a year at Hair of the Dog in Toronto, where they would gossip and talk about Samuel Beckett. The two performers have an affection for each other’s work, with Paterson standing up for Moser being seen as a performance artist. “She’s more verbal than some performance purists, they don’t like language. She’s funny, and she’s a good writer. That’s the first thing that really hit me other than the fact that I find her very watchable.” He recalls her early performance works showing off her dance background, fluid movements while negotiating a love-hate relationship with furniture. To Paterson, Moser’s work is very rooted in body art, and specifically body sculpture, over time transforming into works that investigate the body in relation to technology. Where did this penchant for prop performance come from? Moser’s sister, art historian Gabby Moser, suggests that this might have been a natural course from when the two took dance classes and playacted at home with toys and other things. She recalls that Moser would incorporate props into her solo dance routines, often made for her by their uncle, a set-maker who worked on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Their fourth-grade teacher made students perform monologues, as practice for the schoolwide speech competitions; Moser says she still uses his teachings on how to memorize and deliver a speech off-paper. In her BFA at Concordia Moser studied painting, which turned into more fibre- and material-based work that became performative by the end of her degree. Her final project in 2007 was a Swiss hunting lodge environment made entirely from fibres and screenprinted fabrics, including axes and logs, referencing her paternal Swiss heritage. Inside a tent was a video of Moser wearing a fake mustache, doing a deadpan but wordless impersonation of her father—making coffee, doing the crossword, chopping wood, cooking Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes over a campfire. The key to her sister’s comedic performance turn, Gabby says, may actually originate outside this personal history of dancing, acting, improv, and being naturally funny; rather, it was solidified by attending Kira Nova and Michael Portnoy’s “Experimental Comedy Training Camp” residency at The Banff Centre in 2012. Moser was among 20 artists who participated, along with familiar names in the Toronto performance scene like Neil LaPierre, Fake Injury Party (Derrick Guerin, Scott Leeming, Paul Tjepkema), and Life of a Craphead (Amy Lam and Jon McCurley). Residency participants were asked to perform at “club nights” with only an hour’s preparation directly beforehand. Otherwise, the group underwent intensive workshops that trained performance through voice, stage presence, and even anatomy. Nova and Portnoy’s collaborative practice in “experimental comedy,” involving “the sublime, the blatantly inscrutable, the abstract, the primal, the operatic, the choreographic, the theoretical… etc., into the frame of stand-up,” highlights a combination of the bodily with the study of theory into a cohesive and robust practice. Bridget Moser, When I Am Through with You There Won’t Be Anything Left, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Texas State Galleries. Photo: Madelynn Mesa. Bridget Moser, A Malevolently Bad Map, 2024. HD video, colour, sound, 13:09. Courtesy the artist and The Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin.  Moser had seen Portnoy’s infamous appearance as a backup dancer for Bob Dylan’s 1998 Grammy award performance, when he removed his shirt and outflanked Dylan, dancing with “Soy Bomb” written across his chest and stomach. This, alongside an aggressive performance by a male artist in her residency cohort, inspired her to aim for making people uncomfortable. The residency upended definitions of comedy as a means to a laugh, rooting the practice instead in the absurd and the sublime, exploring the limits of language and communication with an audience, and acknowledging the potential for a hostile interpersonal experience. The structure of a stand-up routine resonated with Lam and McCurley, who organized the Doored performance series (2012-2017) upon returning to Toronto. The key elements—a seated audience and short performance with a microphone—were a fruitful foundation, allowing for a clear distinction between audience and performer. Doored was an opportunity to build a community that workshopped performance practice together in real time and in front of reacting viewers. Over 120 artists participated in the series during its five-year run, with Moser being a frequent performer. Moser’s newest performance, Hell Is Empty; All the Devils Are Here, first performed at York University, then Art Windsor-Essex, and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, is a Saturnalian romp through the grotesque and carnivalesque spirit of a triumphal capitalism on its last legs and in denial. In Moser’s words, “I’m trying to bring forth the fact that we live in hell.” Honing her skills and the subjects of her works from the last few years, Moser takes our new cultural archetypes and points us towards what I would call neoliberal brain rot about self-optimization and the capitalist posthuman subject, extracting and presenting us with the absurdity of these mindsets. She captures the pathology that undergirds ideas about the hyper-networked neo-human, primed to be an uber-productive entrepreneurial subject living three six-hour days per 24-hour period, and exposes how hilarious it is to take these views seriously. She recalls: “After the performance someone asked me if the woman with the raw milk attorneys is based on Lisa Barlow [from Real Housewives of Salt Lake City], but I wrote that before the new season of the show started. Though I realized it is indeed Lisa Barlow, and every woman of her ilk.” What makes it fruitful is Moser’s canny ability to draw out subtle humour in a way that is not on-the-nose like an SNL skit, rather giving form to the spiritual cores of these figures with a wink and a nudge. Moser wanted the performance to feel like scrolling through TikTok, experiencing its unique brand of psychosis from the many personas trying to sell or convince you of something. It is the free market made flesh, where you could or should always be doing something you saw in a short clip, whether or not it is a scam or would have any real benefit. This threat worsens with AI, and with it, Moser suggests, a decreased understanding of aesthetics. Ultimately, Hell Is Empty is about scammers, and Moser understands that much of the mainstream cultural class is made up of losers. She showcases the ways that aspirational objects, like a Birkin bag, sit at the frontier of an affluent, influence-laden society, positioned as a seductive, symbolic reward for submitting to it. Maybe less consciously, Moser’s critique is leveraged at the crumbling foundations of Western civilization, showcasing the psyche of the average consumer as simultaneously pacified and plunging into ennui from a seemingly endless stream of new and improved products, in the spirit of Mark Fisher’s theory of depressive hedonism. In this vein, Dreams of Dusk, a soap opera produced for CBC’s Creator Network, is acted out in miniature through props with AI-generated voices, each of the main characters carrying some heavy cultural baggage. Sarah is played by a 50 mL bottle of Glossier You perfume, a millennial favourite that “wears close to skin—so it smells a little different on everyone!” She is a real estate heiress and patron of the arts, consumed mostly by guestlists, gossip, who was wearing what, and nightmares of seeing herself flayed and pulled taut like Lady Cassandra in Doctor Who. David, played by a mini replica bust of Michelangelo’s David, is an out-of-touch C-suite type—indicted for securities fraud, estranged from his son (an even smaller David replica bust), obsessively introspective and self-consciously writing bad poetry in his leisure time. The bust itself was an original inspiration for the series, a collected object in Moser’s repertoire referencing the trend of right-wing posters obsessed with espousing white supremacy vis-à-vis masculinity, Western traditionalism, and the classicism of Ancient Greece, hiding behind their avatars of marble statues. In three episodes just under six minutes each, with titles like “Dying to Be Relevant in a Dying World,” “We Haven’t Done Anything Wrong, We’re Normal,” and “Can God Just Kill Us?,” Moser solidifies her position on the absurdities of socio-cultural structures being imposed on us from above, where what we internalize is dominated by the self-interested opinions and overdetermined anxieties of the rich and powerful, which we are perpetually forced to behold and take seriously. There are even subtle references to local art politics and the leaked letter demanding Wanda Nanibush be removed from her position at the AGO. What makes it fruitful is Moser’s canny ability to draw out subtle humour in a way that is not on-the-nose like an SNL skit, rather giving form to the spiritual cores of these figures with a wink and a nudge. She says the series is about dreaming and the end of an empire, perhaps in the spirit of one of her underrated influences, the late David Lynch. Lynch did have an affinity for the conventions of the soap opera, the melodrama of tarnished idealism, unraveling conspiracies and uncovering the secrets of the middle-/upper-classes fighting for their comfort in a rusting America. Moser, like Lynch, understands the power of gnawing guilt and the subconscious threat of punishment among this subset. Bridget Moser, Dreams of Dusk, Episode 1: "Dying to Be Relevant in a Dying World," 2025. HD video, colour, sound, 5:31. Courtesy the artist and CBC Creator’s Network.  Bridget Moser, Dreams of Dusk, Episode 2: "We Haven't Done Anything Wrong, We're Normal" 2025. HD video, colour, sound, 5:44. Courtesy the artist and CBC Creator’s Network.  Bridget Moser, Dreams of Dusk, Episode 3: "Can God Just Kill Us?" 2025. HD video, colour, sound, 5:49. Courtesy the artist and CBC Creator’s Network.  Over the past few years, the character of the paranoid, self-absorbed protagonist recurs in Moser’s videos and performances again and again. In A Malevolently Bad Map, a video work in the eponymous exhibition at Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, Moser plays this role in conversation with a beaded towel of a Grecian amphora and a talking pair of pants. The protagonist meanders and focuses her talking points squarely on issues of self-expression, emotional intensity, and consumption. Moser refers to this time as “the Amazon age,” where any and all whims, even the ones that can’t be consciously articulated, are catered to through buying things. This exploration of selfhood is complicated by the onslaught of advice and affirmations that come from all the nooks and crannies of TV and online spaces, ultimately trying to sell a solution to a problem that was created in the sole hopes of selling more products. When I Am Through with You There Won’t Be Anything Left, performed in her installation of the same name as part of “I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality” at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Nebraska, makes bedfellows of charismatic, cultish, self-optimized figures; victims of the supernatural; an anti-identity politics landscape painter; and evangelicals extolling heavenly organ transplants. The vignettes kick off with a TikTok manosphere guru pontificating on “the construction of the perfect male body” and espousing “the healing field of misinformation.” Taking these self-serious, if cynical musings of the right-wing grifter class on their own terms, Moser uses their circular logic, pseudo-science, and total belief in divine intervention to highlight that they ultimately say very little. The fact that new-age concepts like energy, vibration, portals, manifestation and alignment have become more or less naturalized within a lexicon of skeptics to scientific experts whose research can be bought and sold reveals that people are afraid of what they don’t understand—especially with regard to the self and the body. The exhibition, “I don’t know you like that,” takes up the concept of hospitality alongside what it means to be in a body. Considering the relationship between the self and others through the experience of embodiment, the exhibition asks: what can bodies do, and how do they relate to each other? Moser’s answer: “We’re all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life.” Her character monologues of the last few years operate much like comedian Tim Robinson’s characters: those who bring the suspended social contract of the internet—which puts no limits on anti-social outbursts, conspiratorial thinking, paranoia, constant misrecognition, and openly communicating one’s pathological instincts—into the real world without compunction. Moser simulates the discomfort of these encounters and makes clear to us that this barrier has been irreparably broken, because we no longer collectively agree on the rules of the game. When I Am Through with You is a direct ancestor of Hell is Empty, with a similar format that employs a comparable mode of pantomiming advertisements, influencer culture, and basing characters on reality TV personalities and familiar pop culture types. When I Am Through with You expertly satirizes an era of hyper-self-obsession and pop-psychology that has only become more entrenched in the few years since this performance. Moser is also sure to reference the ways in which the awful things happening in the wider cultural sphere are impacting arts institutions and the way artists have to work now. Through her expert manipulation of archetypes, characters, and props, Moser shows us what it really means to be a performance artist who is also funny. In 2020, Moser opened My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists at Remai Modern during a COVID lockdown. The central video work of the same title is highly attuned to Moser’s foray into anxious identity formation in a hyper-networked and highly influenced era. One part meditation video, one part alternate-universe-infomercial, one part soap opera, the video features a familiar protagonist: self-conscious, paranoid, needing to be recognized. “Enough about me, let’s talk about you, what do you like about me?” The voiceover occasionally uses the same female-coded text-to-speech voice that many video artists began using in the 2010s for monologues about the posthuman self, as though creating a cyborg character in a frictionless world of rest and relaxation. Moser injects this archetype with her surrealist humour and reveals the very human anxieties behind statements about not pursuing “unique living for my own benefit” and being “more than a purposeless body waiting for eventual death.” The set is abundant in the trappings of luxury, filmed in a room of French-style moulded wall panels with a pink velvet settee, the costumes and tables of haute consumer props conforming to a colour palette of pinks, yellows, whites, and golds. She spreads La Mer face cream on a slice of bread. Moser’s tableaus show an interest in the iconography of vaporwave as a movement about nostalgia amidst dying consumerist spaces, which didn’t explain itself with a grand theory but still seemed to resonate and proliferate with a subset of artists in the mid-2010s. In its maneuvering of post-2008 capitalism in decline vis-à-vis the aesthetics of 1980s consumerism and cyberspace futurism, vaporwave traffics in the saturation of the digital and a dissolution of authentic human experience. Moser identifies that we live in a post-vaporwave ecology that has diffused its symbols among different subcultures, like the marble statue avatars on right-wing text posts from various platforms. Her frequent use of pinks and blues is taken from 2016 when Pantone named two colours of the year, Rose Quartz and Serenity—right on the heels of vaporwave’s near-mainstream popularity, solidifying the colour palette of Gen X/millenial nostalgia. What shines through is that Moser is a keen observer and takes stock in a vast array of useful artifacts and references that cohere into a worthwhile and darkly funny critique. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Moser’s influences are varied, owing as much to pop culture as to other artists. She cites the late American performance artist Stuart A. Sherman, best known for his Spectacle series in the 1970s and ’80s, in which he created miniature theatrical choreographies with everyday objects on a tabletop. This influence shines through in Dreams of Dusk. My favourite vignette is the opening scene of Episode 3. David laments losing control of his poetry as though it has become sentient. Commanding Alexa to call his ex-wife—to which Alexa asks: “Which ex-wife?”—David resigns to whichever one will answer and we are treated to Linda: a wispy pair of Barbie stockings (a gift from Neil LaPierre), cross-legged with her tiny French rotary phone in the Modway Casper Armchair in Clear, which went viral in 2017 after a woman purchased it for her apartment and received a dollhouse chair (the human-sized and miniature versions have since been clearly differentiated). Dreams of Dusk highlights Moser’s penchant for collecting, as well as her talent for paying attention to trending aesthetics. She likes Ryan Trecartin, and credits him with predicting TikTok through his frenetic pacing and over-the-top confessional characters. Where they also overlap is a love of television, particularly reality TV. Moser considers the importance of reality TV shows (namely, the Real Housewives franchise and Vanderpump Rules) alongside the larger, mutually reinforcing universes they exist within, but also help to create. That is, reality television begot influencers as we know them today, as a medium that creates celebrities out of regular people and catapults them into perpetual publicity through brand ambassadorships, obligatory social media presence, and more reality spin-off shows. Throughout Hell Is Empty, A Malevolently Bad Map, When I Am Through, and My Crops Are Dying, a similar character reemerges whose monologues reveal deep-seated anxieties about rapidly changing social and cultural norms. They exhibit a pathological self-obsession, as Moser puts it, “inhabiting the dream and the nightmare simultaneously.” This person constantly reflects on whether there are multiple versions of themselves out there, doing evil things that they have no control over. What continually comes through are extremely banal fears about the self and recognition, channelled through advertising slogans and pop-psychology affirmations, much like the way reality TV personas operate. Moser admits that this is an amalgam of some specific personalities from the Real Housewives franchise. Rolled into this character, and Moser’s strategy for writing monologues, is what she has learned from her day job at a plastic surgery clinic in Toronto. Earlier on, it fed much more into the way she made and wrote her performances. Doing the clinic’s marketing, she was “figuring out how to talk to people about their bodies,” and this language made its way into the work rather heavily. Now, Moser says, “I don’t fall back on that as much anymore. I don’t find it as interesting.” However, I suggested that this kind of vocabulary still naturally finds inroads in the way that the people she emulates talk in a celebrity-influencer environment saturated with plastic surgery. An aforementioned influence from David Lynch is more apparent the closer attention one pays, showing up in set design, camera takes, characters, backwards-talking objects, and an occasionally unsettling mood. The self-absorbed Housewives-esque character, narcissistically oversuspicious of what other versions of herself might be doing to make her look bad, dovetails with Lynch’s beloved theme of the evil doppelgänger. Moser says her greatest desire would be to make work that is more Lynchian (i.e., unsettling), but she’s certainly had her moments. Letting a handful of fake teeth slowly fall out of her mouth, falling to the floor and slowly crawling on her hands and knees to a low rumbling soundtrack (both My Crops Are Dying), and the entirety of How Does it Feel (2016), a silent video performance inside a hotel room wearing a completely royal blue outfit. Her affinity for creating hands out of other objects—hot dogs with press-on nails, a latex glove filled with beans, black fetish gloves manipulated by sticks—also helps. Moser admits, “My greatest anxieties are about making something that is too twee or cute.” I think she has nothing to worry about. Returning to Hell Is Empty; All the Devils Are Here, the performance encapsulates much of what Moser has been perfecting over the years, as well as some truly frightening developments that happened at the same time. It is the rich and powerful that can actually afford delusion, but the world made as their mirage has trickle-down effects for the rest of us. Moser is also sure to reference the ways in which the awful things happening in the wider cultural sphere are impacting arts institutions and the way artists have to work now. Through her expert manipulation of archetypes, characters, and props, Moser shows us what it really means to be a performance artist who is also funny. The title of her newest performance is more on the nose than it might seem: the loudest tastemakers and “culture-producers” gaining ground are ghouls and psychopaths, and the only real antagonism is our ability to laugh at them. The above text was written by Angel Callander, a Toronto-based writer, editor and curator. Editorial support by Emily Doucet. Cover image: Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. 

Three boots hang from the pole that greets me; something of an archway, a threshold to sidle and cross before the room comes into view. Two more poles partition the space of Split Hairs to suspend Kyle Alden Martens’ boot-sculptures—the lines of gaping bodies in an abattoir or the draped garments of a walk-in wardrobe, everything hangs in the air like open secrets. ---------- To my left, boots of deep purple leather drip with scissors and loose threads, punctuated by three jackets sewn shut. To my right, a line of snakeskin boots with turquoise soles and dangling watches. The matter of handicraft—thimbles, scissors, thread—is taken up as adornment, but produces instead a set of signs that point to the hands (the past hands that handled the work) as the sculptures themselves point to the feet (the invocation of future feet). Time spreads out as the hanging beings encircle me, winding and unwinding on their poles, drawing little loops in air, and I am urged to go around again, to make some sense of their arrangement. The room proposes a closet, so I am moved to reach out—to take from the rack, to step into these skins as I do my own. When I choose clothes from my own wardrobe, I encase my animal body, wanting to inhabit something that intimates, however briefly, my imagined ‘I’. Queers have more language for this act: we perform, we flag, we enact ourselves, and we find each other through these visual codes—but it is anyone’s daily labour. As I approach Martens’ garments, I see that they are unfinished and splitting at the soles. The object of my reaching, this me concealed in cloth, but one lapsing iteration of many, splits open in turn. ---------- Kyle Alden Martens is a Montreal-based artist working across sculpture and performance. Informed by years of performance and videowork, their sculptural practice provokes imagined gestures through compositions of familiar objects. Common sense and comfort are both encoded and undone through the artist’s play with ambivalent signifiers and scale. The home, the familial—sites and systems that violate queer life—are denaturalized, disoriented from. Martens’ new solo exhibition, Split Hairs, which opened in January at Galerie Diagonale, blends sculptural practice and artisan shoemaking into a craft of disturbing the language of clothes or skin–exposing both the seduction and risk of coherence for the queer, or any imagined, body. I. Skin “[W]e should need no further warning as to the importance of clothes in human life and human personality; indeed, the very word ‘personality’...implies a ‘mask’, which is itself an article of clothing.” (John Carl Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes) Martens’ practice has long incorporated clothing, with handmade sandals, clogs, socks, jackets, and gloves doubling as containers for unexpected items like keys, marbles, combs, and rings. Placed on the ground of galleries, the shoeworks seduce the viewer to step into them—the embedded objects, then, interrupting this habitual act. Split Hairs presents a departure from the artist’s past work, exhibiting a constrained focus on the form of the boot, yet exposing its own (incomplete) process of making. The familiar is suspended, distinctly. Whereas clothes denote one’s ability to step into themself, to produce themself as a self, Split Hairs lays bare the careful labour of this process: one of excessive, gorgeous artifice. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Leather, thread, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles. Photo © Mike Patten. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, leather, thread, horse hair, paper, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten. Suspended on their racks, the boots withhold this offer to step in. Their wide shafts gape open in uncut leather, retaining a fleshiness not yet obscured by clean stitching. One piece, a boot in burgundy leather, splits all the way down its shaft and hangs ajar, revealing a spinal column of stiletto heels protruding from its interior. This boot is a body, fortified by heel vertebrae of leather stuffed firm with horse hair. The spine signals strength and capacity to stretch, a series of bones in relation with muscles and ligaments. The spine, whose name comes from the botanical word also meaning ‘thorn,’ as in the spines of a cactus, signals threat. The spine may be a weapon, a protective apparatus. Shoes derive fully from a protective impulse—at some point, primates descended from the arboreal realm and our feet touched the sharp, hot earth. Shoes invoke a threshold, this risk-laden boundary of person and world, me and not-me. The foot, too, inhabits this crossing—the appendage is taboo; arousing and disgusting. The hands made the shoe to sequester the foot, guarded (or withheld) from the threat (or promise) of the wild ground. Split Hairs toes the limit of tedium and tumult. The dragged time of meticulous making and the mess or murk of the unknown, the anarchic, the animal. Exacting care and disorder, hand and foot. To split hairs conjures a meticulous, obsessive labour or process and, yet, split hairs, as a qualified noun, imbues the work and its dangling threads with what was always already feral and broken open. II. Stretch “The aesthetic was ‘more more more,’ and every layer conveyed meaning as we created eclectic mystical collage on our bodies. With my drag, I was collaging myself together.” (Fayette Hauser of The Cockettes in Fray) Invoking queerness via subverted gesture, the closet space of Split Hairs brings up Judith Butler’s “repetition with a difference.” The boots are shaped by stretching new leather over a single mould, culminating in a set of drafts. The mould is worn down with each reuse–every citation decays its origin and derives the next. The result is not a sequence; boots hover in a circle, evading implications of progress. Time is stretched and stitched and left agape along with the rest of the show’s vital matter. Dozens of watches drip from the exposed bootsoles; more are strung from inside the opened gauntlet of the show’s single glove. While their clocks’ hands are made illegible behind sandblasted crystal, the artist’s hands are everywhere, unobscured. The time of handmaking is doubled in the allusion to craft, which is always an engagement with the past: traditions of making are repeated with a difference. Craft is subverted as it cobbles together the queer body. And time becomes another material for such manipulation. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, leather, thread, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles, horse hair, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, thread, vintage scissors, hammered thimbles, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles, horse hair, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman critiques Butler’s theory of performativity—in which the production of subjectivity is primarily citational—for its adherence to linear temporality. For Butler, every act is a reference. Queer selfmaking, then, is situated progressively, entailing the constant subversion of remnants of a heteronormative past. As Freeman writes, “the results of these temporal formulations can be that whatever looks newer or more-radical-than-thou has more purchase over prior signs.” And, “to reduce all embodied performances to the status of copies without originals” actually overlooks the provocation of the past—its residue; the atmosphere we live inside of in the present. The repetitive act of producing a (gendered) self—this “collaging [a self] together” engaged in drag but extending beyond explicit performance—occurs in a referential loop. For better or worse, the past is always in the room. The past is the room. Drag lives in this temporal gap between referenced and reference, working as “a productive obstacle to progress, a usefully distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure on the present tense.”1 ---------- An inventory of garments made and remade, Split Hairs is the back of a shop, strung up with unfinished works, and an archive. It sprawls multiple pasts, residuary presents, and imagined futures—an index of indistinct time. The materials—cowhide leathers, silk taffeta, horsehair—bear their own lifespans, narratives outstretched and stained by time’s passage. Left undone, the absent referent is stitched to the present. The works reconfigure actual/imagined or prior/future bodies, in resonance with drag artist Fayette Hauser’s practice, where “shredded red velvet upholstery layered against an ochre gold tablecloth came not only to signify but to potentially reorder her own blood and flesh.”2 ---------- From within the closet, we withhold the secret of ourselves. Nothing is as precious as this secret, even as it hangs open. There is tenderness in its concealing. A certain care, immixed with the certain horror of its exposition: what madness sits on the other side? The secret’s matter is infected with the desire for meaning: we want to make sense. The idea of clothing adheres meaning to the body as it signals the calculus of gender. The idea of skin adheres meaning to the body as it proffers the enclosure of the human. Together, the ideas form a matrix for the (always violent) organization of bodies. ---------- Here, Martens constructs a closet, not to contain a secret so much as exhibit the negative space surrounding it. Held cautiously in rich cloth, a question hovers in the air: how do we step into ourselves? Gazing into our closets, we confront the possibility, and proposition, of its container––but Split Hairs begs deeper inquiry. Through Martens’ repetitive use of skin as the cloth that collages the self together—each attempt failing to conceal or cohere— common gestures of self-making are split open. The above text was written by Abby Maxwell, an artist, writer, and gardener based in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, leather, thread, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles, horse hair, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten_______________________________________1. Elizabeth Freeman. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010, 63-64.2. Julia Bryan-Wilson. “Queer Handmaking,” Fray: Art and Textile Politics. University of Chicago Press, 2017, 64.

The day after the opening of her solo-exhibition, Primary Information, I met Julia Dault in the basement 'Bunker' at Bradley Ertaskiran—a space that she specifically requested for her third presentation at the gallery. There's a certain drama to the room, given the mass of concrete, visible rebar, ventilation ducts, and amalgam of building material that cover the walls, like mineral deposits from preceding epochs of use. There we sat, shoes off, cross-legged on the most uncannily-coloured carpeting I've ever seen—not quite sulphuric, nor mustard, but somewhere between the two on the binary of fertilizer and food. The colour of the carpet wasn't planned ahead of time, as the massive quantity was repurposed, and yet, its presence doesn't feel accidental, either. This is no doubt due to the material sensitivity that lies at the core of Dault's practice. Across her career and through the various disciplines she engages with—sculpture, painting, and, more recently, public art—there is a recurrent lightness of touch and precision of treatment, stemming from a keen awareness of the affective dimensions of the materials she engages with. Dault began as an art-critic for one of Canada's main newspapers, then pivoted from this work of producing secondary information to that of primary information: she "came out as an artist," completed an MFA in New York, and has since had developed a rigorous practice marked, in part, by a curiosity and interrogation of what is at stake for those working in the tradition of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism. Having had solo-exhibitions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and group exhibitions across the world, Dault is now shifting gears, not for the first time. Where, previously, Dault took up electric, straight-from-the-tube colours with intuitive automation, this exhibition is instead rendered in a grounded, deeper, and complexified palette. Related to this revision of hue is an underlying question concerning whether or not a long-term commitment to abstraction forecloses the possibility of using painting to process certain experiences of raw, primary emotions. Here's where Dault's work crosses into the realm of literary deconstructivism, as she regularly does and then undoes her own tools. Over the course of what was a freezing cold morning, we spoke of how, perhaps, the distinguishing characteristic between primary and secondary sources—and therefore the type of information that each category contains—is rooted in touch and manipulation; the affective dimension of industrial materials; and the possibility to exhaust one's physical or chosen form. I'm left thinking about how secondary information has literally been handled a second time, fed through the machinery of augmentation, elucidation, or complication. This distinction between first and second, top layer and underlayer, immediate and gradual, float around the exhibition, our conversation, and Julia's practice writ-large. On a negative day, I can feel that stylistic cohesion is just the market speaking, and that the real creative freedom comes from not worrying if something's coheres into a ‘body of work.’ I find this title, Primary Information, to be particularly intriguing. I’m interested in this category as one that contains raw data, original documents, and firsthand accounts from people who physically experienced something. Mm-hmm, go on. So there's this evidential quality that then you can base analysis or interpretation on later. I'm wondering about two things: the stickiness of identifying primacy, like a primary document, but also how we identify this primacy, because it's not an objective enterprise. I was raised by a fairly well-known art critic who also made art and believed that as an artist, you're producing primary information. If you're an art critic, you’re producing secondary information, which is wholly dependent on the primary information. He always said to do something primary. So Primary Information hearkens back to his idea—which I always disagreed with. I always felt writing about art is itself a beautiful act. Yes, it might need art in order to exist. But ultimately it's its own thing. Right, like chain reactions of primary and secondary. Yes, that’s it. I’ve printed a book to coincide with this show, and it’s also called Primary Information. But, in a way––in his way––you could argue that this is secondary information. The primary would be the paintings in this space. But I believe the contextual information of the essays is itself primary. A factor that often distorts, or comes into interaction with primary information is time. Memory fails. Documents are damaged. Then we die, and the information we carry also dies. So I’m curious about elapsed time as a compositional tool that has a direct, or at least distinct, relation to primary information. 

 For sure, that's definitely a through line. In my last show at Bradley Ertaskiran, I made a clock. It was a painting covered in spandex. It had a piece of matching spandex draped over its face, and at the bottom of that drape was a rock with a hole in it; it was a very heavy, beautiful rock. The spandex wove into the hole, and so, over time, the rock pulled the spandex lower and lower and lower to the ground. This work also came with a soapstone pedestal that you could place under the rock to effectively stop time.

 Around the same time, I was labouring on a giant painting, and it had layers and layers of work that I was never happy with. So I covered it entirely with white paint—but of course you could see the texture from each previous layer. I took the smallest brush I could find and painted tiny black marks on every single bump or mark. Covering the white surface in this way took two years. Tiny little black marks on every single bump on the topographic relief. When it was exhibited, I placed a small black shelf next to the work that held a flipbook of photographs I’d taken of every single layer. A viewer could stand there and effectively go back in time.
 In this show, “Big Boss” was painted again and again, each time with a single color. Each time I added to it, I made the marks smaller and smaller. Then, when I felt that it was nearing completion, I had it photographed. Then I took a knife and essentially destroyed it. Okay, wow!

 I then collected all the bits of paint that fell away from it. I had the documentary photograph of the not-yet-destroyed version, printed on mesh. So you're looking at an earlier version of the work that is then skewed and stretched over a later version. The effect is that it looks almost like a lenticular print, as if it has depth, yet it's all surface. I later put those little bits of paint on a different canvas, called “Rare Earth.” It felt almost timeless because it looked like it was made of minerals. Which essentially it is. Paint is mineral. So these two works have a connection, like simultaneous chronologies, or timelines. This ties into a question I had about iterative potential, through repeated lines of inquiry, repeated forms, gestures like scraping, repurposing, or transposing. Also known as self-cannibalization, right?

 Yes, exactly. So I’m wondering about exhaustibility, and if you have thoughts around exhausting form, material, or yourself? Yes. That's a very prescient question, because this show is different from my past efforts. I've always worked with self-imposed rules: off-the-shelf colour only, say, or pitting my physical capabilities against my sculptural material’s capabilities—and we’re always meeting in the middle. These rules worked for me for a long time, but then I had this crisis because I'd stopped learning. The ways I had been working didn't feel right for the complexity of the time in my life, in the world. I had been drawn to bright, almost day-glo, colours. But then I started to feel like I had pushed this palette as far as I possibly could, iterated as much as possible, like I was starting to go through the motions. You know when, at midlife, Jerry Seinfeld got tired of his jokes, and he threw them out and started over? I'm not suggesting that I'm Seinfeld [laughs] or even that I started over, necessarily, but there is something to be said for this midlife awakening. For understanding that something doesn't fit anymore because you've changed. As an abstract artist, how could I bring in all of that complexity? How do I become less tightly wound, or how do I stop obfuscating and let myself do more with fewer tricks? In the past, I always thought I was being direct. It’s been a tough journey! [laughs] I’m thinking of this in terms of the repurposed carpet that covers the floor of the exhibition space, and that you’ve also stacked squares to create makeshift stools around the exhibition space. The colour of the carpet is pretty distinct, almost sulphuric. It doesn’t seem like a colour that would’ve fit into your previous, flashy palette. Is it a colour you would naturally gravitate towards, before? Probably not, no. Right, but then you got a massive quantity of it. And this colour comes with its own tone and associations. Yes. While working on the show, I had this plan for the carpet. And because it was in my mind, it surely affected my choice of colour. But at the same time, I don't need everything to perfectly coordinate. This hearkens back to a fundamental aspect of my practice: I always work by responding to what is given. The key here is that there is so much waste in general, but also in the art world. And some of the carpets in these stacks are disgusting! Thousands and thousands of people have walked on this material in its previous life—it was installed at a museum—but now the carpet has a second life. I used to use this term, ‘dirty minimalism,’ to explain parts of what I do, especially the Plexiglas sculptures, and I’m happy that it still applies here. Julia Dault, Primary Information, 2026. Exhibition view, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photo by: Jean-Michael Seminaro. ulia Dault, Bigg Boss (detail), 2026. Printed mesh, acrylic, and oil on canvas, 72" x 60." Photo by: William Sabourin. Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran and the artist. Julia Dault, Rare Earth, 2020 - 2025. Acrylic and oil on canvas in painted wood frame, 24" x 18." Photo by: LF Documentation. Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran and the artist. Julia Dault, Rare Earth (detail), 2020 - 2025. Acrylic and oil on canvas in painted wood frame, 24" x 18." Photo by: LF Documentation. Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran and the artist. Now I want to ask about style, because this seems to tie into a question I had about Raymond Queneau. In his 1947 book, Exercises in Style, Queneau tells of a brief moment witnessed first on the bus, then in the metro, and then recounts the anecdote 99 different ways. The culminating effect is not of solidifying one style in particular, but rather of disassembling style, and therefore any mythology surrounding cohesion itself. I'm wondering about how you think about or approach repetition. As we do things again and again, what happens to this notion of style, or to the cohesion of style? On a negative day, I can feel that stylistic cohesion is just the market speaking, and that the real creative freedom comes from not worrying if something coheres as a ‘body of work.’ I get bored easily, and I also swore that I would never make the same move twice—that I wouldn’t make the same painting over and over. Sometimes people say, and I take this as a compliment, that my solo shows look like group shows. I think this is also because I operate with the premise of X and Y… like, if you take this tool or you take this colour palette and you put it here just so, what do you get? When I was younger, I worried about things fitting together, but in not cohering, there is, in fact, cohesion. You can do so many different things in one space and still have a legible aesthetic because you’re declaring it. The more experience I’ve gained, the harder it is to surprise myself, and it’s when I surprise myself that I know I’m exploring new terrain. Oh yeah, there’s a prop painting in this show that many people haven’t noticed, at the entrance to the space. It’s titled “The Hawk Painting.” Did you see it? Yeah, I was wondering who made it. In the book we printed for the show, the central essay, “Primary Information,” is about my work. In it I describe a moment that encapsulates the crisis of abstraction that I’ve described. I was out on a walk with my kids and saw a hawk descending towards a bird’s nest, swooping in to eat the baby birds. I could see the birds’ parents flying around, and I had never heard birds scream that way. This scene was in my head for a long, long time—but as an abstract artist, what could I do with it? It represented a lot of things that I'd been going through. So I painted it, “straight.” The experience of making the hawk painting opened up a different painting in the show, also called “Primary Information,” which initially was covered by taut fabric. It was very unsatisfying, and I stared at it for a long time in my studio trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. I eventually just started slashing and cutting into it. I became less concerned with tightness, or the optics of the object. It took a while to come to that place. It sounds so simple when I put it into words, but it wasn’t—or isn’t. That might be because I have a background in art history and art criticism. My mind second-guesses itself: how is that relevant? How does this fit into a broader historical trajectory? This ties into how I was thinking of exhaustion, because to me it seems like we typically, or historically, think of exhaustion in biological terms, whether that’s our bodies or our planet. Or our spirit. Yeah, exactly. In my mind, this kind of exhaustion comes into tension with industrialized and modernized production. So I’m wondering what you identify in the industrial materials that you engage with. Your bound sculptures are quite iconic, and to me they seem to be a momentary unraveling of efficiency—like they’re made useless or incapacitated by their own restraints. I think there’s also something about permutations in here, again. Well, that's why Queneau is interesting. With the Plexiglas, the question was, “What can a four by eight sheet do?” And the sculptures are iterative, each one a different version. They're never repeated. I say that I’m like a magpie when it comes to shiny, industrial materials. Working with the material is also about globalization. Industrial materials are available wherever I am; I just have to come in and shape them. Yet the works are never secure, I like to say they are securely insecure. One of my rule sets declares that with the Plexiglas sculptures, if the forces and physics meant that they weren't tied tightly enough by me and they sprung out, I would then have to leave them installed like that, splayed out, and collapsed on the floor. That never happened, even though I secretly wanted it to happen. There was no obfuscation.
 Yeah, totally. And about the materials, there’s a painting upstairs called “Infinity Fades” with silver, perforated spandex hanging off it. That the material is hanging instead of stretched taut feels to me like a statement on the power of that twentieth-century industrial era. But it also plays with the idea of what is a substrate and what is a painting. And also, finally, the question of what happens to us when we look at art IRL? There must be a justification for coming to see something in space. So of late, I seem to be asking how I can reward that viewing. Prolongated viewing, or like, reciprocity? Exactly. With the Plexiglas sheets or Formica that I used, I would install them so that they would appear to have mass and volume, but galleries and institutions were never actually burdened by the mass of the work because it was temporary. The works could always be taken apart and laid flat. Maybe this connects to my deep-rooted, Modernist self. I appreciate the grid, for example, but I’m always breaking it down. My “structures” always fall apart in some way; and then all of a sudden you can see the fallibility of humans. Full stop!

 I’ll just end the interview there. There's an essay on your practice written by Jason Farago entitled “Better Angels.” In that essay, he notes that the majority of your paintings “are structured according to an underlying grid,” but then the “...grids get wonky and elastic as [you] over-paint and erase with frequent all-over motions” which expresses an infinity for “more gestural kinds of non-objectivity.” I often think of the grid as a non-hierarchical structure that assigns logic, or has a categorical function. What is the relationship of the paintings in this exhibition to the standardized measure of the grid? Is this a method that you're still employing? Specifically, in this show, there’s a work titled “Fate Xclusive” that’s all about grids. In 2021, I made the drawing that is on the right side of that work. I thought, “I need to see this work again, somehow.” And as I was making the painted version of the drawing, I thought “God, I never work this way.” Normally, I call my approach ‘making is thinking.’ That is: I don’t plan or preconceive, I just go in, respond, make, be in the moment. I couldn’t fathom what I was doing, which was reproducing something I had already made, but bigger. So the joke with the title, “Fate Xclusive,” or the play, is that they could only have ended up together, their fates are connected. The title, like many of my artworks’ titles, is something I found; I think I saw “Fate Xclusive” on a sign somewhere in Toronto. Later, I realized that I wanted them framed together, to make this relationship between the two more apparent, rather than discard the “study” work. And then it dawned on me that this was a plan view of the space we’re in at Bradley Ertaskiran, of this bunker. As we were planning the show I got five shag carpets that I thought of installing in this space to mirror the rectangles in the drawings, and the carpets were these amazingly disgusting colours. Then when I finally got in the space it didn’t work at all! But I had to go through with it, and so now this work is pure potential of what could have been. Like a score for a performance that didn’t happen. And the rectangle space of the carpet makes me think of how the grid evokes the way we orient in space. All these rooms, units, rectangles and squares that we inhabit on the grid of the city. My next question is about whether there is an underpinning to your sculptural works like the paintings’ grids. Do these works request a similar scaffolding, grid or otherwise? The Plexi pieces are titled based on how long it takes me to make them, which is in many ways their structure established in real time. But at one point, I did a 180° turn and created a series in collaboration with a computer programmer and robotics expert; we made ceramics with a programmable robotic arm. Whereas with the Plexi works I shaped industrial materials with the human hand; in these works, ceramic, which typically carries an expectation of human impressions, was instead made by this robot. I loved “making” these “organic” forms in a highly industrialized way. We made grids and spheres that looked like woven baskets, forms that would be impossible to make by hand. The process was amazing to watch. Yet when the arm made a giant sphere out of clay, and I placed a clay grid inside of it, there was inevitable decomposition. Oh wow, like the trace of a human hand gets totally distorted. In a productive way though, it seems? This is something I think about a lot. It’s funny, in the hierarchy of making, if you touch too much, it’s craft. It’s not considered valuable. If you have paint on the surface, people love it. If you don’t have paint on the surface, it’s no longer valuable or as valuable. There’s this thing about how much an artist has touched a work, how involved or present they are in the production. Can we see their hand? I’ve spent many years trying to obscure my own gestures. This latest work is more about letting in the viewer, for real. I have two compositional questions. First, it feels like, in what I’ve seen of your work, there’s an attention to equilibrium, without symmetry. Between the works in an exhibition, or in and of themselves? Good question, but I’m thinking more in and of themselves, each individually. Is this something you think about, or not really? I think I must be in some way, but it’s not conscious. I do get this thrilling feeling in my knees when a work is done, when I know that I can’t add anything else. It’s very bodily. And in general I’m very analytical, I love words, so I appreciate that this is another way of understanding the work. That seems to be what harmony feels like, no? Yeah, I don’t like to be too spiritual, but it does feel as if it’s beyond words. But I do still think that artists have a responsibility to be able to talk about their work. My other question comes from being initially struck by the dynamism in both your wall and sculptural works. Does this stem from a preoccupation with time and materiality—since neither of which can be static even if we try to manipulate them into being that way? Do you think about movement in your practice? Well, I definitely think about choreographing the space when I do installations. In this exhibition, I placed one of the carpet benches in a specific spot so that visitors have to move around it. Often when I build a show I’ll integrate an element that obscures sightlines, so that you can’t stand at the threshold and see the whole thing in one glance. So, in a way, I like to guide the viewers’ movements in space. But that’s installation-specific. I think this dynamism probably comes from the fact that I just don’t want to be bored. But don’t get me wrong, I also love paintings that are really static. I guess this is a question of the relationship between work we feel drawn to from a viewing perspective, and then the work we feel compelled to make ourselves. And how often they don’t entirely overlap. I guess it’s the dynamic of input and output. Should we say primary and secondary information again? Why not! My last question relates to the encounter between material and concept. For you, do materials arrive first, with their inherent affective dimensions that then lead to concept? Or do you seek out materials that can respond to certain needs that you have? For me, the most successful pieces balance concept and material in perfect harmony. For example, with the sculptural piece that I consider my first real artwork, I went to a place in Long Island City in New York that was like a warehouse of recycled materials that were being discarded and sold for almost nothing. I found this piece of extremely dirty, turquoise blue Formica that had this magnetic pull. It was just this beautiful sheet of colour, so I took it to the studio and started playing with it. That became my thesis piece, and my sculptures went on from there. So that was material first. But then there’s the idea of that sculpture somehow encapsulating a gesture or action, of it being expressive. I’d been obsessed with the Abstract Expressionists. But also the Minimalists, even though I didn’t believe in the purity of their perfectionism. So I came up with this idea of dirty minimalism; I didn’t wipe any of the dirt off. 
 Oh okay, so literally dirty. Yeah, exactly. If it’s just material, it’s not interesting. If it’s just concept, it doesn’t need to be an artwork, it could be something else. So maybe I lead with material first and find the concept through it? I’m not sure! I guess it’s very specific to what I’m making at any moment. Public art has to be concept-first, which I struggled with when I started making it. I love to work alone, but in the public realm you can’t, you have to work with a team. So I learned to do concept-first art-making, but it’s not my preferred method. Okay, so maybe I am material first! I’ve never articulated that. Thank you for that question! Of course! [Both laughing] The above text was written by Emily Zuberec, a poet living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Julia Dault, Primary Information, 2026, Exhibition view, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photo by: Jean-Michael Seminaro.

It’s thanks to the conversation with Michael DeForge transcribed below that I end up on YouTube reading the featured comments on an abridged audiobook version of Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction memoir Communion: A True Story. Philippe Mora’s 1989 film adaptation of the same name, Communion, is one of two central inspirations DeForge cites for his most recent book, Holy Lacrimony (2025). What makes the film so compelling, DeForge says at one point in our interview, is that it “sidesteps whether or not the experience is real,” in favour of taking seriously the material consequences of the protagonist's experience—in this case, of alien encounter. I would say this, too, is what all of DeForge’s books do with the experiences of their characters, not least Holy Lacrimony with its aliens, and it makes them similarly compelling. The books are less interested in what is plausible, or normal, or even what’s right, and more interested in what social and political outcomes an act might produce, even those acts performed in private. DeForge, based in Toronto, has been making comics, posters, and illustrations, prolifically, for at least two decades now. Since 2013, between Koyama Press and Drawn & Quarterly, he has published more than fifteen books (some strip collections, some longer narratives), and his illustrations and comics have featured widely in both digital and print publications. Whether in black and white or colour, his images rage with intensity. They bulge, warp, or slim to needle thin. They disorient, not because of the uncanny forms or landscapes they contain, though these are delightfully strange, but because of the feelings of identification and recognition they still inspire. Their silliness is rendered with both generosity and realism. In this way, his books provoke similar feelings for me as does the YouTube comment section where I find myself in a post-interview browsing session. Six months ago, @Useyourthirdresource commented: “No one can answer the questions this video is asking as these greys do not communicate to humans about themselves and they strictly follow their purpose, needs and objectives, keeping them all secret. Suffice to say they are not benevolent beings. Best to stay clear of them if possible. 😊” One month ago, @earthtru commented: “he's such a fraud.” Below that, an exchange: @AnalogLanguage 10 months ago Definitely not aliens from outer space. Something much more complicated and strange. ╰ @Useyourthirdresource 6 months ago What do humans know. 😊 ╰ @theisisreincarnate 5 months ago Human ( gov't) experimentation disguised as Aliens . - Trans-Humanism ╰ @Madddhatter115 1 month ago @theisisreincarnate yea right lol Despite the high chance of stumbling across tragic, or, at minimum bleak, exhibitions of 21st-century subjecthood, I love reading YouTube comments. This brief, estranged exchange is an example of why. It feels familiar and sad, dark but sweet. What do humans know, :blush:? The human, slash substitute here for human gov’t, accounts for much of what is more complicated and strange in this world. That is, the world. Also: yea right lol. It goes straight to the heart of questions raised by DeForge’s work. Can you know what you know? Who can you trust? As @Useyourthirdresource prompts, whose benevolence can be assumed? Our own, or our neighbours’? What about those forces whose origins evade straightforward capture, such as aliens, or capital? Evidential logic is always and perhaps increasingly tenuous, and these questions loom large and ominously unanswerable. DeForge’s characters construct their lives under a cloud of existential unknowns emphasized by visuals easily mingling the grotesque and mundane. In his comics, urgently if more obscurely, DeForge presses on the same concerns as in his posters plastered around the city, which call, among other things, for worker solidarity, rent control, harm reduction, cultural spaces not complicit in arms dealing, living wages, sick leave, PACBI, and prison abolition. That is to say, across formats, he is always asking whether community can be made out of shared suffering, whether anything is indeed shared at all, and what kinds of political responsibilities we have to each other, even as we are engulfed by life as a venture of the impossible. I'm in a lot of collective projects, and I take seriously what it means to sustain those. I’ve also been around the block long enough to have been in many failed collective projects. Sometimes it feels weirdly inevitable in a way that is very disheartening. We’re in conditions where every apparatus and power is trying to stop you from sustaining collective efforts, whether they’re artistic, political—ideally both—it feels like everything is working against it. What are your main tools when working? A lot of the finished pages anyone is seeing are done digitally. It used to be a more hybrid process where I would work analogue, scan, draw on top, and colour digitally but now a lot of the finished comics are digital from start to end. I mostly use Photoshop and a Wacom tablet, and I letter by hand. But I still do analogue work in a sketchbook, and a lot of my thinking goes into sketchbooks and notebooks first. I’m sure it varies, but what is the big picture process of developing a book like for you? I start with whatever idea I have, whether it’s the type of story I want to tell or a visual idea, and there’s usually a bit of a development process where I’m trying to work out the rules of the book. That often has to do with tone, and colour; frequently it's me settling on what grid I’m going to use. I tend to use a single grid throughout each comic, and I make pretty intentional decisions very early on about whether that’s going to be four or nine or twelve panels or what have you. I feel like once I establish what the look is going to be then I can start working on it. I try not to have too much set in stone about stuff like plot and try to have an impression of the characters involved but to let that be something that develops as I work. I don’t script out my comics very heavily. I try to let it be a little improvised. I find if I script something out too heavily I lose interest really quickly. Comics are a fairly tedious medium, not the most tedious, but they’re time consuming, and if I do have too much scripted out I’ll find myself a year or two later feeling really trapped by decisions I made when I was, you know, basically a different person. There’s a really moving dynamic in your comics between contingency and character. Your characters change according to both circumstantial and internal factors. I think that improvisational approach comes through in the narrative as a great deal of surprise, which, as a reader, is really lovely. Could you elaborate a bit on your own relationship to those things in your comics: chance, or everything that is unknown before you begin, and then the characters themselves—do you have an experience of, inside the rules of the world, discovering the characters as you’re writing, or discovering the events that happen to them? Absolutely. I try to let myself be surprised by the work. I know some writers describe having this fully realized vision of characters and they can just place them in any situation and describe almost transcribing conversations. I never start a project that way. I have an idea of a person or personality, but it’s only writing and drawing them and figuring out what type of clothing they might wear in a situation or what body language they have or how might they react to something, that’s where they reveal themselves to me. I think, too, that’s the interesting part of characterization. They might react in a sort of idiosyncratic way that makes sense in the context of the scene but is maybe not something you’d have been able to plan beforehand. In general, I like digression. I like giving myself a lot of room for digression, especially in some of my very sprawling comics. A few of my comics were initially serialized: my first book, Ant Colony (2014), which is a little embarrassing to think about this many years removed from it, Sticks Angelica (2017), Folk Hero (2017), Leaving Richard's Valley (2019), Birds of Maine (2022), were all serialized, and a comic I did called Brat (2018) was serialized in a different way. Working with a very set schedule meant I would have these overarching threads I wanted to keep following, but there’d be lots of instances where I was kind of sick of that, and would want to follow some side character, some tangent, for a while. I think those are the most interesting parts of those comics. Those really small characters, once I follow them along for a while, would in a very unplanned way start occupying a larger space in the narrative. It happened in Leaving Richard’s Valley with a character called Caroline Frog, who for a while becomes really crucial to the plot, but started out this very small, unnamed role. That only came from the rhythm of doing a daily strip. When I think about daily strips I really like, my favourite part is when you can tell when the artist is just trying out some throw-away experiment for a week. There’s a week of Peanuts, I forget which decade, where it’s just a monologue the wall of a school is delivering. You discover that this inanimate wall has an inner life. It’s not repeated again, but it’s this great, really weird week that stands out so much in the body of work. In a lot of ways it’s very un-Peanuts and violates some of the rules of the strip, but it’s great, it’s perfect. Those tangents are pretty special. I love Caroline’s arc in Leaving Richard’s Valley. There’s a feeling in the book of simultaneous occurrence across a really wide field. There’s a lot of overlap of course, but each character has, also, almost their own epic. Caroline’s transformations are great: self-appointed cop, star architect, cult artist, snow shovel mob boss. The snow shovel thing came from something that happened in the neighbourhood when I was working on the comic. A bunch of the houses on our street had their snow shovels stolen from the porches and at one point the upstairs neighbour saw a group of kids walking with a bunch of snow shovels, and you know, they’re kids, so I don’t think he confronted them but was like, what are you doing with those? And they offered to sell him back the shovels. I was really impressed by the gall of these kids. Genius. In Leaving Richard’s Valley, Toronto feels to me like a—or even the—central character. In general you seem really interested in cities as collectively invented, reliant on certain kinds of mythmaking. They’re cobbled together, and in flux, but that cobbling together is also always bounded by capitalism. It’s not like the conditions of labour and market and even the social relations appear spontaneously in the scene. How central is the city to the collectives you’re writing and thinking about? It’s a subject I return to a lot. Partly, it’s that most of my adult life I’ve lived in Toronto, at this point twenty-plus years. I’m also interested generally in trying to write about community. How spontaneous versus how intentional does a community have to be, especially under capitalism, in order to sustain itself? I think, with Leaving Richard’s Valley, a lot of it was me directly working that out. It’s very much a Toronto comic and references real and imagined Toronto history—very specific types of histories that would appeal to a nerd of my demographic. Like jokes about Rochdale College, which is pretty well-mined territory. But I also assume people could see other types of North American cities in it. But it’s something I grapple with a lot. I’m in a lot of collective projects, and I take seriously what it means to sustain those. I’ve also been around the block long enough to have been in many failed collective projects. Sometimes it feels weirdly inevitable in a way that is very disheartening. We’re in conditions where every apparatus and power is trying to stop you from sustaining collective efforts, whether they’re artistic, political—ideally both—it feels like everything is working against it. That’s sort of what Leaving Richard’s Valley is. You see all these stops and starts, and I think it ends ambiguously on how many of these threads can keep going at the end of the book. I live in a city, and it’s a city I feel extremely committed to, but I also try to be realistic about how...you know, you earn the right to love it, and you earn the right to hate it. I don’t know what the future is for Toronto, and it feels fairly bleak right now, but I don’t think that’s predetermined. In your comics we’re often meeting a collective at a moment when it’s about to disintegrate. We watch them, as you describe, splinter and re-form in various iterations. Some are more successful than others, none are permanent, and inside of those collective formations there are all these individual crises of faith. Can you talk a bit more about how your own living in community relates to the writing of those narratives? Do you learn things about collective movement from your own books, or is it a different relationship entirely? The type of collective projects that inform Leaving Richard’s Valley, some I had a direct relationship to, but a lot of them were historical. I’ve never been in a cult, for instance, but I like reading about cults. I don’t know if I learn about collectivity from my writing. My inclination as a person is that I gravitate towards solitude. I very much fit the model of a stereotypical cartoonist who is not naturally the most social, and I’ve also had the same kind of liberal brainwashing artists receive of a very individualistic approach to life and practice. But I do have social commitments and political commitments that mean I’m in community with a lot of people, and it has forced me out of my comfort zone in many different ways. I think that shows up in some of the characters in these big communities in my comics, almost reluctantly getting enmeshed in all the messiness of having to live and work with other people. So yeah, a lot of the stuff about the way people live together is me trying to figure out that on my own. Certainly in a lot of political projects, having to mediate conflict has been a difficult thing of like… I’ve committed to learning and I’ve had enough discipline to not put any of that directly on the page, but it has informed how I write about conflict between people. It’s been a weird side benefit of doing that. It does help me understand something about how people fight that I maybe wouldn’t have got to on my own. I think for a while I would do two types of books: some were written in (almost) my own voice, about a character who is in their head in a very specific way, usually like a depressed guy, because I’m a depressed person; and then I would have books that were more like the cast of Springfield or something, like Sticks Angelica, Birds of Maine, these really sprawling casts. Holy Lacrimony maybe consolidates those, splits the difference between the books that are this self-narrating suicidal ideation—which is the first half of the book—and brings it to a book about community in the second half. Spread from Holy Lacrimony (2025). Courtesy of the artist. Spread from Leaving Richard's Valley (2019). Courtesy of the artist. Spread from Leaving Richard's Valley (2019). Courtesy of the artist. I loved Holy Lacrimony. The aliens in it are sort of god-like in their omniscience. They have access to Jackie’s whole life, and Jackie’s encounter with them seems almost like an encounter in the afterlife, almost purgatorial. The book has been described as a type of post-alien abduction traumatization story, but it also felt to me like when Jackie is returned to earth, his role apparently fulfilled, he’s returned with renewed capacity for life. Or maybe rather what happens to him in his life afterwards is a sort of renewed capacity for communality. I think part of why I found the book so compelling is that his post-abduction experience felt really familiar to me as someone who was a very serious Christian and now is not. Being watched over is terrifying but also deeply comforting. When Jackie is abducted, he discovers that his life has been under the constant supervision of a being who is intensely interested in him, and he enters into conversation with them. That’s not unlike the relationship I experienced myself as having with God. And the loss of that relationship of constant observance is fraught. Jackie’s return to earth is marked by the discovery of his life as a kind of performance for an audience, now made uncertain and ambivalent, as well as the abrupt end of that conversation. I wondered if you yourself have any kind of religious background or connections to religious practice that you drew on for the book. It came from a different place—it’s not really something I considered, but it makes sense especially because so much of the comic is about belief and doubt and disbelief, which is also one of the things I find inherently interesting about abduction stories. I’ve talked about this in relation to this comic, but a lot of it is me trying to find a different angle to write about my own experience with mental illness and institutionalization and the way people reacted to my response to struggles with mental illness, or however you want to phrase it. Like, how I relate to other people who have gone through similar experiences, whether that’s useful or not, whether it can be the basis of actual community or solidarity or whether it’s too tenuous. It’s something that I was trying to think through when working on it. Some of the relationships between Jackie and the group are based on how I relate to certain people in my own life. Those are unresolved questions for me still. With Holy Lacrimony, one major influence was Communion, which is a Christopher Walken horror-adjacent movie directed by Philippe Morra. It’s based on what was at the time a very popular alien abduction memoir by a guy named Whitley Strieber, and all the usual kind of stuff around a big piece of popular media like that, especially memoir: whether or not he was for real or a scam artist or whatever, there are all these associations people have with this book and with the movie. But what I think was really interesting about the movie is it completely sidesteps whether or not what the protagonist experiences is real. There’s a scene where Christopher Walken’s character goes to a UFO support group, it’s maybe only six or seven minutes in the movie, but it was a huge influence on Holy Lacrimony because in the group they make it really explicit that what concerns them isn’t necessarily whether or not what happened to them is real, because what happened to them is so massive. It’s not like they can even fully understand it. And instead they just have this very frank conversation about things like, if they resent being seen as victims, or resent the idea that it should be empowering. They don’t even necessarily all believe each other, but they can relate to each other because they’ve experienced something that no one else in the world will take seriously. He’s less worried about whether or not it’s real, but knows that it permanently affects things like, how he talks to his wife and child because he knows his wife did not experience this and might not ever believe him, [how this] permanently affects his career, this kind of thing. Obviously there are all these parallels when talking about mental illness that the movie makes very explicit. Walken’s character, for instance, talks about how he’s afraid his son might get visited by aliens—it’s very unsubtle about the parallels. I really love this movie. A second influence, when I was in the middle of the book, I had a friend bring up Bethel House, which is a project located in a rural fishing village in Japan. Karen Nakamura wrote a book about it called Disability of the Soul (2017), and made an accompanying documentary. Bethel House is in the tradition of ways of treating mental illness outside of psychiatric norms; there are lots of parallels between other projects, but this one is still going, and the idea is that the “patients” there are living and working outside of an institution. The idea is that to be treated you shouldn’t be sequestered away, but still living in community, with other patients but also the people supposedly “treating” you, and also just generally the people in town. They make a lot of art and music and host a festival every year, and the most famous aspect of the festival is the annual award given for what they call “The Best Delusion.” The best delusion isn’t necessarily just the most interesting one. It’s awarded based on how the community responded to it at the time. The example Nakamura gives in the book and documentary is someone who believed he had received a message from aliens telling him to go out to the middle of the forest, walk inside an alien spacecraft, and pilot it, in order to save the world or something like that. For residents it’s a very common occurrence to be visited by aliens or see a UFO, but it was a really cold night and his fellow residents were afraid that he’d hurt himself or die, walking to this forest alone. So they gathered an emergency meeting—and a lot of these communal meetings would not necessarily even have doctors, they’d be purely led and facilitated by other residents, who might be experiencing something similar—and they problem-solved how to respond to it in a way where he wouldn’t necessarily go out that night and hurt himself. They suggested a bunch of things like, what if we went as a group? And that kind of got rebuffed, well, what if we sent a scouting party and that got rebuffed, so what they settled on was: you don’t actually know how to fly a UFO, you haven’t flown a plane or anything before, so what if we sleep on it and then in the morning we can figure out how to address the fact that, you know, you can’t fly this thing. That was able to deescalate the situation, and a big part of that was how he saw everyone taking his problem as seriously as he did, even though when you see the way they interact and see some of their one-on-one interviews, there are a lot of different opinions. Some people are like: I think everyone else here is crazy—not me, but… So not everyone is aligned on what they are experiencing necessarily, but they do have this common thread and common commitment to taking care of each other. Nakamura doesn’t idealize the situation, it still depends on not believing this person, still assumes that some type of psychiatric intervention is necessary, which might not be the case, but I was really struck by this story. I think another big part of unlocking the book was reading about that whole house. I’m gonna look it up, that’s really interesting. You keep it beautifully ambiguous in Holy Lacrimony, for the reader—what has happened. From the start I’d fully bought the story, and then at the moment when Jackie is in the support group saying to himself, well he’s a liar, and she’s a fraud, suddenly I was, like, wait, what should I believe here? What actually has happened? But I love the idea of displacing that concern, just setting it aside to get on with other more interesting questions like, what was the texture of this experience? What has it done to my life or sense of self? And what do I do now that this thing has transformed me in some way? Which is a more interesting and more relevant question than, was it real? I have friends who experience things that are pretty far off from what I’m experiencing in my own reality—that’s an inelegant way of articulating it I guess, but, I’ve had things like that myself, and I feel like a lot of the time what is most actionable isn’t necessarily someone saying ‘yes, I totally believe you’ or, ‘I totally understand.’ A lot of the actionable things are way more material than that. It has to do with needing social supports, needing people around you, or, even more than that, needing to keep your job, needing to still pay rent while going through whatever it might be. I am personally agnostic on a lot of stuff around UFOs and aliens, which has been something I’ve engaged with through my life. And I have things that I find more plausible than others with aliens and conspiracy in general, but I wanted to make sure that I could maintain that agnosticism in the text itself, and not feel disrespectful in any way. As someone who has read so many accounts and listened to a lot of late night radio where people are talking about it, obviously it’s a space where there are a ton of grifters and con artists, but, once you set that aside, it’s also a ton of people going out on a limb explaining something they know is going to permanently ostracize them from a lot of respectable society, or something they’re gonna their lose their job by saying, which is a really intense thing to think about. Of course, there’s a ridiculous aspect to, like, UFO conventions and this whole ecosystem, but at its core, that’s just a really intense thing to have forever alter the trajectory of your life. I don’t think a lot of people do that lightly. Unfortunately what the movement calls on isn’t necessarily always me just drawing something…but I’m always very happy to do it. I feel very proud to call myself a propagandist in this context. Organizing on the left, in some contexts, requires a fairly evangelical approach to convincing people of what is basically a major conspiracy, i.e., the way money and capital move in these hidden, sinister ways. But when trying to engage with people for instance who are anti-vax, it’s like, well that’s a conspiracy theory—don’t lose yourself to the conspiracy! The whole idea of conspiracy is much more complex than we sometimes allow it to be. Yeah, I mean it’s almost insulting now how little power feels the need to hide itself—just operates in plain sight. But anti-vax stuff is maybe a good example of where people are movable, because someone who is anti-vax clearly doesn’t understand how vaccines work or how illness and disease works, but, where there’s an earned mistrust of pharmaceutical companies or a mistrust of how the state controls bodies. Exactly. Or chemtrails are another good example. People aren’t wrong in identifying that our skies are changing in a way that is pretty upsetting, and a lot of people have written about this: the ways we used to be able to quantify what we saw with “our own two eyes” in the sky are changing because of environmental degradation. So there’s always something there, but obviously easier said than done, moving people in those ways. But most people understand that something is wrong. Yes, most people have in some form come up against ways in which what is wrong makes them suffer. They’ve at least tried to access healthcare or something. I’m gonna lead into my next question with a story. For the last few years, before she passed away, I was seeing this really amazing analyst who had, among other things, been campaigning for decades in the psychoanalytic community in Toronto for a real reckoning with Israel as a genocidal state. That was her baseline, and we spent probably upwards of 70% of our time just talking about conditions of labour, exploitative taxation, state violence… things like this. We’d spend 30 minutes just trading sources on the global arms trade. It was such a relief to be in a therapeutic context where those material conditions were taken for a psychic foreground, rather than background. But, with the assumption that those things can’t be dealt with simply by their recognition. There’s not a therapeutic answer to war, either in a personal or collective sense. Yet they can’t be ignored, at least not without pretty bad consequences. I was thinking about this because, in your work, I have the impression that these things (war, exploitation, violence) are worlds—encompassing conditions—even if we’re not on earth in the world of the book, in the comic, if we’re in an adjacent reality. Fiction can’t responsibly do away with those conditions, I don’t think. And that seems to be the approach in the comics that you make, which I respect and appreciate. This is a long-winded way of asking about the No Arms in the Arts campaign you’ve been involved with. I have impressions from the outside about that organizing, and there are continuities between the landscape in Montréal and Toronto, and material connections between the two, but I’m curious to know: what is it like in Toronto currently for artists who are organizing around divestment, not only from complicit Israeli funding, but other funding that relies on militaristic expansion? And what has that organizing been like for you? With No Arms in the Arts, I had some experience organizing in other sectors, and a lot of the people who were present for the birth of the campaign were people I knew from organizing in encampments and shelter hotels, for instance. So we had some organizing ideas, at least about what it means to work collectively, and several people had experience in other divestment work—BDS work but also things not solely tied to Israel, like involvement in Amazon divestment campaigns for instance. We saw that there was a lack of focus or coordination, and I hope no one would get offended by me saying this, but in culture-sector organizing in Toronto, organizing frequently ends up being very reactive. You’re responding to one piece of news, or one abhorrent institution will be this flash point for a little while, maybe a boycott gets called, then three months later no one is really thinking about it or working on it anymore, and it just gets replaced by another thing. I felt very tired of organizing from a position of weakness. So, a lot of No Arms, to start with, was trying to actually think through where art workers’ leverage is in their industries, and what could be a considered target across different industries. A lot of the work has been about targeting Scotiabank as an arts sponsor. The targets of the campaign have expanded to include the Azrieli Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the Azrieli Group, an Israeli real estate empire that has had ties to settlements deemed illegal in the West Bank; as well as Indigo Books, owned by Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz, who, among other things, are the founders of and sole major contributors to the HESEG Foundation for lone soldiers in Israel. So the idea was to look at what a common target could be and ways that efforts could be combined between film workers, people involved in the gallery world, authors, people involved in publishing, etc. It’s been difficult, because doing this work is always very difficult. It’s a constant uphill battle, and you will be described as trying to take away opportunities from fellow artists, especially when funding is super tight. But it has also been heartening. There have been actual victories, including the Giller Prize dropping Scotiabank as a sponsor, which was a direct result of these pressure campaigns, and at different moments we’ve had effect on Elbeit Systems stock that Scotiabank is invested in. For any readers not familiar, Scotiabank is a major Canadian bank, and Elbeit Systems is Israel’s largest military company. Also, a big element of the campaign is trying to situate artists as workers, which is very difficult to do, I think. Artists, when responding to a political moment, even very sincerely, are still conditioned to think to respond through their art. Certainly, in organizing conversations we have a lot of difficult ones about trying to get artists to think of themselves as workers who can act and think collectively. But we’ve brought on a lot of people for whom this is kind of their first time out organizing, and it’s been really exciting to see that. While struggling to even wrap our heads around the scope of a genocide, it’s kind of the only thing that has made me feel at all optimistic and connected to other artists. Otherwise I sometimes just feel, like, I hate this world, you know? Why even make art? All the usual questions. I hate this industry, why am I beholden to all of these institutions that I hate? Doing this has felt like, okay, I actually am connected to my peers, because we do have these shared ideals, and there are ways we can make those actionable, and that’s through organizing. It reveals a serious vulnerability, to not have this kind of collective labour power, or rather as you’re describing, to not recognize it. The idea of an artists’ union has been largely unfamiliar in the last decades in most Canadian contexts, I think, but it has been really heartening to see cross-disciplinary labour organizing happening, even in the absence of an official union body. I feel like there’s been a bit of a course correction, because for a while I think people were approaching boycotts as a question of individual complicity—opting in or opting out—versus a boycott as collective action which can be about withholding labour. These arts institutions aren't anything without the artists actually participating in them. And yet, artists have less and less agency and say over these institutions that our livelihoods have become so entangled with, our work and its distribution has become so reliant on. It’s not the primary goal of the campaign—the primary goal is to try and put a meaningful dent in the Israeli war machine—but a secondary part of the campaign has also been modelling what it might look like to actually wrestle back control over some of these industries. Part of your involvement in these campaigns is to make posters—which are really great. What is the postering aspect of your work like, and how is it located in your work as an artist? Are there traditions of design and illustration you feel particularly connected to, either for political or aesthetic reasons, or both? Posters have always been a big part of my practice. When I was in high school I’d draw gig posters, usually just in exchange for getting on the guest list for shows, having the promoter turn a blind eye to the fact that I wasn’t allowed to be in the bar or whatever. I still love poster making and, in an ideal world, for commercial illustration I’d only be drawing posters. It’s my favourite kind of form. I feel more suited to that than editorial illustration or other kinds of commercial gigs I pick up. Really early on I was very informed by gig posters, especially punk and noise rock and the aesthetics there, and I was also in high school introduced to revolutionary Cuban poster art, especially Eduardo Muñoz Bachs and Rene Mederos. I was obsessed with looking at those images and breaking them down. Those became a big aesthetic influence, but were also an early introduction to radical political thought. I know there’s a range of opinions on those individual artists and their time making those posters, but what really appealed to me when I was young was the idea that artist practice could include doing, like, a really militant solidarity poster that would get airdropped into the Global South, and then also a public service poster about washing your vegetables, and then also a movie poster, and I thought: this is the dream. Not only is this a visual culture where you can work on something that is really dynamic and interesting and experiential, you can work on this range of messaging that would get out to the public, and people engaged and interacted with this stuff in a real way. I just thought that was amazing. So yeah, I still like doing posters, and for the most part now the poster work I do is for repertory film screenings, or political posters. I don’t like the idea of doing agit-prop for it’s own sake; I like to make sure that it is for campaigns or movements or orgs that I, at least, if I’m not a part of them know a little bit about, versus me just putting stuff out there for the sake of it. But it is a big part of my practice, and I like doing it, and I feel like it’s the movement work I’m most suited to. Unfortunately what the movement calls on isn’t necessarily always me just drawing something…but I’m always very happy to do it. I feel very proud to call myself a propagandist in this context. Cops Aren't Workers poster (Toronto, Ontario: 2020). Courtesy of the artist. Poster for Palestine All the Time event at Gallery TPW (Toronto, Canada: 2025). Courtesy of the artist Cover for PACBI Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) explainer zine, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. It’s probably sentimental, but I do feel nostalgic for the kind of radical print collectives or print studios of various communist movements of the 20th century. I think one of the things that was maybe distinct about those is that the print production was integrated into, for instance, radical educational experiments or actual labour organizing—strategic campaigns. So I’m excited to see the visual output of something like No Arms in the Arts, because I think that integration is happening there, and we’ve maybe been in a period where, although postering has by no means disappeared, it’s lost some of that coordination with larger organizing efforts. Yeah, I agree. I do realize that for me as well that some of it is nostalgia. But I think we’ve been too complacent about allowing online space to be the primary place this stuff circulates. There was a shelter hotel that I was organizing in, for instance, and a lot of the flyers and graphics we’d make would be very immediate. We weren’t allowed inside the shelter hotel because of the service providers’ rules, so we’d table outside and would have a lot of print material, and residents would come and say, like, what would actually be useful for us to speak to our fellow residents is this type of pamphlet, or something that has like Know Your Rights information, or something that explains nearby social services–-or something more charged, more political, and that would change week to week. So we’d have a lot of small pieces of paper that were really made so that residents were able to talk to people we couldn’t themselves and could distribute themselves. You can’t do some of that stuff online. You have to actually have it exist as something you can physically hand to someone. There’s a lot of messaging, too, you either can’t or wouldn’t want to trust an online platform to house. I think it’s a shame if we give that up, because it’s also a medium where we have a lot of control. The poster, the pamphlet, the zine—those could be pretty potent tools depending on the context. I think of some movement graphics I’ve made, it’s stuff that was like, a pamphlet no one outside of maybe 50 people saw, that I had to throw together an hour before hitting a copy machine and bringing it onsite, you know. Those are some of my favourite pieces of movement work I’ve designed because they were the ones that felt most effective or most potent. A couple last questions. Film obviously features in your thinking and making, and you’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I’m curious to what degree you consider your comics filmic. And, if there are specific films that have had an outsized influence on your approach. I wouldn’t consider my comics filmic. In fact, kind of the opposite. I think they belong more to the tradition of comic strips with a very flat, fixed perspective. Very early comic strips predated film, and the dominant visual medium of the time would have been theatre, which is why when you look at those early comic strips they frequently have a fixed perspective in the same way that you would see characters interact on a stage. Then post-film comics started adapting, incorporating the concept of camera angles, almost. When I look at my own comics, I do have some that would count as more filmic, but, for the most part, what interests me in comics is how they can be such a sharp break from three-dimensional space and can organize information in a very different way to film. There are certain filmmakers who are a big influence, and I do love thinking about movies. I watch a lot of movies. Derek Jarman is one of my biggest influences. The way he organizes information temporally and on a screen is a big influence, but also just generally his writing and practice and his life: the way he thought about politics and agitation. He’s made some of my favourite movies. I like a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers like Tsui Hark and Johnnie To, and I think a tradition of Hong Kong filmmaking I’ve always been attracted to is how tonally diverse a single movie can be. I think western audiences, when engaging with this stuff, are always really surprised at like, how you can have a fart joke, and then something really serious, and then something really horrifying, and then an action scene. But I really like that, and I think it shows up in my comics a lot. I really dislike when someone uses tonal inconsistency as a criticism of any piece of art, and I think I lean into that in my comics. I like the idea of something being really silly but taking its emotions seriously. There’s a Johnnie To movie called Running on Karma (2003), it’s one of my favourite movies and is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking meditations on Zen Buddhism ever written, and also, the lead Andy Lau spends the whole movie in an intentionally artificial-looking muscle suit—just, the whole movie—and I love that. I grew up watching those as a kid when my family would just pick up DVDS from Chinatown sometimes, and I think the influence really wormed its way into my writing. It’s really interesting to think about that shift from pre- to post- film comics. Your comics definitely feel theatrical, like scenes in front of painted backdrops, in a way that’s lovely and strange. I think about those very big early Sunday strips in the early days of strip cartooning like Krazy Kat or Gasoline Alley. I like the way they look like stage tableaux that characters are just moving around, and I think that’s a sensibility I try to have in a lot of my comics. A lot of my pages I almost think of as a scene unto themselves. I’m interested in organizing space more than I am organizing time, maybe, in comics. That’s really interesting. I mean, it seems like that kind of organization of space would produce a book whose time is non-linear also. Time is more easily manipulated in a comic, I think. You manipulate time all the time in film, but it calls attention to itself more. I’ve seen it described as comics allowing for an almost cubic representation of time—fractured. If you want to pull a reader out of it and have them really stare at a scene or sequence, it doesn’t necessarily read as stillness like it might in a movie. Or, in a movie it might be more heavy-handed, like, something in slow motion. In comics you can mess around with things more invisibly. I remember reading in sequence some very late-era Dick Tracy strips, long after Chester Gould died. I guess I would have been a kid. That’s a serial strip, but it was still being made long after people wanted to read serials, in a newspaper strip, and I was fascinated by how the first panel or two of each new strip had to recap what had happened the day before. So it meant that reading them in sequence you’d see the same scenes repeated over and over again, and sometimes it would be redrawn from a slightly different angle or some of the text would be omitted for expediency's sake, and it was so fascinating to me as a kid to read something that way. It was like reading time that was stuttering. I loved that, and it really stayed with me as this bizarre way to approach narrative. You have an upcoming collection of short comics being released in 2026 with Drawn & Quarterly, All the Cameras in My Room. Can you tell me anything about it? Lately, I’ve tried to have my short story collections feel a bit more organized than just stuff I was thinking about during the span I was drawing the comics, and a lot of these ones are organized around surveillance, or being watched. The being watched thing feels like a thread from Holy Lacrimony. So yeah, it’s a collection of shorts and I would, say, on the whole, it’s a bit more paranoid and pessimistic than my last collection, if each book of short stories is a bit of a check-in on me, and to a certain extent me checking in on what I’m seeing around me. I think my last book, Heaven No Hell (2011), maybe as the title implies, some of it is dystopian, some of it utopian, and a lot of the stories are in dialogue with each other that way. This one is a bit bleaker. I think it shows a world that is a lot more immobilized. It’s a very paranoid book, I’d say. The short story its title comes from is about surveillance, and the longest story in the book is about someone infiltrating an activist movement. One last question: what are you reading or watching currently? I really like Joe Sacco’s new book, The Once and Future Riot. It’s weird to say because Joe Sacco is so canonized and venerated and has cross-medium success, but I think he’s an author that the comics and literary world is starting to take for granted, just because he’s so consistently good. It’s just a really excellent piece of graphic reporting. The other day I saw The Gulf of Silence by Mina Rhodes, who I don’t know a lot about, but the movie is about someone’s experience seeing a UFO, and I was grateful that I saw it after I did my book because I think it would have influenced it. It’s excellent. A lot of it is about professional fallout from having this sighting and talking about it. And I’m on the third book of Peter Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance trilogy. They’re all very good, and it’s subject-matter that’s on my mind a lot. I sometimes feel ambivalent about the role art can have in resistance, and they’re novels that talk about potency versus the way art can be part of a containment strategy. Thanks so much. The above text was written by Hannah Strauss, a writer based in Montreal.Editorial support bt Tom Kohut.Cover image: Spread from Holy Lacrimony (2025) by Michael DeForge. Courtesy of the artist.

We grew up with our tongues pressed so hard against our cheeks, it’s no wonder we all needed braces. That’s a title for one of my own paintings: a couple kissing against a violently green background. I used the kiss between Drew Barrymore and her costar in the 90s film Never Been Kissed as a reference but it really could be any B-movie kiss, and that’s the point. A writer whom I admire, and frankly have a bit of a crush on, lent me a monograph about the painter Elizabeth Peyton. A review by Roberta Smith contextualized Peyton’s cringingly sincere, fan girlish portraits of the recently deceased Kurt Cobain, invoking Realism, Karen Killimnick, and the Pre-Raphaelites. She diagnosed the portraits as part of a 90s trend toward “emotionalism,” an excellent description that never really stuck. I’ve been thinking about this review a lot. And I haven’t returned the monograph. 1—Most basically, Emotionalism is a genre of art: paintings, photography, film, and literature, etc…. 2—Emotionalism is sticky, tinted pinkish red. It attracts wasps. 3—Emotionalist works all share a mood; a frank sentimentality. Elizabeth Peyton started showing in New York in the 90s, when figurative painting was having a renaissance. Among her peers were John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Sean Landers, and Richard Phillips, but there seemed to be one major difference: where Currin, Yuskavage, Landers, and Phillips’ paintings were interpreted as ironic jokes (for the most part correctly), Peyton’s small jewel-like portraits of celebrities (the crushable kind) and historical figures (the French kind) struck audiences as sincere. It was around this time that postmodernism is considered to have ended; old forms, like figurative painting, were being reanimated to serve new content and cynicism wasn’t feeling as smart as it used to. In 1993 David Foster Wallace implored fiction writers—via essay—to abandon their ironic disinterestedness and embrace sincerity. His call to disarm may have worked. New Sincerity, a movement in art, literature, film, and music with roots in the 1970s, gained new followers and practitioners. Whether this is because of Wallace or just an inevitable cultural trend is hard to say. Despite all this, irony and cynicism continue to be cultural mainstays. Wallace attributed irony’s ubiquity to television. Lauren Michele Jackson, in a 2025 editorial for The New Yorker, followed up on Wallace’s proposition, suggesting that the social internet, the next big thing after TV, propelled irony even further: “[A] posture of unseriousness pervades institutional and individual channels alike.” Emotionalism is neither sincere, nor cynical. Or maybe more accurately, it’s both. Emotionalism is naive with a wink, its idealism is pragmatic, critique’s pill is ensconced in a jawbreaker’s sugar. Emotionalism is embarrassing. It can embarrass its audience (oh god, I can’t believe I like this) or its author (oh god, I can’t believe I made this). Emotionalism definitionally reveals something private.  4—Emotionalism is concerned with simulacrum; there’s a reiterative quality, a trying-to-get-the-feeling-rightness. It shares this with Romanticism alongside themes of beauty, nature, the individual, and romantic love. I was in New York earlier this year where I saw the Caspar David Friedrich show at the Met. Dark rooms were thronged with whispering visitors who wove politely around each other, all trying to get a good look at Friedrich’s beautiful and impossibly cinematic tableaus of Gothic ruins backlit by sunsets, and individuals posed heroically in windswept landscapes. Friedrich’s work, once dismissed for its distasteful admirers—first Adolf Hitler (for obvious reasons) and then Walt Disney (too schmaltzy)—has had a resurgence as part of a larger cultural trend towards Romanticism. The Romantic genre covers a lot of conceptual ground: life and death, collectivism and individualism, beauty and ugliness. It is this oscillation between polarities that makes Romanticism the ideal genre for our contemporary moment—one of simultaneous “irony and sincerity, hope and despair, empathy and apathy” write Timotheus Velmeulen and Robin van den Akker in their paper, “Notes on Metamodernism.” Emotionalism, though, is much smaller in scope than Romanticism. It’s more like Realism in this regard, wanting to capture life in all its granularities. 5—If Caspar David Friedrich was painting about losing his virginity I think he’d be an Emotionalist painter. 6—A non-exhaustive list of Emotionalist works and practitioners: Elizabeth Peyton. Claire Millbrath. Lois Dodd. Fairfield Porter. Boris Torres. Stand by Me, by the late great Rob Reiner. Cindy Hill’s bronze diaries. Nadya Isabella. The portrait of Hari Nef by TM Davy Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven, where he’s having sex with his soon to be wife, Ilona Staller. Wolfgang Tillman’s more diaristic photos. Karen Killimnick. Frank Ocean’s music, especially his song “Siegfried”. Dike Blair. Joy Williams’ short stories. Claire Milbrath, Dog in Pansies, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 22 x 28 inches. Jeff Koons, Hand on Breast, 1990, oil ink silkscreen on canvas, 97 x 143 7—Emotionalism’s origins are older than the 1990s. Postmodernism’s cool had to have a foil. Artists like Lois Dodd and Fairfield Porter, unconcerned with Pop art and Minimalism, painted bucolic landscapes and rural domestic scenes while their peers made tongue-in-cheek celebrity portraits and inaccessible navel-gazing obelisks. 8—A friend of mine once said, with a big grin on his face, “making art is humiliating” (at the time, he was making work about gay abjection using the metaphor of pissing his pants). Obviously I agreed with him but I don’t think this is true for all artists. I don’t think the Abex guys felt humiliated by their work. Amy Sillman writes “...what could be less punk than staying up late in a studio trying hard to make a ‘better’ oil painting? That’s so earnest, so caring…” In grad school I told a room full of my peers and advisors that I wasn’t trying to make good paintings. I meant academically good—I wanted, and still want, to paint with an awkward and amateurish approach to my subject matter, to imbue the picture with vulnerability. Emotionalism is embarrassing. It can embarrass its audience (oh god, I can’t believe I like this) or its author (oh god, I can’t believe I made this). Emotionalism definitionally reveals something private. Critically though, Emotionalism is not about shame. Shame is too biblical. Emotionalism courts the blushing cheeks, downcast eyes, and nervous laughter of embarrassment. Embarrassment is quotidian and lower case “h” human. 9—Emotionalism isn’t about sex. Except sometimes it totally is. 10—Emotionalism and Camp overlap a lot. While rereading Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” I realized that Camp foretells the prevailing contemporary attitude that Velmeulen and van den Akker would diagnose half a century later. Sontag talks about a “sweet cynicism” and a play with naiveté in her descriptions of Camp. Importantly though, Camp is a sensibility, a taste you develop, something which exists in its purest form when it’s accidental. Emotionalist works of art can be mischaracterized as tacky or nostalgic and get lumped in with Camp. Emotionalism, though, is not a miscellaneous kitten calendar, or the portraits of A-listers by the late Palm Beach resident and neo-romantic painter Ralph Wolfe Cowan; those things are Camp, which is a term that can be (and often is) applied retrospectively. Emotionalism is a genre that artists work within. Mona Hatoum, Van Gogh’s Back, 1995, chromogenic colour print, 19 1/2 x 15 inches. 11—Emotionalism is feminine–not to say that it can only be practiced by women, but more that it is wistful, silly, pastel, and frivolous. It loves love and sunlit interiors and days at the beach with a picnic. These things aren’t inherently feminine, it’s more that the quotidian and sentimental have become associated with the feminine. I think it’s because of this that many of the artists I include in this genre are women and queer people. When American critic Joseph R. Wolin wrote an essay on Ann Craven for Border Crossings magazine he described her work as brightly hued, kitschy, anodyne, suitable for postcards, clichéd, but never the most obvious: feminine. 12—Romanticism’s great flaw is its ability to be co-opted. I think again of Caspar David Friedrich and his work’s appeal to a Fascist Germany. Friedrich’s paintings of a solitary figure overlooking a landscape were easy to parlay into emblems for German nationalism. (Ralph Wolfe Cowan painted Donald Trump’s portrait in 1989.) Emotionalism on the other hand is too ordinary, too girly, too gay, and too stupid to appeal to the political right. 13—William J. Simmons writes in “Queer Formalism: The Return,” “…for in queerness or queer formalism we might understand and find liberation in the facts that everything has been done before and there is no such thing as greatness, which is not to say that nobody and nothing can be truly special, but rather that all moments, all experiences, all of our daily intimacies and disappointments coalesce like paint or photographic chemicals into the image of a life, and that is good enough.” Though Simmons was writing to define his own category, Queer Formalism, these sentences also gesture to the heart of Emotionalism: the sanctity of the quotidian and a sincere admiration of cliché. Simmons gives us permission to do it all anyway, despite the cliché, because nothing is original and therefore everything is valid. There are no heroic figures in Emotionalism. 14—Mona Hatoum’s photograph, Van Gogh’s Back (1995), is a perfect example of an Emotionalist work. It’s critical and funny and sincere all at once: the photograph’s tight crop shows only a man’s back, slick with water and soap. His dark back hair is combed into swirling circles. Hatoum’s wonderfully corny title turns the man’s back into the starry night. It reminds me that the private world shared by two people can feel as expansive and complicated as the Milky Way, that god exists in all of us, and that the personal and the political are always intermingled. 15—Emotionalism thinks, well there’s a reason it’s cliché. The above text was written by Sophia Lapres, an artist and writer based in Toronto.Editorial support by Emily Doucet. Cover image: Elizabeth Peyton, Twilight, 2009, oil on panel, 8.5 x 11 inches

John Brady McDonald is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the Mistawasis Nehiyawak. He is the great-great-great grandson of Chief Mistawasis of the Plains Cree who was considered a visionary leader and the first signatory of Treaty 6 in 1876. McDonald is also the grandson of famed Métis leader Jim Brady, who is generally considered one of the most influential Métis leaders and activists in Saskatchewan and Alberta of his time. Brady disappeared while on a prospecting trip in June 1967. His body has yet to be recovered. Forced to attend the Prince Albert Indian Student Residence in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, from 1984 to 1989, McDonald has served as an activist and advocate for fellow residential school survivors. The Nêhiyawak-Métis musician, playwright, actor, speaker, author, and visual artist discusses how his lived experience comes through in all facets of his creative work and life. McDonald’s first book of poetry, The Glass Lodge (2004) was chosen for the First Nations Communities Read program and nominated for the Anskohk Aboriginal Book of the Year (2005). Despite The Glass Lodge being heralded as a raw, lyrical experimentation influenced by Shakespeare and Jim Morrison with some teenage goth thrown into the mix, McDonald endured 15 years of rejection letters until Childhood Thoughts and Water was published in 2020. That was followed by his book of free verse poetry, Kitotam, which translates into English as, "He Speaks to It," in 2021; his fictional work Electricity Slides (2021), in which the protagonist confronts conformity as a means of survival; Carrying It Forward: Essays from Kistahpinanihk (2022) that honours the traditions and the languages of the two nations McDonald navigates between; Songs From the Asylum (2024) that chronicles his day job working with youth mainly as a Frontline Youth Outreach Worker on the streets of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan; and What Shade of Brown?, released in July 2025. That of course, leads to a discussion around why it’s so difficult for racialized writers to get published in Canada and whether the sudden interest McDonald has generated since 2020 means things are changing within the old guard, or if there are simply more niche publishers creating space for ignored voices. McDonald’s artwork has been displayed in various publications, private and permanent collections, and galleries around the world including the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. He’s a founding member of the P.A. Lowbrow art movement and served as vice-president of the Indigenous peoples Artists Collective for almost a decade. His art also reflects very personal lived experiences. McDonald truly believes, “Art in any form is a way for a person to leave their mark upon the world and say, ‘I was here.’” As someone whose art styles were not held in high academic regard for decades [...] it is important for us to fill and occupy those spaces and have our work recognized as legitimate art. You were named John Adrian McDonald by your parents, but in 2021 you legally changed your name to John Brady McDonald. Why change your name at 40-years of age? There was a combination of factors which led to my decision to change my name. A lifetime of bullying and mockery at being named John A. McDonald was seriously taking a toll on my mental health. Being a Residential School Survivor and an advocate for survivors with the same name as the creator of the attempted genocide of my people was proving to be getting in the way of my advocacy, with people assuming I was being facetious or sarcastic, like I was choosing to have that be my name. Around the same time, communities across the country were removing or renaming their statues and monuments of Sir John A. MacDonald, and I felt the time was right to topple my own minimum, so to speak. Also, the Government of Saskatchewan had, around the same time, waived the fees to change one’s name for Residential School Survivors. The stars all seemed to align to confirm that it was time. Jim Brady disappeared at the age of 59 while on a prospecting trip. That was 14 years before you were born. So, why was it important to ensure your grandfather got the military cenotaph headstone he deserved 58 years after he went missing? In 2019, a group of individuals in Northern Saskatchewan began a new search for my grandfather’s remains. We as a family never had a proper memorial service or grave to visit. It had been a mission of mine to ensure that a place be made where not only our family, but also the Métis Nation as a whole, could mourn one of the greatest heroes of our people. We chose the graveyard at the Batoche National Historic Site because, as my aunt said, “he belongs to the Métis people.” We chose a simple military headstone as opposed to a grandiose memorial in line with his own humble way of living. If and when we bring him home, he now has a place to rest. How has Jim Brady and Chief Mistawasis of the Plains Cree influenced your life’s vision and all the work that you do? Both men used their positions as leaders for the betterment of their people, not to paint themselves in better light or to buy their way into heaven, but because it is the right thing to do. That concept and philosophy of working for others without expectation of return or reward is a principle and benchmark by which I live my life every day. Both men could have used their positions to live very comfortable lives, but both were adamant to do no such thing while others couldn’t. You were forced to attend the Prince Albert Indian Student Residence in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, from 1984 to 1989. You were only three years old in 1984. How did those five years at residential school impact your life? And, can you share how former residential school survivors became employees in the residential school system? I came to live at the P.A.I.S.R through my father, who was himself a survivor of Residential School, and was hired to be one of the people to live on-site and supervise the children. I grew up in a dorm with 24 other boys and experienced everything they went through. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the various churches were getting out of the Residential School business, and the Federal Government began to take on operations. One of their policies was to hire Indigenous people to staff these Residential Schools, replacing the nuns and priests with Residential Schools survivors, who then took their own experiences and behaviours learned at Residential School and continued the cycle of abuse and trauma, my father included. In those years, I was robbed of my culture, my language, my connection to community and I witnessed and experienced physical, spiritual, mental, emotional and sexual abuse. My experiences have led me to become estranged from extended family, experience loss of kinship and connection, and were a huge factor in the severe substance use disorder and destructive behaviour I experienced in my teenage years. Let’s focus on your writing. Could you describe your writing practice and how you create the ideal conditions for words to flow onto paper via typewriter and computer? I have learned to schedule my artistic and creative endeavours seasonally. While I may write a snippet or two here and there throughout the day, I only write when there is no snow upon the ground, and I only paint when the snow arrives. I’ve arranged my writing style by the seasons, creating words when I’m surrounded by warmth, colour and life, and painting bright vivid colours when I’m surrounded by cold, snow and death. It’s allowed me to become a more disciplined writer, crafting words more diligently in the final stages. Setting these parameters is necessary for me to ensure that what I am writing is meeting the expectations that I have set for myself as a writer, and showing respect to both my words and the situation which created them. I will fill a shoebox with scraps of paper covered in ideas, full poems and pieces of scribbled prose, then I will sit and meticulously combine them as they flow into small, black hardcover notebooks. This is the first stage of the “filtration process,” as I call it. From there, I begin to construct my books on a 1969 Remington typewriter. It’s at this point I start working on the technical aspects of each piece—is it easy to read? Will I stumble on this word or that word when performing it onstage? Is it rambling? Am I using a certain phrase or metaphor repeatedly? Does it make sense? Etc. From there, the words get committed to the computer. From time to time, to gauge response and reaction, I’ll post one or two pieces to social media. Your first book of poetry, The Glass Lodge, published in 2004 by Kegedonce Press, was recently re-released on its 20th anniversary by Shadowpaw Press. At the time, The Glass Lodge was chosen for the First Nations Communities Read program and nominated for the Anskohk Aboriginal Book of the Year (2005). However, that success was followed by 15 years of rejection letters until Childhood Thoughts and Water was published by BookLand Press in 2020. The collection of beat poetry, spoken word, performance art and lyrical verse journeys into the memories and events of an Urban Indigenous warrior's struggles to reconnect with a language and culture that is always almost out of reach. Then, between 2021 and 2025 you published five books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction including your most recent book of poetry and prose, What Shade of Brown? Why is it so difficult for racialized writers to get published in Canada? And, does your experience since 2020 mean the publishing world is becoming more inclusive of voices originating outside the white male canon? It was difficult, in my opinion and experience, because the publishing world did not view Indigenous and racialized writers as commercially viable at that time. I’ve personally had publishers tell me straight to my face—“Canadians won’t buy this (book,)” and, of course, by “Canadians,” they meant white people. It wasn’t until many non-Indigenous/racialized publishers realized that Indigenous/racialized works were commercially viable in this country that they were willing to begin publishing our works. Now, I’m not saying all non-Indigenous publishers had this mindset, and there were several non-Indigenous/racialized publishers that did publish works by Indigenous and racialized writers, but they were certainly the exception and not the norm. There was, obviously, the element of racism that put those barriers up, but, from my experience, it was about the publisher’s ability to earn money from our words. It took Indigenous and racialized publishing companies to kick and fight their way to the book store shelves and occupy that commercial space before many of the bigger publishers began adding Indigenous and racialized writers to their rosters, and, even then, it seemed apparent to me that they were choosing writers who were palatable to white readership. Interestingly, perhaps ironically, several of those writers were actually revealed to be Pretendians. I would love to say that, now that we have broken through and have created this Indigenous Literary Renaissance, we will never go back to that, and, out of a sense of altruism, our words will continue to be amplified. However, I’m not naïve enough to not realize that, as soon as sales start to slip, things will begin to backslide. It’s a business, and businesses cannot survive outside of capitalism. Of course, this is just one person’s opinion. Book cover for What Shade of Brown? (2025), Radiant Press. John Brady McDonald, She Wears The Scars Of Your Canada - Reconciliation, (named by Rosanna Deerchild), 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 30" x 40." Sourced via.  Book cover for Carrying it Forward: Essays from Kistahpinânihk (2022). Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. What Shade of Brown?, published by Radiant Press in July 2025, uses passionate poetry and prose to explore the experience of an Indigenous person who feels not quite accepted because of his light skin and undermined by settler-colonial society. The struggle of trying to connect to your family and lost culture is reflected in the poem, What Shade of Brown? What do you want readers to feel and take away from the impactful poem, What Shade of Brown? This poem speaks to an issue that has been part of the Indigenous experience since Contact. Light skin is a living representation of colonization, and it has caused so much turmoil and pain in our communities, leading to ostracization, isolation and rejection. Given the revelation of people like Buffy Saint Marie, Joseph Boyden and, most recently, Thomas King of pretending to be Indigenous people, the struggle for actual Indigenous people like me who are made to feel “less-than” has been compounded. “What Shade of Brown?” is my way of holding to account those members of our community who act as gatekeepers, determining a person’s worth, belonging or value to the community based upon the pigmentation of skin and putting the onus on them as to why. That’s the take-away I want this poem to have. Why? Carrying It Forward: Essays from Kistahpinanihk (2022) published by Wolsak & Wynn, contains stories that honour the traditions and the languages of the two nations you navigate between. It also examines the city of Prince Albert, your experiences at residential school, northern firefighting, as well as the time you spent at Cambridge University in England where you “discovered” and “claimed” the island for the First People of the Americas in July of 2000. These essays are filled with history, careful observation and some hard-learned lessons about racism, recovery and the ongoing tragedies facing Indigenous peoples. What then, is your reaction to recent revelations that a number of high-profile performers and academics once claiming Indigenous heritage cannot substantiate that claim? My reaction has been a mix of “I told you so,” “how dare you?” and “(insert expletive here).” As I said earlier, being light skinned and having to struggle my entire life with being accepted by my own community, the struggle has been made harder by these charlatans and liars. They have taken up spaces meant for Indigenous people and exploited it, to the detriment of others. I think of Kelly Fraser, an Inuit musician who was nominated for a Juno award that was given to Buffy Sainte-Marie, and who later took her own life. Would her world have been different had Buffy not falsely filled a space not meant for her? Would she have made the choice to take her life had she won? Personally, my first book had been in the same award competitions with Joseph Boyden, where he won awards. Had he not been there, would that book have been successful and not lead to my own 15 years in the wilderness? I also closely worked and collaborated for a decade with an artist who claimed to be Metis, but turned out not to be, and who made thousands of dollars off that claim. Pretendianism is not a victimless crime, and it has real world consequences where real people suffer. Turning to your art, you started out as a tattoo artist, graffiti artist and comic book artist. Why is creating tangible art important to you? I’ve tried to use my art to the best of my ability to express my views and experiences in the world and share them from what has historically been and in many ways still is a visually artistic wilderness. Being so geographically far away from major art galleries and that whole “Fine Arts” scene, the opportunities for visual artists to showcase their work in Saskatchewan can be slim. That’s why I am so grateful for groups like OSAC (Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils) and SK Arts (formerly the Saskatchewan Arts Board) for providing the opportunity for artists to have their work tour the province and allow others to see their work. Art in any form is a way for a person to leave their mark upon the world and say, “I was here.” As someone whose art styles were not held in high academic regard for decades (in fact, my art style is what is known as “Lowbrow” art,) it is important for us to fill and occupy those spaces and have our work recognized as legitimate art. You have a painting that you titled, No Thought Was Put Into This (2025). What is the story behind this painting? And, what should Settlers/Colonizers take away from this story and the painting? This painting is a sequel of sorts to a painting commissioned by CBC Saskatchewan in regards to the first national Orange Shirt Day. It was in response to a Settler’s reaction to the fact that their plans to recognize the day had nothing whatsoever to do with the reason why we were observing the day. Their solution was to “stick some feathers on it.” Adding eagle feathers or other stereotypical Indigenous cultural iconography to things is a common way for non-Indigenous groups or individuals to say, “look, we’re committed to Truth and Reconciliation, see?” We become parsley upon their plate, little more than garnish. This painting shows what appears to be a stereotypical Indigenous image of an object (which in reality, isn’t a real thing—just a deer antler on a tree with some feathers) and these mechanical, steel-grey thingamabobs thrown in. There is no real substance to the piece, and that’s the message. “No Thought Was Put Into This” is part of a greater response to this form of tokenism. The title actually came from a lyric in the Nirvana song, “You Know You’re Right,” which in itself speaks to the selfishness and vapid response that is often at the heart of narcissistic behaviour, and I think that it is entirely fair to say that quite often, the response to Reconciliation by Non-Indigenous groups is not one of honesty, but of painting oneself to not be the bad guy. I would hope that anyone viewing this piece will be able to see the forest for the trees, as it were, and see it for what it is: a sardonic rebuttal to an empty response. Canadians can't say they’ve accomplished the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to action when more children are in the custody of child welfare than ever went to residential school and Indigenous women and girls are still being disappeared and murdered. What message do you want to share with Settlers/Colonizers who don’t necessarily want to read, hear, or see the Truth before moving towards acceptance and then, Reconciliation? What stands in the way of reaching meaningful Reconciliation? As earlier, the message I want to leave with Settlers/Colonizers of this mindset is a simple question: Why? Why do you not want to know the truth? Why is learning about, discovering, accepting and rectifying the wrongs of the past and the wrongs continuing today such a difficult thing to do? Are you afraid of finding out? If so, why? Are you worried about what you might uncover? If so, why? You just have to learn about it, accept and acknowledge that it happened, acknowledge that it is still happening to Indigenous people today, and do your very best to ensure that it stops. We’ve had to experience it first hand. The least you can do is listen to us and stop saying things like, “no, it didn’t,” and “when can we stop saying sorry?” It’s not a big ask. The above conversation was conducted by Doreen Nicoll, a freelance journalist and podcaster based in Burlington, ON, Canada.Cover image: John Brady McDonald. Photo courtesy of John Brady McDonald.

Con miradas siempre nos damos todo el amorHablamos sin hablarTodo es silencio en nuestro andarAmigos simplemente amigos y nada más —Ana Gabriel, Simplemente Amigos In her 1988 song, Simplemente Amigos, Ana Gabriel belts out a confession disguised as restraint. It’s about a love that must exist in the shadows, spoken through a secret code of gestures and glances. The ballad moves between longing and endurance, mapping the tension between desire and secrecy. Similarly, Reynaldo Rivera’s photographs translate the impossibility of public love into forms of tenderness—where desire becomes both memory and a way to exist otherwise. His Los Angeles is not the one full of celebrities, beaches, or Hollywood films that usually comes to mind. Rivera’s images depict a Los Angeles rarely shown. His photographs blur the line between the personal and the political, becoming indispensable records of a world both luminous and precarious. His portraits of performers, friends, and lovers capture a community that built itself through art, nightlife, and kinship at the edges of visibility. Rivera’s new book, Propiedad Privada, published by Semiotext(e), extends that intimacy and resistance. Combining his photographs with new writing by Abdellah Taïa, Chris Kraus, Constance Debré, and others, the book reveals a body of work that is at once diaristic and political, tender and defiant. It is a testament to a life lived through looking, one that insists on visibility without surrendering complexity. I spoke with Rivera from his home in Los Angeles. Our conversation moved between memory and philosophy, between laughter and loss, returning always to the question that anchors his work: how to love, and to be seen, in a world that has so often refused both. It was about giving people what they wanted: to see them as how they wanted to be seen. If someone believed they were a star, then that’s exactly how I photographed them. And, to me, they were stars. I wanted to start by asking about the new book, Propiedad Privada. The title feels loaded. When I read it—Propiedad Privada, Private Property—I think of ownership, intimacy, maybe even boundaries. How did you land on that phrase? It's a song by Lucha Reyes, the Peruvian singer (not to be confused with the Mexican singer of the same name). It’s not about real property, it's about the stuff that’s in you: the things that are you, the things you’ll take with you. I feel that we queer folk—maybe not so much young people—but I know a lot of us old farts had to create this inner life that we were rarely able to expose because of fear for our safety. But it was our own, you know? The one thing we owned. It was the one place that we could be ourselves. So the work is about that, about that which is ours—that love between two people—you can’t buy shit like that. You know what I mean? This is not monetary. As a young person, I had a very big fantasy life—and throughout my life, this inner me has been something that I own. That’s mine. That I’ll take with me to my next life. That’s something I was thinking about in your photographs. When I look at the photographs in Propiedad Privada there is an insistence on beauty no matter where the photos are taken, or whether they’re of people that might not always be recognized, or moments that might usually be kept private. What does beauty mean to you in your practice? Girl, at the time I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms. I documented my life and the people around it: the people that I cared about, the people that I wanted to preserve and relive. Because that’s really what it was about. It was really a time machine. But by the 90s a lot of these people just were dying off so quickly. Sometimes I wasn’t even able to give them the prints because they were gone. There’s something about them—it doesn’t matter where they are, what time of day or night—there’s a timelessness to them perhaps because of how you make everyone look so beautiful. It’s how I view them. If I’m going to take a photo of you it's because I like you. I feel that this comes out in the work. It’s like that with any medium, but especially photography. Look at Diane Arbus for example, her work is just like her. She made everyone look freaky, because she saw the world through that lens. Everything was frightening to her, she chose to photograph those fears, and you can see it in her photos. I photographed the same kind of people but I made them look amazing because that's how I saw them. Everything you’re looking at in my photographs had something to do with me. And so, you could almost say I’m in the photo. I think the reason why my work might be a little different is because I wasn't making a documentary, I was a part of what was going on. Also photography was expensive, especially when I started. A roll of film used to cost you as much as a burrito. I wish I could’ve taken more photos, but it was prohibitive. Back then we, and I mean, not just Latino folk but poor folk—were usually documented by other people. Where this is something where they’re being documented by themselves, where we’re documenting ourselves. As far as the photographs in Propiedad Privada, it's very different from the first book [Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City]. The first one was really a gift to Los Angeles, because I always felt that it was criticized for all the wrong reasons. Or, I should say, it was criticized without ever taking us into account: Latino folk here. Whenever people are critical of LA, it is always about the west side. Whenever people talk about Los Angeles, and everyone trying to make it and being fake, superficial, etc—that was never my experience. Most people here didn’t fantasize about being fucking Hollywood starlets. I mean, maybe, of course, one or two here or there, but we didn’t lose sleep over it. These neighborhoods, by the time the book came out, were no longer Latino neighborhoods. I originally thought of the first book in response to what I saw was disappearing out of LA. I’m like, “I need to leave a testament that we were once here.” It was like a living testament that we once lived in Los Angeles—that it was once not just our city, but a city that we thrived in, that all this stuff happened in, all this shit that went right under popular culture’s nose. It’s funny you bring up the geography of Los Angeles because another thing I really like about this book is a kind of mapping of communities through portraiture. Do you see your photographs as building a geography and history of queer love in LA or queer Latino love in LA? We have always been put in these fucking categories, and I hoped that with that book that could change. Because we’re all those things, you know? We’ve been involved in so many moments in culture. For example, when you think of punk rock in the US you never think of Latinos. Alicia Armendariz started one of the first punk bands in Los Angeles and in 1976 was opening for the Sex Pistols. But because we weren't good at documenting what we did or put it out there things like this went unnoticed. There is power in photographs, and whoever is in power gets to say what gets included and excluded from history. This second book, Propiedad Privada, as much as it is about love, it's also about the end of love. I had all these photos of people and all their multiple partners, all their exes. It's funny how people go through life and every time they’re with someone they think “this is going to be forever.” It's also about the way we love and—I know this will sound whacky—but also how we see and love ourselves. I grew up being fetishized by all the men around me, after a while it didn’t even register anymore. This idea that just for being Latino—even as pale as I am—the fact that I’m Mexican put me in this category. I always wondered how much of this we internalize and begin to view the world through that gaze and not our own. What does desire look like to us? This book is about that. Taking our love and putting it out there. In most of the photos of me in the book, I was in love, and I think that’s evident in the photos. I’m looking at this photo right now, in the book. I wanted to ask you about these photos specifically. It’s Bianco in Silverlake in ‘94, and then on the next page it’s the photo of Amy, you, and Bianco, and you’re photographing it through the mirror. Those are the photos I was thinking about when I was asking about beauty. You know a lot about photography, so you know, portraiture is controversial in its own way. But in these photos there’s this generosity to the people in them. It’s all love, I mean, this book is really about love. Reynaldo Rivera: Carla, Echo Park, 1997.  Reynaldo Rivera: Bianco, Reynaldo, Echo Park, ca. 1992. Reynaldo Rivera: Patrons, Little Joy, 1996 Reynaldo Rivera: Pamela, Echo Park, ca. 1998 Reynaldo Rivera: Richard, downtown Los Angeles, 2023 Your photographs never feel exploitative. Maybe it’s because they were made for you, or come from within your world. How do you approach making work that feels that intimate? It's not something you can approach. You have to really be in it, the moment, present. I never thought of those photographs as just portraits. When I was shooting in the clubs, the drag shows—all of that early work—it wasn’t about documenting “cross-dressers” or looking at anyone through some outsider lens. It was about giving people what they wanted: to see them as how they wanted to be seen. If someone believed they were a star, then that’s exactly how I photographed them. And, to me, they were stars. They were as grand as Marlene Dietrich or Faye Dunaway. Honestly, I’ve always thought the knock-offs were better anyway. Those performers were the leading stars in my movie, because everything was my movie. I tried to photograph them through their own eyes, to show them as they imagined themselves to be, not as I saw them. In those moments on stage, they fully believed in their own transformation. Back then, in the late eighties and early nineties, those backstage spaces were private and off-limits to most people. Many of the girls’ families didn’t even know about that part of their lives, and within the queer community they were still treated as outsiders. I only gained access because of a performer named Mrs. Alex, who invited me into the dressing room and told everyone to chill out because I was taking her picture. That’s where so many of my favorite photographs were made. Most of those women are gone now. They didn’t live to see the century turn, and that’s something that still breaks my heart. It’s like you’re reading my mind because a thought I had about the photographs is that as beautiful as they are, there is also a darkness in them. Mija, you’re Latina. You know death isn’t darkness. It’s part of life. It’s sad to me now, but at the time it barely registered, because when you’re young, life keeps moving; it doesn’t stop for anyone. Looking back, I get all dramática and tragic about it, because it’s heartbreaking that they never got to see what came after. I mean, what’s happening now with trans visibility—it’s still fucked up, but at least there’s a moment, a light, a kind of recognition. They never had that. They deserved to be celebrated, to have their moment in the spotlight, to feel, even for a second, like a whole bag of chips. I also wanted to ask about your own role in the photographs. Because you not only take them, but you’re in many of them in very intimate situations. I’m in it to win it. Well, mija, to be your true self, without shame, without apology, to own who you are and what you desire, whatever that looks like—can we dare to look at ourselves that way? To see through our own vision and strip away all the exterior shit we’ve learned along the way—all those ideas of who others think we are? That’s the hard part, especially for young people now. They’re bombarded by the media from every direction, constantly being told who they are, what they should want, what they should look like. It’s exhausting. It’s time to turn some of that noise off and figure out who we are—collectively, yes, but also individually. What does desire look like to you? Because it’s gotten blurry with all that fetishism, all that projection of what others think we’ve been. Does that make sense? Because you’re very much involved in the photos as a participant, how do you negotiate that tension of being in them, but also being the one who is documenting those moments? Bitch, I was having sex in those photos—I wasn’t negotiating anything, I just thought, oh my god, this looks cool. You can see the one of Bianco fucking me—I’m in the mirror, and I just grabbed my camera as he was sticking it in and took the photo, boom. I think sex is one of those places where you become truly vulnerable. That’s one of the beautiful things about having sex with someone you’ve been with for a while—all those walls start to fall away. You get to a point where you can just be with each other without worrying you might fart or have bad breath or whatever else comes up at the beginning. Some of the images in the book are from that time—some from the early days, some later. There’s one image of Bianco’s back, taken in a mirror’s reflection—him lying there, his back exposed. I still remember what I felt when I took that photo. It was thrilling, but also full of anxiety and fear. One of my exes had just died of AIDS, and that shadow was always there. You can’t talk about art, photography, or anything queer from the ’80s or ’90s without reckoning with that reality. How do you feel about the word archive? Well, first, I never thought about any of this in those scholarly terms. Girl, I dropped out in the sixth grade—you think I was out here thinking about archives? No. Not at all. Now I do. I didn't have the language for it back then but I did know there was something there that made it art. So “archive”? No. But I did start to see the need for documenting by the 90s because so many people around me were disappearing—dying of AIDS and drug addiction. I began to see what I was doing as documenting something that was vanishing right in front of me. So in that sense, yes, I did start to think about saving it for the future. Because I thought this stuff was cool, important, and that younger generations should know we existed, that we did this. That was there. But eventually I had to step away—for my own sanity. Your photographs feel protective but also deeply open—you really let us into everything. What do you think about the risk in that? There’s so much vulnerability in the work, and you’re putting so much of yourself out there. I know. But, believe me, I’m afraid. Why are you afraid? My fear isn’t about showing myself—it’s about how the work will be perceived. I worry that people won’t really see it, that they’ll just reduce it to porn. I mean, I hope that whoever picks up this book is already in a different headspace, that they understand what it is. But still, that’s my fear—that someone will look at it and think, “Oh, this is just pornographic.” Because it’s not that. That was never the intention. Yes, the images are explicit—there’s a lot of cock and balls, sure—but it’s not about that. As strange as it sounds, even the act of turning the camera on myself was difficult. I can’t even look at some of those photos—they’re me, and still, it’s hard. But at the same time, I feel this need to break that shame, to break that fear, and just say, fuck it. I’ve lived my whole life that way, so why not end it that way too? My fear at this moment is that it's exposing the community. We’re putting so much of our culture out there with Drag Race, Queer Eye, etc. Can it actually be making us vulnerable? How we’ve communicated and shared with each other is no longer just for us, it's mainstream now and that could be dangerous. You really get a sense that there is a lot at stake in this work because you’re putting so much of yourself and your friends out there. I’m not putting everything out there. The real, personal work feels like an exorcism for me. It’s a way to release the inner anxieties and fears I grew up with—being queer, loving men. I still remember the amazement I felt after being with a man, lying there and realizing how impossible that moment once seemed. I grew up in a small town in Mexico where being queer was worse than spitting on Jesus. As a kid, I never imagined I’d one day be holding a man, kissing him, feeling that closeness. Those moments felt miraculous to me. That’s the part that isn’t literally in the photographs, but somehow it is. Making these images was a way to purge those fears I was raised with. My mother—she’s still terrified that people will think she’s a lesbian. That fear runs deep. I think, in some way, all this work has been about breaking that chain. It’s funny you ask about this, because I’ve never really let myself think about it—if I did, I’d probably stop the presses. The truth is, most of what’s in the book isn’t what most people would choose to show of themselves. None of it was put out because I thought we looked great or glamorous or any of that. In most cases, I just thought the photo itself was good—visually interesting. I really tried to remove myself from it, because otherwise, I don’t think I could have looked at it at all. The essays in the book are very personal and provocative too. How did you decide on the writers? A glad you mentioned this, because this book is as much about the writing as it is about the photographs. The people I invited to contribute are writers whose work often deals with love—its presence, its absence, the ways it connects or fails to connect us. I wanted to hear from them because I’ve always wanted to understand what makes people tick when it comes to love. What the fuck is love, anyway? It means something different to everyone. I wanted these writers to help me think through that. When I was a kid growing up in Mexico, in this little small town, I remember my first crush—we were in first grade, making out behind a book in class. I thought I was in love. I can barely remember his face now, but I remember that feeling of being happy. Of course, life had other plans. Things happened that made love feel more complicated, darker. Over time, all those experiences piled up and shaped what love means to me now. I think we all end up creating our own definition of it, piece by piece, from everything we live through. The writing matches the photographs so well. It’s so in your face and direct. Just like the photographs. They’re not overpowering, it’s more like they flood you with emotion. I love Devan Diaz’s piece. Constance’s piece is amazing. I included Abdellah Taïa because I had read his book Arab Melancholia and there is a scene in his book that I lived, and it was very emotional for me. What is the scene? He gets dragged—he gets assaulted by all these young men, in Morocco, in Casa Blanca, I think? And they drag him into this room, and they’re beating him, and they’re going to rape him. It has an unexpected turn at the end, but I won’t tell you. I don’t want to give away the ending. Is there anything else you have coming up? I’m having a show in Mexicali, mija. It will be at the art museum of La Universidad Autonoma de Baja California (UABC). It’s also called Propiedad Privada. I was born in Mexicali; it's in the middle of nowhere but I am very excited. The curator got a massive grant, so we can put together the show I wanted to put on. The above conversation was conducted by Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, an artist living and working in Vancouver, BC.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Reynaldo Rivera, Zeneido, Adalberto, Boyle Heights, 2025. 

When you’ve been living on, or with, the internet for over a decade, it can be difficult to recall your first encounter with a writer that you’ve become closely acquainted with over the years. When that first encounter isn’t a book—but an essay, conversation, or even simply a diffuse involvement in a certain school of online writing—it absorbs into the larger web of your own personal internet ecosystem. I thought my first brush with Larissa Pham was when I read her essay Crush in The Believer, but upon revisiting it, I found it was only published in 2021, and it feels as though I’ve been reading Pham for much longer. “I know and have worked with a lot of Canadians,” Pham told me when I voiced this sensation to her. She cited proximity through the years to essayist and critic Haley Mlotek, for example, and having written for the short-lived but stunning Adult Magazine, run by Sarah Nicole Prickett. “We probably have some overlaps,” Pham said. These moments of overlap are really a sign of communion: of mutual interest or even fixation on certain works of art and the writers who write about them. And for Pham, one thread of interest is precisely this sensation of communion over art. When Pham’s last book, Pop Song, a collection of essays on art and intimacy, came out in 2021, she did an interview with Montréal literary podcast ‘Weird Era’ in which she said “intimacy is a matter of surfaces.” Most people, I think, would bring up imagery of depth when thinking about intimacy. But in Pop Song Pham was invested in interrogating surfaces for all that they imply (that which lies beneath them) but also what they themselves, being so intentional in their cautious representation, can offer. “When I say I have a crush on you,” Pham writes in the essay Crush, “what I’m saying is that I’m in love with the distance between us.” In addition to her own books, Pham’s work has been included in several anthologies about desire. Through all of Pham’s work, there is an attention to visual art. Artworks, and in many cases paintings, are used as sites to explore ideas, to prompt reflection, to coax out story. And now, in 2026, Pham is releasing her first novel, Discipline. Discipline is about a painter, Christine, who has given up her practice after a painful, power-imbalanced entanglement with her mentor and professor—who is, for the most part, referred to as ‘the old painter.’ Unable to continue with her art, she takes up writing, which leads her to publish a revenge-fantasy novel. The classical structure of the künstelrroman, the artist’s novel, or apprenticeship novel, follows a protagonist as they develop towards their eventual artistic success. Discipline warps this archetypical trajectory by tracing what happens when an artist’s progression is thwarted by an abuse of power that prevents development, when the artist is pushed into a different form of expression, and what happens when that secondary form is still soured by what happened, even when the work itself is a success. In her experimental book Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton has an essay on ekphrastic writing, ‘The Picture Held Us Captive.’ She considers fiction as a place in which we might ‘attend to the world.’ “The job of art is to make the world strange,” she writes, “rather than simply recognizing it out of habit.” Pham, I believe, after reading her work and speaking with her, agrees with this notion. Why else might a painting of a glacier make you think so much about divorce? Why else might the sudden simultaneous bloom of daylilies feel so related to a bright spot of a political movement? Why else might Discipline end the way that it does? What do painting and narrative have in common? One answer is they both simplify things [...] in making art we simplify, but in simplifying we can say something true. There are several essays in Pop Song that use a structure of cataloguing—numbered fragments or paragraphs—as the essay’s format. The essays oscillate between themes of intimacy, desire, engaging with cultural objects, and personal narrative, and you catalogue these revelations and anecdotes and moments. When I was reading Discipline, I thought about how it could be read as an expansion of that style. Each chapter of the first half of the book centres around visiting a new place, revisiting one of Christine’s relationships, and contending with one artist in particular. What does the cataloguing form allow you as a writer? I call them the list essays, but I think cataloguing is a better word. I wrote ‘Crush,’ ‘Dark Vessel,’ and ‘Camera Roll,’ which are all in that structure, at a residency in New Mexico, and I was reading—and this is a very millennial cliché—A Lover’s Discourse and Bluets. I was interested in how the numbering gave the essay an internal propulsion. There wasn’t a lot of connective tissue, it was really just bone. That was liberatory in terms of drafting those essays in particular. I was thinking of Pop Song as a catalogue of modern intimacy, and the push and pull that technology has on how we connect with each other. Although I think that book became more about the technology of writing and language and how those things come up as barriers between people. I’m still doing those same things in the first half of Discipline, and I think part of that is a product of wanting to write fiction and wanting to structure a book around these encounters with paintings and with people. Discipline actually began as a project—which it is not anymore—for a book called ‘Ten American Paintings.’ I wanted it to be very gnomic, almost hermit-like, little meditations on American painting. I was really interested in it not being read—I wanted to write something that was very private. But then I thought: what if I took this structure of encounters with paintings into fiction, and had a woman moving around the country looking at things? It is a very familiar form for me—art and viewership, and relationships—but when I was writing it, in fiction, it became almost all connective tissue, in a way. Fantasian was fiction, and you’ve written short fiction as well, but from Pop Song to Discipline, how was that jump of forms? I love writing fiction, I would say it’s my first love. Realistically, I couldn’t picture a way to get a career off the ground as a fiction writer, so I started with writing book reviews and essays, because those are things that you can actually publish and make money doing. And I do love the essay form. But what unites those three projects is first person. First person in Discipline allowed me space for some of those essayistic meditations that I really enjoy writing. Christine thinks a lot, and it was really enjoyable to think in her voice. But the exciting part is that in fiction, so many other things enter the formal mix: character, plot, pacing. There’s a flexibility to first person that I really enjoy, and a way you can move that first person closer or further. There are moments in the text that are very Outline-esque, where Christine recedes so far back to let another character tell their story. And [Rachel] Cusk didn’t invent that, the porous narrator is a nineteenth century thing, you know? Like, there’s a guy who’s like ‘I keep the ledgers in this town, and I’m going to tell you about all the affairs!’ Or like in The Secret History. In Pop Song you have these really precise moments between the narrator and unnamed ‘characters.’ In Discipline, because it’s fiction, was this a place where you felt like you could expand beyond the surface intimacies you were interested in tracing in Pop Song? Pop Song is about the narrator—which in that case is me—trying to exert a power over her life through storytelling. In Discipline it’s much more about Christine listening, her porousness. Something I had written on a sticky note on my computer was: ‘how should we live?’; I was thinking of Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? Christine is interested in how other people live, so I wanted to allow her these long glimpses into other people’s lives. I realized that’s a way to get to talk about ideas, and I really like when novels have conversations about ideas. You’re doing a lot of ekphrastic writing in this book, but through the lens of a character. It’s funny you bring up Cusk because I returned to Second Place as I was reading Discipline, feeling this Cusk-connection. I wanted to see if there was anything in the books that felt like they were speaking to each other. There was this one passage where the narrator of Second Place is talking about the idea of things happening to you, and you can’t remember a time before they were happening to you—in this case, the narrator’s experience of being criticized—so they feel inseparable from your sense of self. And then the passage comes to: “But my point is that there’s something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you some relief. They give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the space has been taken up because the criticism got there first.” I was interested in this idea of a painting functioning as a location. I have my own ideas about what Christine’s perspective on the function of paintings for her might be, but I was curious what you thought of as the function of paintings for you. I really admire Cusk, and clearly this book is in dialogue with her work, but I also don’t agree with her on a lot of things. On what art is, on what relationships are… I find Cusk to be kind of cynical, and maybe a little bit more down on the human condition than I am—that’s probably a sweeping generalization, but I disagree with her sometimes as much as I respect and admire her. I find Second Place to be a book about the tyranny of artmaking. Speaking as myself and my own relationship with painting, there are two reasons why I love it. As a craft, it’s so enjoyable. It feels really good to paint. And the formal vocabulary: shape, colour, stroke, texture, surface—I really enjoy looking at all of that, and looking at how other people have done it. This is probably something I gave Christine; she’s interested in the formal architecture of painting, always talking about brushstrokes and the way things are composed. My second love of painting, which I didn’t really give to Christine, it’s just for me, is: it’s just such a different medium from writing. You look at a painting and you look everywhere. When you pick up a book, it’s a prescribed form. There are lots of people who have tried to interfere with the form of the novel or narrative, I’m personally not that interested in that, I’m not a language poet. But with painting, it’s completely different, and maybe that’s why I’ve never tried to disrupt writing, because painting is right there, all at once. It gives you more the more you look at it. And maybe there’s a secret third thing for me, which is that painting is so rich. There’s just so much in a visual language that can be conveyed, and when you call upon it in writing, it brings so much power. Invoking the spirit of Edward Hopper, invoking the spirit of Vija Celmins. Brings this rush of associations in a way that I don’t think I was completely aware of when I first started. If I may quote your own book back to you… I’m ready! There’s this spectacular line that relates I think to Christine’s perspective on painting, but I think can relate to writing too. She says: “Life was all around us, all the time. Sometimes, I thought, it felt like there was too much of life to handle—too much detail, all cramped into reality, from which we could rarely escape. There was no filter, no strategic compression of narrative through which we could fast-forward—just the onslaught of each moment and its accompanying sensation.” I wonder if this relates to Christine’s impulse around painting as a way of existing outside of time, away from the clutter of life. What do painting and narrative have in common? One answer is they both simplify things. When Christine is thinking about how overwhelming life is, sometimes there is too much life, and there’s too many memories. And Christine’s approach has been to rewrite her own memory, to become this sexy bitch and kill her abuser. That’s the way she deals with it. And maybe it gestures towards the larger project of artmaking, which is that in making art we simplify, but in simplifying we can say something true. Now that we’re talking about the novel within the novel, I was thinking about the term ‘mise-en-abîme,’ which translates to ‘placing into the abyss,’ and is an art history term for a painting that has a small version of itself within the painting. I think I first learned about it in a class that was talking about Velazquez’s painting ‘Las Meninas’ where there’s a small mirror within the painting, reflecting the subjects of the painting, so that there’s a doubling in the image. And so ‘mise-en-abîme’ is this idea where there’s a mirror or a small version of the image you’re looking at placed within the work you’re looking at. There’s the sensation of infinite reflecting. In Discipline, there’s the novel within the novel, and we don’t read it but we learn about it. How were you contending with the novel within the novel as you were writing? I love a metanarrative, I love thinking about what is it that we’re doing when we write, and what is it that we’re doing when we try to make something. From the beginning, I knew that Christine had written something. It seemed important that I not include sizable sections of the book for logistical reasons. I don’t really enjoy reading long sections of a book within a book, and it has to be handled really well. It’s not always effective either. And you maybe don’t get that quality of the mise-en-abîme in the same way if the novel within the novel is taking up the same amount of room as the actual novel you’re reading. It has to be buried, or placed. There’s something really fascinating about knowing that Christine’s novel exists, but not actually reading it. It’s better when some things are a mystery, too. The very first draft of Discipline didn’t include the fragments between chapters that are in the first half of the book, and those were inspired by my Canadian editor, who suggested including excerpts of Christine’s book. I was thinking about Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, where it has these ambiguous bolded sections, where you don’t know the POV. So those interludes are the only text we have of Christine’s actual writing, and I wanted those fragments to feel different tonally. I think Christine is a pulpier writer than I am. To me the most important function of Christine’s own novel is how she talks about it and how she comes to her own understanding over the course of the book that she was constructing something in order to live, she was doing her own bending and twisting and versioning of the truth. And that’s what the old painter says about it—that he could recognize it and didn’t recognize it. Book Cover for Discipline. Sourced via. In my preparatory notes, I have a question under the heading: Being forsaken through the patheticness of authority figures—a bit of an absurd line that I wrote after reading the poignant, hilarious, and slightly devastating moment in ‘Dark Vessel’: “a professor accidentally left a whole page of porn tabs open in his browser while trying to navigate to a YouTube clip from The Birds. It wasn’t the moment itself that bothered me; it was that I was paying so much to be lectured at by someone who didn’t understand the concept of a private browsing session.” This struck me because it aligns with a significant theme you've taken much further in Discipline with Christine and the old painter: the way that trauma and pain can also be twinned with a strange mix of other feelings when the person holding power both hurts you, but also reveals themselves to be pathetic in a variety of ways. Without giving too much about the book away, I'd love to hear how you approached such a thorny theme, and how you were able to find yourself writing towards a place that breaks new ground on this subject (as I believe Discipline does). Once I decided that they would meet, I became interested in finding a way to equalize Christine and the old painter somehow, to bring them to each other’s level. Their age gap, which feels so significant when Christine is in her twenties as a graduate student, seems to collapse a decade later—because they’re both truly adults, they’ve become peers. Even the moniker of the “old painter,” while being appropriately sinister, is Christine’s attempt to knock him down a bit, to take away some of his power. I’m really interested in this connection you drew because, though it wasn’t my intention, there clearly is a thread there—this aura of the pathetic that lives inside men who would like to have power over us, or who do. And maybe it’s that weakness, or frailty, or bathos within a certain kind of man that leads him to want to claim power over someone younger and less resourced. Or conversely, maybe it’s the recognition that power gained through exploitation isn’t real power which creates that aura of the pathetic. With the old painter’s character, I was interested in finding moments where his humanity is revealed to Christine—she’s spent so much time thinking of him as a villain, but in reality he’s just a guy. There’s something humbling, maybe even embarrassing, about realizing that this monster that you’ve created in your head isn’t really a monster, right? She’s plotted all this violence, and yet. And at the same time he has done her harm, he has changed the course of her life. I was really interested in the ambiguity and yes, thorniness of this situation. I know that Christine’s story isn't particularly new, but I did want to take it into new territory by having these characters actually speak to each other—I wanted to see what would happen if they could be honest with each other, and what it might take for them to get there. Without giving anything away, part of that meant giving these characters things to risk—both of them. Some of my favorite scenes are the ones in Maine, where Christine and the old painter are just hanging out, talking, almost verbally sparring. So much arises in that discomfort, but I think that messiness is what makes us human. How do you approach ekphrastic writing? It’s different whether I’m doing it in fiction or nonfiction, because that will change whether it’s me or the character working through it. I teach a graduate literature seminar on short experimental books, in which we read Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. I’m a big fan of Sloan, she’s an arts writer, and she does classic art reviews, but she also works visual art into her essays in a really compelling way. In Borealis, she writes about these Lorna Simpson paintings of glaciers. There’s a beautiful passage where she describes a painting, but also uses her point of view to exert something onto the painting. She’s reporting on this encounter between her and the painting that’s so charged and so personal. She’s like, ‘I think this painting is about divorce.’ And when I look at that painting, I don’t think that, but she had this encounter with it, and she has written it down for everyone to see what kind of encounter she had. And so what I tell my students is that in arts writing, there’s a component that’s very art historical, where you’re thinking about material, you’re thinking about technique, the history of the sales and the gallery that represents them, the art historical aspects, but there’s also the point of view that you can provide. What do you see in something, what touches you? What does it awaken in you? And that is the place where I begin my more creative ekphrastic writing. That’s something that makes its way into the fiction, because what a character notices can contribute to their characterization or to the plot. There’s a lot of personality that can go into arts writing or ekphrastic writing. It’s a double lens that you’re writing through, when you’re writing ekphrastic writing in fiction. And I want to talk about Christine’s relationship to fiction. There’s a part with her ex-partner, where they’re talking about how he can’t handle the gaps between the book she’s written, which has bent or moved the facts of reality so that the book (which is fiction) portrays what feels truest to her experience. He is having a hard time dealing with that gap, balancing the external facts versus her internal facts. There’s another passage where she’s talking about the idea of roleplay with a partner, saying, “What my ex and I had never learned was how the act of being someone else can set the true self free. When we pretended, we layered on levels of artifice. Instead of revealing something we couldn’t say any other way, we just covered everything up.” When you’re writing fiction, do you have a method for yourself to work through when there may be a level of artifice, or when the construction is allowing you to speak about something that feels more true? I cannot abide by an emotionally untrue moment in a book. When I read something and feel that the character wouldn’t do what they’re doing, then I don’t trust the writer anymore. I really want to trust the world of the book, and if the world of the book starts messing that up—and not in a productive or experimental or fun way—there’s a collapse somewhere, a hole. When I feel myself moving towards a place of artifice in my own work, the work gets flat and I get stuck. If I’ve written myself into a corner, it’s because I started doing something that’s not emotionally true or convincing. It doesn’t mean that it has to have actually happened to me, or even someone I know, but if I am writing and there’s a false note, I can get only two paragraphs past that, and then I hit a wall. Fiction is all about emotional truth for me, so when the work is flowing it’s because it’s coming from that place of emotional truth. So I can’t say exactly what the mechanism is, other than when it stops working. You have a newsletter, ‘Yield Guide,’ which is about observations on nature, “devoted to slow looking,” as you call it. We haven’t talked that much about the second half of the book, and I don’t want to give away anything to readers, but there is an attention to the natural world that comes up in that section. When did you find yourself turning to writing that engages with nature? I grew up in Oregon, which is a very pro-plant state, and in Portland, which is a very pro-plant city. I grew up with a familiarity with the natural world that I assumed everyone else had. I never considered myself outdoorsy until I moved to New York City. When I moved to the Hudson Valley in 2023, I started really thinking about nature writing. There was a moment where I realized all these plants do something. I’d also been spending more time in nature because I was in a grad program at Bennington. Katy Simpson Smith, a faculty member there, wrote a really great book called The Weeds, which is all about plants, and each entry in the book is inspired by a specific species of plant found in the Roman Colosseum. If you’re interested in nature writing and how a novel can be structured in an unconventional way, I definitely recommend it. Ultimately, it all started with noticing—I tell my students that noticing and paying attention is the first step of being a writer. I wanted to translate this experience I was having with the natural world, wanting to learn things, notice things. Especially being up here too, you feel the weather and seasons a lot more than you do in a city. I live in a pretty small town. I remember in the summer, right around the time that Zohran Mamdani won the primary, all the daylilies were in bloom, they all popped open at the same time, and I was just like, oh my god: celebration. The above conversation was conducted by Emma Cohen, a writer, event programmer, and editor living in Toronto. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Photo by Sylvie Rosokoff.

Public Parking Publication is delighted to announce the participants in our 2026 editorial residency. For this program, we aim to work with thinkers who are adjacent to or outside the realm of the arts as part of Public Parking’s ongoing efforts to broaden the scope of ideas we feature and the communities we reach. This project invites guest editors to serve as residents of the publication for an extended 12-month period. Throughout this time, they will work with our team to publish a series of texts, either self-written or in collaboration with other writers of their choosing. Previously, we've hosted eunice bélidor, Tammer El-Sheikh, Amy Fung, Nasrin Himada, and Shiv Kotecha. This year we are honoured to have host Minh Nguyen, Abdellah Taïa, and Zoé Samudzi. Minh Nguyen is a writer and curator. She is the director and curator of Dogma Collection in Ho Chi Minh City, and is on the editorial team of e-flux journal. She has organized exhibitions and film programs at Metrograph, Wing Luke Museum, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Chicago Cultural Center. Her art and film criticism has appeared in publications such as e-flux, Mousse, and Momus, and she has received a Warhol Arts Writers Grant and Fogo Island Arts Writing Award. She is the author of Memorial Park (2025). Abdellah Taïa is a French-Moroccan novelist and filmmaker. His acclaimed autobiographical novels and stories, widely translated from French, often foreground queer narratives within Arab communities. Some of his published works include 'Infidels', 'An Arab Melancholia', 'A Country for Dying', 'Living in Your Light', and 'Salvation Army', which he adapted for a full-length film. His other films, which have premiered at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, include 'Cairo Streets' (2025), 'Cabo Negro' (2024), and 'Never Stop Shouting' (2023). His writing has also been recognized by the prestigious Prix Goncourt and Prix de Flore. He currently lives and works in Paris. Zoé Samudzi is a Provost’s Fellow to Faculty postdoc in the Department of African-American and Africana Studies and a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Her work contends with genocide memory and denialism, mythologies of the postcolonial African state, and the politics of visuality. Samudzi is also a writer and associate editor of Parapraxis Magazine, as well as a co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018). She is a 2026 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant grantee for her project, “The Citizen and the Anthropophage: Postwar/Postcolonial Italian Memory and the Cannibal Boom,” a 2026 resident at La Becque’s Principal Residency Program, and an awardee of the 2026 Fire Station Studios' International Curator Residency. Cover images: From left to right:  Minh Nguyen by S*an D. Henry-Smith, Abdellah Taïa by Abderrahim Annag, and Zoé Samudzi Courtesy of Zoé Samudzi.

In August of 1945, the friendship between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and writer Anaïs Nin turned into a nasty feud. Deren immortalized the clash in a poem dedicated to Nin: For Anaïs Before the Glass The mirror, like a cannibal, consumed,carnivorous, blood-silvered, all the life fed it.You too have known this merciless transfusionalong the arm by which we each have held it.In the illusion was pursued the visionthrough the reflection to the revelation.The miracle has come to pass.Your pale face, Anaïs, before the glassat last is not returned to you reversed.This is no longer mirrors, but an open woundthrough which we face each other framed in blood.1 Their relationship had initially blossomed as neighbours in Greenwich Village and they eventually became collaborators on the basis of their shared interests in self-reflection and living their lives as artistic experiments. The rupture between the two occurred because of their opposing views on postwar aesthetics, namely how new technologies would impact the psychology of individuals, and artistic production in turn. While Nin preferred narcissism as an artistic strategy, obsessively writing diaries in hopes of discovering deeper truths about herself, Deren opted to experiment with techniques of self-recognition, believing that narcissism was a failure to consider oneself amidst external conditions. Deren’s poem alludes to the trappings of narcissism, wherein obsessively examining the self amounts to the endless repetition of woundings and misrecognition; a compulsive interest in plumbing the depths of oneself does not always create a fruitful foundation for relationships with others. The motif of the mirror occurs again and again in Deren’s film and writing oeuvre, a mark of her concern with the psychodynamics of relating to others while forming distinct identities. A hooded figure with a mirrored face originates in her first experimental film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)—a figure which has recurred in art and visual culture over the near century since. Running through these examples are the shaky interpretations and projections of self and other: dissociation, fragmentation, and the potential for integration. The mirror mask stands in for a psychic space in which it is never quite clear whether the real or the fantasy is more disturbing, positing that the two dimensions sit side by side in discourses on identity formation. This proposition highlights the disagreement between Deren and Nin on the relationship between individuality and postwar shifts in technology and culture, and how artistic practice has responded to these changing structures. Namely, by orienting more and more towards video-centric industries like surveillance and television as outgrowths of wartime military research, slowly morphing into social media and an influencer-marketing industrial complex over time, ultimately a socio-cultural climate oversaturated with self-regard and anti-social tendencies has developed, which Deren would have abhorred. The central epistemological shift post-WWI was towards identity; psychoanalysis and anthropology stepped in to answer questions around identity formation through appeals to otherness. Jacques Lacan wrote of ego development in the mid-1930s with his theory of “the mirror stage,” suggesting that the ego is founded by first observing oneself in the mirror as a child, thus seeing the self as an image. Prior to this, Lacan proposed, the body is perceived of in pieces; the imaginary unity produced in the mirror stage, then, is forever threatened by this memory of fragmentation, which deploys the ego like an armour against anyone and anything that represents an external danger. Lacan’s theory of the subject is not necessarily historical, though it describes a modern subject that is paranoid, guarded against otherness broadly (both within and without).2 While the discourses of the 1960s and ’70s derided the authoritarian character of institutions and proclaimed the death of the universal humanist subject with revolutionary intent, through texts such as Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the 1990s more firmly naturalized identity discourses in the form of multiplicity, bringing heterogeneity and previously ignored subjectivities to the fore in cultural and political settings. Western conceptions of individuality prevail through Modernism and Postmodernism, changing form periodically in relation to shifts in culture and technology, often plunging people deeper into paranoid self-regard that permeates the cultural as much as the social. The mirror mask has reoccurred in culture to continue a long exploration of the interdependence between reality and fantasies of the self, a matrix we can never really grasp nor escape. The search for clarity never ends, like reflections upon reflections that go on forever. The art of cinema, and performance by extension, is a technology of direct encounters with the self, the other, desire, fantasy, and reality, allowing us to think visually about how to reconstitute being in the world. By overcoming limits of time and space, cinema operates with fictions that use the coordinates of the mind as it attempts to put the self back together, as it were. Deren made Meshes of the Afternoon at age 26 after her father died of a heart attack. Previously working as a journalist—of which he disapproved—she used her inheritance money to buy a Bolex 16mm, changed her first name, and took up filmmaking. Deren’s relationship with her father was so foundational to her identity that she wrote to a friend following his death: I was a growth from and upon his mind and soul so that I was always a part of him. That is why our relationship was almost pathological…. we always had to converse with a third person in the room whom we addressed, instead of each other. For we were really one person and you cannot speak to yourself… How can he be dead and I alive since we are one thing? Starring only herself and her second husband, Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon plays out Deren’s tumultuous internal struggle to differentiate herself from her deceased father. The film features four versions of Deren—personalities in conflict, one wields a knife that threatens to kill another—and the film culminates in Deren’s suicide, ostensibly from a piece of a broken mirror. Taken as a means of working out her self-proclaimed pathological relationship with her late father, the film suggests that she must “kill the father ‘organically’ inside her so that a core self can emerge.” Deren insisted that her work not be analyzed with a psychoanalytic lens, though it is near impossible to sidestep the self-reflexiveness of Meshes on the face of things, nor the biographical events that seem to undergird it. However, this kind of defensive refusal of psychoanalytic interpretation is often precisely what indicates the looming presence of a deep-seated psychological wound coming to the surface. The hooded, mirror-faced figure steps in as an emblem of this wounding, a lifelong failure to constitute one’s self. Some critics and scholars suggest that it is a spectre for confronting one’s own death. This would seem apt in context, as Deren questions how she continued to live when her father had died if they shared one singular identity. The constant reflecting in the film suggests the self breaking apart into pieces, toward the pre-mirror stage, on the one hand attempting to become distinct from her father, and on the other, feeling literally fragmented as a result of his permanent absence. Deren’s ego disintegration in the film goes through quintessential processes in analysis from alienation and dissociation, toward the possibility of reintegration beyond death. The making of this film in the very recent wake of Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage makes for an obvious citation, but this mirror mask’s function has stood the test of time even while epistemologies of the self have transformed, and amidst an expanded (technological) object domain for observing oneself. Like Lacan’s paranoid, post-mirror stage subject, the mirror mask is not historically determined but rather continues to function as a stand-in for the complexities of modern identity configuration, despite the ways in which media have accelerated the infiltration of the psychic and social structures that facilitate alienation throughout the past century. Carter Smith, “Koyaanisqatsi,” i-D Magazine 180, “The Forward Issue" (October 1998). Meshes of the Afternoon, directed by Maya Deren, 1943. © Tavia Ito, estate of Maya Deren, Re:Voir Video. One of the earliest reoccurrences of this figure, cloaked in black with an oblong mirror for a face, is in Sun Ra’s proto-Afrofuturist film, Space is the Place (1974), directed by John Coney. Struggling against the limits Sun Ra saw in earth-bound humanity, particularly for Black people, the film posits a Black future, drawing directly from Deren for the hooded, mirror-faced entity that accompanies Sun Ra to the distant planet. That the figure is a silent companion speaks once again to the idea of multiple selves defamiliarized from others, but reflects them back just as well. An October 1998 editorial in i-D magazine, titled “Koyaanisqatsi” after Godfrey Reggio’s eponymous 1982 film, likewise had Canadian actor-turned-model Shalom Harlow donning a black, cone-headed hood covering from Hussein Chalayn’s fall/winter ‘98 “Panoramic” collection, with a mirror mask sculpted into a face. During the runway show for this collection, several models wore these masks while turning and walking to observe themselves in standing mirrors on the stage. The show notes included a quote from Wittgenstein as the collection’s inspiration: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” Within the context of the mirror and the mirror mask, this framing suggests the failures of language to describe oneself or another, a faltering of recognition as it passes between us or passes us by. The 1990s saw the mirror mask enter the lexicon of music videos with Milla Jovovich’s homage to Deren in the video for her song “Gentleman Who Fell” (1994). Later, the directors of Yeasayer’s “Ambling Alp” (2010) and Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” (2010) both also admitted to direct influences through the lineage of Deren vis-à-vis Sun Ra. Both videos traffic in the psychedelic and futuristic, in a newly post-2008 world in which the full range of economic consequences had not emerged entirely, and when even artists’ visions of the future reached back into the twilight of revolutionary fervour from the 1970s. These contemporary examples reveal how an anxiety about visibility—a desire to somehow disappear and be seen all at once—is acculturated in the burgeoning plurality of knowable identities of the 1990s, in the shadow of the triumph of capitalism and a politically unipolar world, and when the world began to play out largely on television. Angelika Festa’s 1984 performance, You Are Obsessive, Eat Something, anticipates this conflicting anxiety-desire, also foregrounding its particularly gendered aspects. Festa stood for several hours at the side of a country road in a modest black dress and hood, hands and feet painted white, holding a bowl of fruit and wearing a mirror over her face. The only documentation of the performance exists in Peggy Phelan’s landmark 1993 book, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Phelan casts the crux of this work as tracing the “passing of the woman’s body from visibility to invisibility, and back again.” The mirror functions as a tool of recursion, through which both artist and spectator endlessly pass their appearance and disappearance back and forth to each other. Following in the footsteps of Deren’s hooded mirror-mask figure, Festa visually suggests a parallel with the concept of Deren’s multiple versions of self as they reflect the other, inciting fear. In one moment, Festa is hyper-visible because she presents herself as a faceless other. In the next, her facelessness disguises her position as a human subject, instead reflecting onlookers back to themselves. The presence of the mirror throws the obligation of visibility onto the spectator who is reflected in its surface, turning quickly to disidentification when this reflection is recognized as being tied directly to another. Phelan contrasts this with Yvonne Rainer’s film, The Man Who Envied Women (1985), in which the protagonist is a woman who is never actually shown in the film. The “drama” of Festa’s performance, Phelan writes, “hinges absolutely on the sense of seeing oneself and of being seen as Other,” which occurs for both parties simultaneously. In Rainer’s film, the woman cannot be seen, but in Festa’s work, the woman cannot see, and can only partially be seen. The mirror fragments the body by detaching it from the human identification tied to faciality; “Sight then is both imagistic and discursive.”3 The “complete” body withdraws to become a body in pieces once again. As a device meant for reflecting what is, the mirror as a replacement for the face results in further fragmentations and multiple disidentifications that affect the standard relations between people. What actually occurs through this defamiliarization? A rather noteworthy and unintentional answer to this query comes through in AMERICAN REFLEXXX, a 2013 performance work by self-described “reality artist” Signe Pierce, in which she went to the boardwalk of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, wearing a curved mirror mask over her face and renouncing the black hooded cloak for a blue mini-dress with lime green high heels. The performance itself was very simple, in that Pierce spent an hour walking the streets of the tourist strip being filmed by her then-partner, filmmaker Alli Coates, but what unfolded was an unpredictable and irreplicable first-hand examination of “dehumanization, mob mentality, [and] violence,” especially in relation to gender presentation and sexual otherness. The two had originally intended nothing more than to make an aesthetically beautiful video work of Pierce’s “cyborg” character to show at Art Basel Miami, but the performance ultimately culminated in an assault that left Pierce bleeding on the sidewalk. Almost immediately, a shirtless man approaches Pierce (who, to be clear, is a cis woman) and grabs her without her permission, sexually solicits her, and asks his friends to take his photo pretending to lick her masked face. Within a minute, Pierce is followed by a crowd that only continues to grow throughout the performance. One person can be seen multiple times throughout attempting to trip or slap Pierce; some hurl water from water bottles—eventually escalating to throwing full water bottles—but some of the most jarring harassment comes in the form of consistent transphobic comments and epithets. The climax of AMERICAN REFLEXXX occurs when an adult woman runs towards Pierce from behind and shoves her full force to the ground. Even while she lies motionless and bleeding, the crowd stands around filming her with their phones, insisting she take off the mask. In the minds of her aggressors, Pierce’s lack of a distinctly human face justifies the violence they inflict on her. What the performance reveals is a very deeply inscribed semiotic system for reading gender presentation and sexual difference in public space and the violence that ensues when someone does not conform. Deliberate facelessness by way of a mirrored mask conceals what might be the one signifier of her “real” identity, causing horrifying confusion, leaving her humanity open to interpretation. Pierce expressed later that with the escalating harassment and assault, her response was to be even more provocative, and it was important to her not to give her audience the satisfaction of forcing her to unmask. By de facto mirroring her surroundings, including those who approach and assault her, Pierce demonstrates how these onlookers do not see her as a person, and instead only see themselves. Those who encountered Pierce’s character during the piece decided on instinct that she was in the wrong place (that is, by daring to be in public), and punished her for it in myriad ways including non-consensual touching and sexual advances; had she been in one of the many strip clubs dotting the boardwalk of Myrtle Beach, the fetishistic, erotic, and enticing readings of the spectacle would have taken on different meaning within the sanctioned boundaries of fantasy and transactional contact (not to suggest that this is always safer). Following Pierce’s revelations on facelessness and gender performance, Spanish artist R. Marcos Mota performed The Ultimate Strategy in Drag at Centro Parrága, Murcia, as part of Disfonías curated by Jesús Alcaide in 2016. Wearing a mirror mask and layers of white lace and tulle, Mota proposes what they refer to as “ontological transvestism” (translated), considering the body as a process rather than an object. Facelessness here is a de-gendering, a suspension of fixed identity, used intentionally rather than what Pierce had uncovered accidentally. What persists regardless is the mirror as a tool of projection. The question of fantasy as it pertains to the gendered—or even non-gendered—body is nearly impossible to decouple. In the performance works of Festa, Pierce, and Mota, as Phelan writes of Festa: “The more dramatic the appearance, the more disturbing the disappearance.” For all three, the mirror is at once a mask and a means of reflecting the spectator (and their actions) back to them, but this element of the horror of facelessness seems to also justify, or at least hint at, some level of dehumanization. Art does not occur within a perfect moral universe since it is predicated on the pathologies of the one we actually inhabit. There is an inherent desire in all of us to know where we belong, to be able to place ourselves among others, and them amongst us. Inherent to cinema and performance is a crucial and unique opportunity to explore fantasy and reality horizontally; as such, we are able to stage fictions about who and what we are in order to understand. This is the offering of Deren’s work now: A prediction of our increasing alienation from the legacy and impact of post-war technologies into what we know them to be now. The mirror is the preindustrial analog of the camera, the TV, the surveillance apparatus, the smartphone. It predates what Rosalind Krauss designated the fundamental narcissism of early video. The intransigent triumph of individualism coalesces under fears of oneself, fears of the other, fears of desire, as well as the double-edged fear and desire of being observed. The mirror mask has reoccurred in culture to continue a long exploration of the interdependence between reality and fantasies of the self, a matrix we can never really grasp nor escape. The search for clarity never ends, like reflections upon reflections that go on forever. The above text was written by Angel Callander, a Toronto-based writer, editor and curator. Editorial support by Emily Doucet. Cover image: Signe Pierce, American Reflexxx, 2013. 14:02 min, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXn1xavynj8._______________________________________1 Ute Holl, “Moving the Dancers’ Souls,” in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill Nichols (University of California Press, 2001), 152.2 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press, 1996), 210.3 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 15.

Parasocial. Rage Bait. Vibe Coding. 67. Slop. Each of these terms has been dubbed “word of the year” by a major dictionary. All originated online, went viral, and spread offline, entering the parlance in a way that would have been unimaginable, say, fifteen years ago. While the very selection of “67” might well be “rage bait,” this glossary captures a year of epistemic exhaustion in which intimacy has been streamlined, outrage optimized, production accelerated, and signs stripped of signification within ever more opaque digital infrastructures. “Slop” might, in fact, sum it all up. Fungible and frictionless, slop is the low-quality AI-generated content that has flooded feeds this year. Selected by both Merriam Webster and Macquarie Dictionary, the term captures the logic of oversaturated systems geared toward mindless consumption. From this linguistic smattering, at year’s end, looking back on 2025, what comes to my mind is: “surreal.” Perhaps the appeal of the “surreal” lies in the affective resonances of the term connoting an intensely subjective phenomena that is less so seen or heard or known or learned than felt. It is precisely within these vertiginous conditions of the present that surrealist tactics regain analytical force. Surrealism dominated museum programming this year. The 100th anniversary of the movement officially inaugurated by André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924) spurred renewed institutional interest. Across blockbuster retrospectives and smaller thematic surveys, museums approached exhibition-making as a form of historical intervention, often through the critique and expansion of the Surrealist canon, long associated with an exclusive circle of white European men. From Ithell Colquhoun at Tate St. Ives to Alfredo Castañeda at The San Diego Museum of Art, numerous solo exhibitions have spotlighted long-marginalized figures who animated—and simultaneously complicated—Surrealism from the start. Exhibitions like Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes meanwhile sought to decenter Paris as the singular origin, spotlighting circulatory networks of exchange instead of more linear trajectories of influence. The bulk of these exhibitions shifted attention away from “Surrealism” as a discrete movement to instead track the divergent legacies of “surrealism” as a far-reaching intellectual project throughout the twentieth century. Surrealism: A Collective Dream at Tampere Art Museum, for example, incorporates more recent generations of artists like Sarah Lucas and Tony Oursler in dialogue with canonical fixtures like Yves Tanguy and Meret Oppenheim. Featuring work from 1964 to 2017, The Traumatic Surreal at Henry Moore Institute brings together German-speaking women artists who mobilized surrealist tactics to challenge the Nazi motto, “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” (“Children, Church, Kitchen”). The feminist angle of this post-war presentation featuring Birgit Jürgenssen, Renate Bertlmann, and Pipilotti Rist among others implicitly confronts the misogyny pervading much early Surrealism. Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum, one of three surrealism-adjacent museum exhibitions in New York City this fall, actively engages with the semantic slipperiness of this term by advancing a bold curatorial proposition: surrealism—not “‘Surrealism’ proper”—was a central current of artistic production in the 1960s. Museum Director Scott Rothkopf emphasized, “It’s a show about the surreal ways of picturing a world that had itself become surreal.” This shift away from the uppercase term coined by Apollinaire in 1917 toward its elastic lowercase counterpart is crucial to the curatorial conceit of the show. In embracing the capaciousness of “surrealism” to present more than 100 artists, however, the exhibition risks inadvertently emptying the term of meaning. At the same time, though, Sixties Surreal circumvents the tendency amongst shows like Forbidden Territories to expand the canon without more radically interrogating its structures, conforming to the prevailing patriarchal model of genealogical lineage. En masse, these exhibitions implicitly—or explicitly, in the case of But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism + Anti-Fascism in Lenbachhaus—evoke a parallel between the tumultuous, post-pandemic 1920s and the tumultuous, post-pandemic 2020s, both with the mounting incursion of fascism on a global scale. Though this might seem like low-hanging curatorial fruit, the most resonant exhibitions underscored that the early movement’s critique of “reason” amounted to a critique of authoritarianism. Surrealism, in ideal terms, emerges not as a style but a strategy, not as a closed historical chapter but a method for destabilizing rationality, revealing suppressed structures of power, and imagining otherwise. Leaving Sixties Surreal, I found myself fixated on the slippage between “Surrealism” and the “surreal” as a ubiquitous descriptor today. Beyond museum walls, “surreal” has become a malleable catch-all for phenomena that feel impossible, contradictory, or beyond comprehension. Where historical Surrealism asked the operational question of how to subvert reason to reveal unconscious desire, the register shifts with the surreal—which confronts the existential question of whether there is any stable ground from which to determine what is real, whatever that might mean. This article emerged as a reflection on “the surreal ways of picturing a world that had itself become surreal” in 2025. In effectively emulating the premise of Sixties Surreal, I run that same risk of expanding the already capacious buzzword to the point of meaninglessness, yet the very elusivity of the ubiquitous term seems apt in characterizing an elusive quality of the year. Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York September 24, 2025-January 19, 2026). Nancy Graves, Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII, 1968-69. Sourced via. Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025-January 19, 2026). Sourced via. The heightened sense of the surreal today seems surely tied to the ontological instability of the present. The “surreal”—as an affective sensation rather than an aesthetic mode or historicized phenomenon—indexes a world in which virtual and physical realms have become indistinguishable. This year felt different as we witnessed the accelerated erosion of mechanisms that once stabilized meaning, with the demise of shared narratives, grounded images, and stable information architectures. The “surreal” captures this ambient disorientation of life shaped by the opaque logic of algorithmic feeds, the unpredictable outputs of AI models, and viral microcultures with lifespans measured in hours. The centennial of Surrealism has coincided with seismic shifts in visual culture, with the proliferation of image generators like Midjourney, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, and Sora, which fabricate images with unprecedented sophistication at an unprecedented scale. While image manipulation dates back to the very inception of photography, the advent of free and low-cost generative AI systems since 2023 has revolutionized the mass production of imagery with little time, effort, or expertise. The ubiquitous generation of images without authorship, intention, or even clear referents feeds into a broader sense of reality itself becoming procedurally unstable. On the surface, generative AI might seem to fulfill the Surrealist dream of creation devoid of human consciousness. By such logic, automation delivers Breton’s founding fantasy of “pure psychic automatism” as a method of bypassing rational control to access unconscious desires. The image generator accordingly embodies “a kind of oblique search engine of the collective consciousness, liberated from any of the contextual social relations that would discipline what it produces.” Freudian associations with terms like AI “hallucination” describing a false or misleading output humanize these opaque systems, at a time when users turn to AI not only as a virtual assistant but also a therapist. The creators of “DALL-E” meanwhile deliberately aligned the system with the iconic mustached Spaniard, whose melted clocks have become a sort of metonym for Surrealism at large. Take Italian Brainrot, for example. The Surrealist analogy is particularly tempting when it comes to this subgenre of memes, which flooded Tik Tok in February with chimeric creatures like Chimpanzini Bananini, a chimpanzee-banana hybrid, and Lirilì Larilà, an elephant-cactus mash-up. These AI-generated characters recall the “exquisite corpse,” the Surrealist parlor game in which the blindfolded assembly of disparate fragments yielded bizarre figurative composites. With creation outsourced to AI instead of human partygoers, the algorithmic process likewise produces hybrid anatomies from charmingly scrambled signifiers resultantly opened up to free association. The nonsensical pseudo-Italian monikers meanwhile echo the linguistics of Dada, the movement preceding Surrealism that insisted on absurdity amid cultural alienation. Does “Dada,” a famously arbitrary and nonsensical label, not in fact sound like Italian Brainrot? These absurd memes are but one particularly prominent trend of “brainrot,” a broader aesthetic category of internet culture that insists upon recursive meaninglessness. The term—Oxford’s word of the year in 2024—reverses the logic of “brainwashing” with the suggestion of self-inflicted cognitive decline. As a coping mechanism of the Information Age, these insistently nonsensical memes evoke what Dean Kissick terms “vulgar images” as an antidote to “the rationalized views of a world that can no longer be explained.” On one hand, the recursive absurdity of brainrot dovetails with the Surrealist rejection of rationality. But the analogy quickly falters. Where Surrealist montage broke narrative links to access subliminal truths, brainrot breaks links simply for the sake of breakage, flouting expectations for meaning within an attention economy defined by overstimulation and exhaustion. Moreover, AI does not disclose the unconscious, but rather predicts outcomes through data compression. The composite visuals therefore emerge as artifacts of computational probability rather than fragments of latent desire. AI merely simulates irrationality through supremely rational systems optimized for virality. This distinction is crucial insofar as Surrealists wielded automatism as a parody of automation to critique the irrational remnants of “modernisms that value industrialist objectivity,” according to Hal Foster. By contrast, Italian Brainrot is inextricable from technocratic infrastructures, extending the logic of such capitalist systems, as superficial absurdity folds seamlessly into platform incentives. Furthermore, the content itself—billed as “slop”—is far from “meaningless.” Tralalero Tralala, a shark donning Nike sneakers, spreads Islamophobic rhetoric through scripts mocking Allah. Bombardilo Crocodilo (sometimes Bombardiro or Bombardino) is paired with audio describing the World War II-era aircraft with a crocodile head bombing children in Gaza. In actively advancing genocide as mimetic propaganda at viral scale, these memes elicit comparison with the sinister legacies of Futurism, perhaps more so than Surrealism or Dada. Futurist art and writing shaped the aesthetic identity of fascism through the glorification of technocratic progress. Mechanized creatures like Bombardilo Crocodilo exude masculinist aggression that echoes Futurism’s celebration of militaristic virility, while the frenetic looping format of the clips similarly privileges velocity over meaning. This comparison is sharpened by the consideration of Crocodilo alongside Futurism’s aeropittura as a glamorization of aerial bombardment. Simultaneously, as noted by Mel Ghidini, brainrot monikers like “Tung Tung Tung Sahur” recall Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), a concrete poem channeling the cacophonous rhythms of mechanical warfare, composed by none other than F. T. Marinetti, Mussolini’s then right-hand man. The staccato structure of the text resonates with the fragmented format of memes, which prompt thinking beyond any one isolated image. A similar machinic bravado animates Trump’s AI-generated propaganda, which channels established authoritarian iconographies through the slick precision of generative models. This year, in posts and reposts on Instagram, X, and Truth Social, we witnessed “Trump” masquerading as a lightsaber-wielding Jedi, a muscular comic book anti-hero, and a king. In one particularly staggering clip, the president appears incarnated as a golden monument within an unrecognizable Gazan landscape transformed into an opulent resort. These hypermasculine self-mythologies, to note just a few, do not aim to deceive so much as to structure fantasy, inviting identification instead of ironic detachment. Trump’s embrace of synthetic spectacle coincides with his administration’s aggressive constriction of culture through authoritarian tactics since inauguration in January. Like Trump’s caricatures, Italian Brainrot is unmistakably synthetic. Within this same visual ecosystem, however, a clip in which Senators Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appear to earnestly discuss Italian Brainrot signals a new standard of verisimilitude, where the artificial and the authentic exist in a continuum governed by algorithmic logic. This reckoning came for me in the form of six bunnies bouncing on a trampoline, a clip I took to be true without much thought. Artists today face this onslaught of slop, contending with an oversaturated visual economy in which distinctions between critique and complicity prove ever more tenuous. Refik Anadol models one polarized approach to the so-called “AI revolution.” The Turkish artist’s wholesale, uncritical embrace of such systems secured his spot in Time’s top 100 list of 2025, which fittingly crowns AI developers together as “Person of the Year.” Also tapped to design the magazine’s “living cover,” Anadol leveraged AI to synthesize Time’s archives into a streamlined visual. While employing humanizing descriptions of AI “dreaming,” Anadol cultivates frictionless imagery conducive to mindless consumption, not unlike brainrot. I mean not to suggest that Anadol’s work is slop, however, but that his mesmerizing, screensaver-like arrays emulate the logic of slop as spectacles of technologization optimized for viral circulation. What then might meaningful engagement look like in an age dominated by AI slop? How can art distinguish itself from brainrot within digital infrastructures that flatten attention into endlessly churned content? Can artists critique the extractive logics of these systems from within, deploying reflexive strategies without being absorbed by the very mechanisms they interrogate? Performance has been proposed as a lifeline, with embodied experiences operating according to an alternative temporo-spatial logic. Critics like Janelle Zara have suggested that the embodied experience of performance might “cure us of brain rot,” a sentiment echoed by Matthew Gasda: “The 2020s are giving slop. With television in decline, talent is migrating from the screen to the stage.” In this moment of parasociality, performance is anchored in more familiar, physical notions of the “real.” Even the brief cultural fascination with the Louvre Heist this fall reflects a similar collective attraction to tangible, immediate realities. With performance, though, the question remains of how to engage the contours of the present, without reverting to pre-digital fantasies that deny the complexities of the Internet Age. Surrealist techniques regain analytical force today in the capacity to embrace contradiction and suspend resolution while exposing the irrational substrates of ostensibly rational systems. Artist and theorist Hito Steyerl reflects that “a lot of the ingredients of 1930s surrealism are present once again in the cultural debate,” noting the rise of global fascism both then and now. This parallel evokes surrealism not merely as a stylistic category but as a tool to reckon with systemic instability. Sasha Gordon, for example, cultivates a surreal quality through the repetition of self-portraits, with multiple affective states coexisting within the same pictorial logic, which suggests the iterability of the self. Haze, the artist’s debut presentation at David Zwirner in New York, channeled the psychological tension of externalized self-consciousness in a manner that resonates with our screen-saturated present. Where we can glean surrealist undercurrents in Louise Bonnet and Elizabeth King’s two-person show at the Swiss Institute or in Joyce Ho’s multimedia presentation at ShanghART in Shanghai, the living legacy of surrealism is particularly palpable in the work of Hannah Black. In HUSH MR GIANT at Arcadia Missa in London, Black leveraged the political potentials of surrealism toward an epistemological intervention. The artist transformed excerpts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)—a speech act theoretically imbued with actualizing capacities—into nonsensical anagrams mapped onto circular canvases. These paintings imbued with a hypnotic quality recall the rotating discs in Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926). This method of disarticulation underscores the fundamental distortion of supposedly “universal” language within colonial systems. In Black’s words, these paintings conjure Suzanne Cesaire’s understanding of surrealism as “‘the tightrope of our hopes’ stretching over the abyss of fascism.” While paying homage, Black, like artists such as Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, activates the unresolved political charge of surrealism to reckon with the contradictions of the present, while resisting the tempting slippage into nihilism. Jacolby Satterwhite likewise leverages his “surrealist toybox” as a politicized approach to envision alternative futurities, “using the materials and variables from yesterday to make work that is about today and tomorrow.” A Metta Prayer (2023), a multimedia installation featured in Machine Love at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo this summer, combines Buddhist ontologies and emerging technologies, while queering digital space as a site for collective speculation and ritualized embodiment. Steyerl in fact suggests that surrealism surfaces through “a new emphasis on ritual, sorcery, transgression, and meme magic,” which goes hand in hand with the epistemological work done by artists like Black in challenging the enduring reign of liberal humanism. From the Bienal de São Paulo, Not All Travellers Walk Roads, to the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Séance: Technology of the Spirit, Oliver Basciano contends that “the foregrounding of art that fuses the sublime and the immaterial, is an understandable, and vital, counter to the technological, ecological and political alienation that otherwise seems all-pervasive.” Hannah Black, Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized (Chinese Communist Revolution), 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Arcadia Missa, London. Photo: Tom Carter. Still from Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, HBO. Beyond the realm of contemporary art, filmmakers, producers, writers, and musicians reckon with the ubiquitous sense of the surreal today. In the second season of The Rehearsal, creator Nathan Fielder stages ever more baroque simulations to test his quixotic theory that improved cockpit communication might prevent aviation accidents. Each episode folds rehearsals within rehearsals, layering scripted reenactments of past encounters with simulations of potential futures. In this kaleidoscopic inversion of reality television’s promise of authenticity, social interactions are rendered recursive and modifiable. The season models a sort of procedural surrealism by revealing the mundane structures that mediate experience. I’m reminded here of René Magritte’s La Condition Humaine (1933), which explores framing as not merely a compositional tool but an ontological problem. Through the painting-within-the-painting, which appears perfectly aligned with the view behind it, Magritte evokes the continuity of representational space and lived space. In turn, Magritte formulates the painting itself as a mediating apparatus, a sort of interface rather than a transparent window or flat surface. Both Magritte and Fielder underscore how frames enact the very realities they represent, inviting us to consider often unnoticed structures of mediation. Doubling likewise emerges as a structural operation in season two of Severance. The dystopian workplace series literalizes the late-capitalist fantasy of a perfectly partitioned subject through the “severance” procedure, which cleaves the self into an office-bound “innie” and a leisure-oriented “outie.” Within the sterile corporate labyrinth of Lumon, psychological fragmentation is a management strategy, a means of rendering workers optimally compliant while commodifying their interior worlds as much as their time. This slightly off-kilter world governed by its distinct internal logic is shrouded in mystery for viewers, much as it is for the characters instrumentalized within Lumon’s all-consuming apparatus. As with Severance, the surreality of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia stems from the closeness of the pictured world to our own, which renders the abrupt genre swerve in the closing minutes so effective. This shift—a structural shock, a sort of inversion of Plato’s cave—reframes everything prior, all that seemed so familiar, in turn destabilizing any boundary between plausible conspiracy and fantastical fiction. I’m hesitant to explicitly label Bugonia as surreal, given the tendency flagged by Breixo Viejo: “if any motion picture dealing with the unconscious, automatism, dreams, desire and revolution is Surrealist (or Neo-Surrealist), then the list becomes endless.” I find myself gravitating toward the term nonetheless, though, perhaps leaning into the slippage between the colloquial descriptor and the historically grounded term. Bugonia, like both The Rehearsal and Severance, speaks to an ambient sense of the surreal, while maintaining a certain surrealist resonance itself, specifically in a structural rather than stylistic sense, through critical engagement with the architectures of perception. Calling these works surreal or surreal-adjacent flags how each enacts rather than merely depicts estrangement, channeling the infrastructural conditions of mediated life. To describe the cultural fabric of 2025 as “surreal” feels at once apt and insufficient. I’ve courted contradiction in switching between the art historical “surreal” and the colloquial “surreal,” which evokes an existential sense of disorientation, while teetering toward meaninglessness. This imprecision, though, simultaneously gestures toward the very limits of language in this moment of epistemological uncertainty exacerbated by the deluge of slop. Perhaps the appeal of the “surreal” lies in the affective resonances of the term connoting an intensely subjective phenomena that is less so seen or heard or known or learned than felt. It is precisely within these vertiginous conditions of the present that surrealist tactics regain analytical force. In reflecting on spurts of surrealist energy beyond the 1920s—whether during the Spanish Civil War or the Négritude Movement in Martinique or today—we confront more fundamental questions of the role of art amid layered crises. Perhaps one of the most weighty lessons to be drawn from these expanded surrealist moments is the radical potential of art-making as a crucial form of political disruption. As Viejo so aptly contends, “the key question after all is not whether a Surrealist cinema”—or art more generally—“as such exists today, but if we are still capable of making and understanding movies as the Surrealists once did—as tools of a furious fight ‘to explode the social order and transform life itself.’” The above text was written by Aidan Chisholm, a writer and curator based in New York City. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Hannah Black, HUSH MR GIANT, Arcadia Missa, London, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Arcadia Missa, London. Photo: Tom Carter._______________________________________1 Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin, “Epilogue: Dreaming Feminist Futures,” in Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, ed. Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025), 257–64.2 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 148.