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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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…