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In response to the Spring Equinox, Public Parking Editorial Resident Amy Fung invited multidisciplinary cultural workers Indu Vashist and Cecilia Berkovic to engage in a mindful and honest conversation on themes of cycles, practice, violence, and endurance to mark this year’s Summer Solstice. Meeting and working in the Toronto arts scene in the 2010s, Berkovic, Fung, and Vashist reflect on the present era of what it means to be alive.  Amy Fung (Amy): Let’s start at the beginning. Ceci, Indu, how do we know each other? Cecilia Berkovic (Ceci): Well Amy, I met you through Images [Festival] when I worked there…

n a new documentary film on his life and politics, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu is in a Toyota SUV when the camera pans closely to his face revealing his lanky form even in his cardigan. His red beret — the veritable and allegorical element of his political struggle — hangs on his knee in the brief foreshadow. Along with other comrades of his political persuasion, they are gearing up for a campaign against one of Africa’s last dictators. Shortly after this scene, Ssentamu asks if his comrades are ready for the outing in solidarity, and then a hymn follows. They all…

Theo Jean Cuthand’s videos are full of good lines, but there’s no time to dwell on them. They’re delivered without pause, almost matter-of-factly, in unhurried monologues that span the video’s run time.  In Extractions (2019), he describes the terrifying lumber scrap incinerator in Merritt, where he spent four intolerable months as a teen, “like something in a Disney movie symbolizing death and anguish.” Earlier, over footage of a series of explosions in an open pit mine, he notes benignly, “I like to think there are alternatives.” In Less Lethal Fetishes (2019), he uses gas masks to meditate on kink culture and the art world’s toxic relationship with industry….

The intersection of art and fitness is so small that I can only name a handful of artists who deliberately engage with the subject (all of them male, of course). It is a topic that is so rarely discussed in my world–the art world–that it took a global health crisis for me to finally begin to take control of my health, and introduce an entirely new vocabulary into my vernacular. Four years later, I now find myself speaking fluently–and passionately–about hypertrophy, isometric movements, and macronutrients.  Before I became the person I am today–the person who works out every day and…

Her breath is hot and acrid. As she lies next to me, chewing, I run my finger across the tuft of fur that divides flesh and claw, her soft brown paw wet with rain. She’s found a jawbone. Heavy with marrow, the gums bloody, the teeth patterned with brown spirals. In the dead grey of winter, I can only assume she’s preserved this deer jaw since the fall. She has bones buried all around the yard, waiting to be unearthed. Later, when we walk along the river between the low, wet cedar branches, she’s cagey about showing me the rest…

Tazeen Qayyum is a Pakistani-Canadian artist based in Toronto. She was trained in the South Asian and Persian traditions of miniaturist painting before she began the mixed-media practice which she sustains today. During the month of Ramadan, I wanted to speak with her about what it is like to be a practicing Muslim as well as a contemporary artist working in Canada. I was also interested in her experience making work that is conceptually driven and shaped by culture and faith. For example, in her iconic archival ink on paper works, Qayyum repeats a word written in Urdu script to…

I was pleased to hear that the incision would run from one side of my neck to the other, following a natural wrinkle. The original plan was to begin a descending cut under one ear for several inches, then proceed across the neck and back up to the other ear – a “horseshoe incision” that wouldn’t age as well. In any case, I was facing a bilateral neck dissection to remove a large malignant tumor on my thyroid and an unknown but significant number of affected lymph nodes in the area. To my relief, this was a curative operation with…

What if grants worked like insurance policies? Artists would buy into them and on the off-chance an opportunity actually struck them the granting body would be obligated to pay out and make the opportunity happen. Insurance, of course, is based on low odds. A payout is a form of surrender: “Fine, you win. Here’s your money.” The Canada Council for the Arts funded approximately 15% of Creation projects last fall. A heads-up about their skeletal wallet would certainly have been helpful to the other 85% of applicants. There’s some commiseration to be done here. The applicants certainly spent hours upon…

On the second Monday in December, I click the link, open a window, and see myself. Instinctively, I adjust my posture. Anne Low has joined your meeting room. A couple of months earlier, I visited Low’s solo exhibition Bury Me at Franz Kaka on Dupont Street in Toronto. The show featured five works that engage with the domestic and the decorative. Inspired by pre-industrialized cloth samples, Low’s woven textiles are presented in sculptural forms; each work gestures towards the material evidence of housework: cleaning, mending, storing, tending, and washing.  An artist-weaver, Low works in sculpture, installation, textiles, and printmaking. After completing her…

“[…]unfinished!” -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952), the last word of Lucky’s monologue My life as a husband, father, composer, pianist, and writer often feels like an endless series of chaotic and unrelated events. From my public life in artistic performance, to my private life in artistic creation, to my personal life with friends and family, my life is endlessly generative. It is both exhilarating and exhausting. My work as an artist allows me to make some sense out of my life’s material chaos. The process of making art does this for me because, to me, art is the capturing, reordering, and…