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hat we witnessed in 2024 was the culmination and confirmation of several cultural trends that began to come into focus in the early 2020s. In the plague year of 2020, over 350,000 Americans died from COVID-19. The World Health Organization estimated that over 3 million people died from COVID-19 worldwide that year. This pandemic, along with the murder of George Floyd, rocked the United States and the world into uprising. The following year was marked by an uprising from the other side–a violent far-right insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, encouraged by President Donald Trump. The next few years under President…

“When you’re doing corpse paint, do you go over the mustache or not…?” Justin Bear L’Arrivée laughs amongst a group of BIPOC metalheads. We were all getting ready for the evening’s events at a table in the back of Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art’s gallery space in Winnipeg’s Exchange District, where Justin acts as Artistic Director. The exhibition is titled “Warpaint,” a solo show by Swampy Cree, Dene, and Mennonite artist Brianna Wentz. Everyone at the table (save Justin and Laura Lewis, another incredible Winnipeg artist) modelled for Brianna back in 2022 in preparation for this exhibition: she invited a…

Jo-ey Tang’s curatorial practice is difficult to describe; words tend to sneak around a corner just as I become aware of their presence. If I had to describe it in three, far from singular ways, I would say Tang’s practice embodies slowness, centers artists and their works, and tends to turn host institutions inside out, exposing the internecine and externalized methods and processes of contemporary exhibition-making. Tang began his career as an arts editor for the literary magazine, n+1 and photography editor for Condé Nast before earning his MFA in Studio Art from NYU in 2011. During grad school, he worked as…

I ran into Alexis Auréoline at an art opening a few months before conducting this interview. As we got to talking, he revealed that his favourite ice cream flavour was French Vanilla, with an emphasis on the distinction—it had to be French. I was amused by this choice, but later, after having had the pleasure of sitting down with Auréoline to discuss his work— which is similarly subtle and precise—I consider this preference to be essentially on brand. Auréoline is a Francophone Métis artist working across photography, painting, and frottage. He is perhaps best known for his large-scale cyanotypes—a cameraless…

It’s a testament to Kazik Radwanski’s faculties as a cinematic storyteller that his two most emotionally resonant movies are arguably the ones in which human faces hardly appear. The seven-minute Cutaway (2014) and the 15-minute Scaffold (2017) form a remarkable diptych of psychological implication and physical detail, portraying construction-worker protagonists whose visages remain unseen. Cutaway focuses on its hero’s dirt-caked hands as he grasps various power tools, applies tape to a cut on his palm, and responds to texts from a pregnant friend. Radwanski could have layered an explanatory score over these images, but he sticks to the mundane sounds: the whine of the machinery, the…

iyar Mayil is a sculptor who lives in Montreal and is originally from Istanbul. This is an incomplete list of materials found in her work: cherry wood, silicone, ceramic, salt, brass, battery-operated motor, latex, glass, gold, raw silk, aluminum, hair, velvet, satin, PVC, rubber. Most of her sculptures take the form of household objects and are titled to reflect this: “Dustpan”, “Medicine Cabinet”, “Mop”. They are tables, clocks, beds, brushes, books. Sometimes these objects get put into motion in performances. Although they are, in contour, ordinary objects, Diyar’s sculptures are designed to be weird: the mop is made of glass,…

In 2018 José Freire of Team Gallery announced through Artnet that he was “quitting art fairs” citing the corporatization of the art world. Degrowth, as it has been proposed to western markets and production is a clear plan, it’s the psychology that cripples its application in a growth-based society.  Over the past year multiple significant New York galleries that have been in business for over 10 years have announced closures. These announcements come via social media as clients, dealers, and artists all take part in adding a “thank you”, broken heart emoji, or a preemptive “looking forward to the next…

The aftereffects of violent deeds – abuse, genocide, sexual assault, extractions of labour, property, and resources – travel through time and space. Neuroepigenetics researcher Isabelle Mansuy suggests, “adverse extreme experiences in childhood can modify the body so much that it can have imprints or traces even in reproductive cells.”1 These acts burrow inside human DNA strands, and our descendants may never escape their echoes. When it comes to music, chord progressions, notes, and melodies linger as well, finding their way back into the current moment, as if to confirm Carlo Rovelli’s observation of Newton’s laws: “there is no distinction between past…

In the YouTube caption to her music video “Stick of Gum,” the Palestinian-Canadian recording artist Nemahsis (Nemah Hasan) tells her audience it’s a love song: “what more can I care for than where I come from and who I come from?” The tempo of the song and video builds gradually. The opening frame is an intimate scene of the musician sitting beside an older female relative on a balcony in Jericho. As the camera pulls back, a web of laundry lines on the roof comes into view, and Hasan joins in taking down the socks and dish towels. The video,…

The following piece contains material that may be especially distressing for some readers. Reader discretion is advised. The Belleville Club at 210 Pinnacle St. is closed, but I’m two weeks late for S’s celebration of life here anyway. I found a dive bar around the corner to sit down and get this started. There’s a small pile of thick dust beside my tall glass of Coke, but the spill on the first table I tried was still tacky, so I think I made the right choice. I wonder if S was ever here. I wonder how many times he walked…