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reath feels like a person’s most immediate form of need. Water and food can wait and intervals between pissing or shitting can be measured in hours but breath is so essential it hangs at the periphery of consciousness. The conscious mind can dictate these intermittent needs. You can forget to eat and even choose to starve but breath is much more slippery. If you forget about it you still maintain a breath pattern but if you start to think about it you can fool yourself into believing you might never take another unconscious breath. Unlike blood flow or digestion, which…

The Golden Boy is Winnipeg’s most famous top. The statue’s homoerotic qualities are so overt that it’s easy to see it as a knowing wink to the queer community. This is the plausible-if-revisionist history suggested in Purple City, a new short film by Noam Gonick and Michael Walker. Modelled after the Greek god Hermes, the statue that adorns the dome of the Manitoba Legislative Building is the symbolic centre of the film, which stages episodes from the city’s queer and occultist mythology. There’s an apt symmetry to Purple City which both begins and ends with Walker, who appears throughout the film, roaming the steps of the Legislature…

Chloe Alexandra Thompson works in sight, sound and somatics. A fluent technologist, her site-specific, digital, and performance works are deeply attuned to our perceptions. The Cree, Canadian composer and sound artist incorporates sources from audio coding language software such as Max and Pure Data. Using coding to invent amorphous digital instruments, her work is brought into physical form through spatialized speaker arrays. Her installations of multiple loudspeakers are programmed to distribute sound in intentional patterns and locations. The result is intricate, heady and difficult to convey in words. At the crux of art and technology, these experiential sonic pieces play…

My first introduction to Angel Bat Dawid came from a simple Google search: “Black woman clarinetist” when I was trying to find repertoire from underrepresented composers to program on my undergraduate senior clarinet recital a few years ago. Oftentimes, classical music recitals consist of mostly White, cisgendered men from Europe with the occasional woman’s composition featured; therefore, I was well accustomed to unsuccessful Google searches of the apparent mythical Black woman clarinetist. One lucky search led me to the music of Dawid, or the genre she names “great Black music”. Before Dawid’s ascension to performer status, her life was informed…

If ever there’s such a thing as the cultural character of an epoch—that is, a quality or cultural attitude that distinguishes a historical time from another across spaces and places—the contemporary epoch, at least in the West and perhaps in Africa, will be best characterized by that complicated concept called trauma. Trauma has become the “cultural script” of our time, writes Parul Seghal in a New Yorker essay titled “The Case against the Trauma Plot,” “a concept that bites into the [cultural] flesh so deeply it is difficult to see its historical contingency.” The cultural fascination with trauma, while best…

In Gregg Bordowitz’s Fast Trip Long Drop (1993), the artist poses as a talk show guest. Bags under his eyes. Sweaty. Full, dark hair. Sits in a dim blue polo cutting at his biceps. In front of a rich blue curtain.  Talk show host palms his hands together: “How long since you received your diagnosis of AIDS?” Bordowitz begins: “I’m sick and I don’t want a cure. I like my illness. It’s just as much a part of me as any other of my characteristics. I identify…-” Host: “Ok.” Bordowitz: “…with my illness.” Another afternoon spent chatting with the hospital’s hold track…

For the Toronto Biennial of Art’s second iteration in 2022, “What Water Knows, the Land Remembers,” multidisciplinary artist Nadia Belerique was commissioned for a new version of her installation HOLDINGS (2020–ongoing). In this series, plastic barrels used for shipping cargo were situated within the context of the artist’s familial practice of shipping items to relatives in the Azores. Installed in large stacks, each drum contained a tableau of objects viewed through different stained glass portals. Belerique’s choice of materials, including stained glass, is a means of expanding the tactics of photography, such as framing, depth, and the distance between objects. Through her…

“The best place I can imagine my work is at a party,” says Lan “Florence” Yee in a video introducing their recently exhibited textile series, Tangerine, After Grapefruit. Borrowing from Yoko Ono’s 1964 artist book, Grapefruit, Yee’s large format rendition takes nine 5×5 linen sheets in which hand-embroidered instructions ask the viewer to perform several curious prompts like “Sigh in at least seven different tones” and “Go somewhere you’ve wanted to visit for a long time. Don’t come back.” Tangerine, After Grapefruit was also photographed, made into book form (a collaboration with Toronto-based micropress San Press), and distributed to the public during Yee’s first Toronto solo exhibition, Just Short…

Everything is what it is because of its relationship to everything else. — So & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd (Queer Nature) Paper folds, creases, tears, and crinkles. It holds the vestige of notes passed to one another or journal entries of dreams and nightmares. It facilitates exchanges of currency, and other types of social contracts that become real when written down, and perhaps, letters to a lover. In many ways, paper is an empath; impressionable, and observant. It’s a vessel that lives, dies, and becomes reborn through decomposition. Paper “bridges the material and immaterial” as Hong Hong describes. Papermaking, since the Han Dynasty in 206-220…

Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker whose material practice is entwined with experimental research. These two aspects of her work are inlaid, as it is nearly impossible to speak about one without the other. Originally from Charlottesville, Virginia, Elizabeth’s family history is embedded in her work, in particular its oscillating histories of racial passing throughout the United States. The artist often considers her own experience, and that of her family’s, as a way of examining broader social structures, and how those structures are at odds with lived realities. Her research process acknowledges these limits, her questions leading her…