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A code of conduct is a list. It can be short or long, normally between five to seven points. It enumerates a certain set of behaviours that are appropriate in a given setting. Sometimes behaviours that are not appropriate are listed too. It is sort of the x and y of socialisation. It plots a space between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. But it is entirely movable and depends on a given situation, so some would say that it’s site-specific. The first time I meet artist, Ethan Murphy is on a Zoom call sometime in late 2021, but technically the second…

I’ve been listening for the sound of a drill driven under. It’s coming any day now. The rumble and the crack of an old vein being revitalized. Recovering ounces that were overlooked by the old timers. A mechanical curtain to the wind sweeping through the willow, so that the rust can once again be followed into the rock. Uncovering an old route into the mountain side, widening the adit, digging that hole deeper. Back into the wrecked earth, seeping. All this in a town sitting in a bowl at the end of the highway. At the head of a lake…

When rewatching old artist talks of AO Roberts in preparation for our conversations I came across a quote of theirs: “I have so much to say but I don’t want to tell you anything at all.” There’s a tension within Roberts’ work between revealing and obscuring, a generosity to the viewer as well as a distrust. AO Roberts is a Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist working in sculptural installation and sound. They have also performed in numerous noise projects and punk bands such as Wolbachia, Kursk, Hoover Death, and VOR. During the winter of 2022, I chatted with Roberts several times on Zoom, myself…

Lens-based artist and filmmaker Zinnia Naqvi and I met by chance during the 2023 Mayworks Festival where she presented The Professor’s Desk (2023), a project that told the stories of four cases of discrimination in Canadian universities. At the time, I was a Teaching Assistant at OCAD University and the outgoing Executive Director of Graduate Studies for the OCAD Student Union; the name of Naqvi’s exhibition piqued my interest due to my political involvement with the institution and my desire to research and work toward better futures for students and faculty. Part of my job was to navigate and mediate conflict, to…

Many of the first naked bodies I saw were adult, varied in fitness and age. Luck and interest brought me to a public high school where we drew from life. Life drawing is a record of concentration that flattens judgement and connects eye to hand, hand to subject. At the same time, live models – as opposed to bowls of apples – make their vulnerability known with their tremors, heartbeats and blinking. For myself and my teenage classmates, these bodies awakened our sensitivities without activating our anxieties. Drawing was an uninstructed period of observation, a peaceful break in the alarm…

Children can represent both truth and rebellion.* —Chiara Bisconti, child viewer of La torta in cielo, written response to the film, 1973 I am a militant of the workers’ movement who is trying to make cinema and I intervene in a disorderly way. —Lino Del Fra, director of La torta in cielo, personal correspondence, 1974 In 1973, Italian communist film director Lino Del Fra and his constant collaborator Cecilia Mangini released a children’s film, La torta in cielo (The Cake in the Sky), that was also a satirical antiwar film, in which liberation takes the form of an enormous flying cake. The film was…

Public Parking is delighted to announce the writers involved in our editorial residency for 2024. 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 be residents at Public Parking over an extended 12-month period. Throughout this time they will work with our team to publish a series of either self-written or programmed texts. We are glad to welcome editorial residents eunice bélidor, Tammer…

There is an old Greek legend that tells us about Croseus, the King of Lydia, and his visit to the Delphic Oracle. He sent gifts to the oracle in advance of his visit, and when he visited her, asked if he should wage war against the Persians. The oracle of Delphi told him that if he went to war, a great empire would fall. Encouraged by her words, he invaded. It was his own empire that was destroyed in the process.1  Some years end with a semicolon, some with a mysterious ellipses … 2020 was like this, when we sat…

On December 31st, 1999, I rallied my best Beanie Babies and prepared for death. Although skeptical of the hype, I gathered my possessions like a pharaoh preparing for the afterlife, just in case. My theatrics were in vain, and the world entered the new millennium on a mercifully anticlimactic note. When the sky didn’t fall, Y2K fell sharply out of vogue, and the tidal wave of novelty items which bore the brand were relegated to the bargain bins of history.  The origins of celebrating New Year’s Eve on December 31st are inherited from the Roman Empire, aligned with the Julian…

A descent into darkness both literally and allegorically accompanied Atlanta-based artist Paul Stephen Benjamin’s recent solo exhibition, Black Summer, at Efraín López gallery in New York City1. The nascent gallery’s small and windowless subterranean space appropriately housed the products of Benjamin’s material and cultural research on the manifold meanings of blackness as a color and state of being, which together form the broad, elusive crux of his conceptual practice. Working across media including photography, painting, video, and sculpture, Benjamin’s corpus bridges integral moments of Black history and art history with an operative aesthetics of blackness—the ways in which blackness circulates as an…