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Of the multiple ways that I relate to the weather, one way that has been prominent recently has been thinking with and relating to the weather as a locator and a temporality that reflects the time I am present in. The external atmospheric conditions are a reminder to place and ground myself as I navigate the portal that asks me— where are you? The weather situates me spatially, structurally, and intimately in the different geographies that I have lived in, particularly in South Africa and Botswana over the last four years. We report the weather to each other every day…

In a laneway garage tucked behind the junction of Lansdowne and Dupont in Toronto, Ontario, Joys Gallery exhibited Maja Klaassens’ most recent solo show, The view is total sea, curated by Joys’ founder and director Danica Pinteric. Visiting during the show’s run in spring of 2023, I heard a murmur, the work washed over me, gently reconfiguring my sensibilities; it carried me back to life’s mundanities with a new glimmer and fresh interest in simple profundities. Months later, I am still stuck on this work.  The act of seeing becomes as similarly naïve an act as holding onto the belief of…

After Morning Sun Garden, Aracha Cholitgul, nap gallery 1. Welcome! Please wipe your feet and collect the dirt that may have fallen off the shoes of you and others: chew, crunch, and/or suck. How does the collective detritus of a sole taste? Spit, swallow, or tuck behind a molar for a later reminder of the visit, whatever kind of mouth you are. 1 2. Mind the entranceway: it transforms. You may find yourself, suddenly, with a tail, with vertical slitted pupils, with a fluid sense of the walls, bounds, and confines that you knew before. Embrace, arch the back and inhabit your new position…

“Our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved … the evils resulting from our vain curiosity are as old as the world.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau I recently came across an old Huffington Post article (done in that Buzzfeed list style that was so popular for pop-culture blogs in the 2010s) titled “9 Sci-Fi Inventions We Wish Were Real.” Pop culture lists like this about science fiction are common, usually detailing the inventions science fiction has predicted/invented. This particular Huffington Post list was of not-yet-existent inventions which “we” yearn for, and it bizarrely included the “nursery” from Ray Bradbury’s great short sci-fi…

How to explain: For everything that exists, there is an unexisting. For everything that matters to me, there is the other matter, an un-story told in calculations regarding matter. Super symmetry of the Standard Model. These ringed fingers pursue individual tasks under the guise of hand. I wake up in the middle of a decision: work at the diagram or work at the window. Touch and orientation. I wear jeans and a bra for now. Abundant particularity of oak accompanies my note taking. Juice from a cantaloupe so alive it cites a future rot. Somewhere in the central section of…

n a late summer afternoon, while toiling in the garden of a mainline estate, my coworker Jarrod shared a prophetic dream of playing basketball and failing to make the winning shot. Though his dream was from the previous night, he mentioned it was a recurring one. Jarrod, a former Big Ten basketball star, claimed he hadn’t reached his full potential because he didn’t make it to the NBA. Now, in his early forties, he was in his fifteenth season as a landscaper. A muscular and unexpectedly meek Black man from a religious family, Jarrod was raised by a domineering father…

Breath 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…