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The landscape of language in Shannon Ebner’s exhibition FRET SCAPES is weathered multiple times over. The show has two main parts: a floor-to-ceiling poem entitled FRET and a series of thirteen black-and-white photographs. The poem is composed using what Ebner calls a “wet letter alphabet”— photographs of paper letters pasted with water onto an anonymous white wall. In Ebner’s photographs, the dampened characters work against the natural forces of time, evaporation, and gravity which have caused the letters to slip and wrinkle. The photographs that make up Ebner’s wet-letter alphabet are sheathed in individual Photo-Tex sleeves and mounted on the wall of the gallery…

Working under the title ‘The Photography Workshop,’ the photographers, historians of working-class history, and educators Jo Spence (1934-1992) and Terry Dennett (1938-2018) collaborated and co-habited for a little under ten years. Rubber stamped on the backs of hand-printed postcards, included in the frontispieces of books, and marking files of photographic prints and negatives, The Photography Workshop was the banner under which Spence and Dennett conducted their photographic and pedagogical practice. While almost always produced or planned from their rented North London flat—which was also their studio and dark room— The Photography Workshop was not tied to a specific location or…

Guillaume Adjutor Provost is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose carefully considered material practice combines installation, sculpture, performance, video, drawing, and text. In his oeuvre, Adjutor Provost creates ethereal landscapes meant for thorough contemplation by his viewer. The artist envisions the space of the exhibition as a container of ideas and sees the act of exhibiting collections as a vehicle for issues such as class consciousness, counter-culture, vernacular imagery, and experiences of queerness. The figure of the wizard, a cross-cultural fictional practitioner of magic that has inspired young and old for centuries, is a wonderful character that Adjutor Provost has…

It was something like 3 a.m. on one of those nights nobody knows how to end the first time I saw Cléo Sjölander’s exhibition Exuvie at Espace Maurice. Heaven knows it’s got to be bedtime, goes the song looping in my head all summer and into the fall. I’m disappointed to discover that I have the lyrics wrong, and the song “Ceremony”—one of Joy Divison’s last, and released as New Order’s first—apparently goes: “heaven knows it’s got to be this time” (Ian Curtis never transcribed the lyrics and his vocals were muffled on the original recording, so I guess there’s a chance I’m still right). Besides, I think…

Guanyu Xu is an artist working with photography and cultural iconography to create compositions that deliberately disorient the viewer. His project Temporarily Censored Home has reached international acclaim, currently showing at the International Center of Photography in New York. In this work, he visits his family home in China and creates elaborate photo installations by mining images from his personal photographic archive, printing them out, and physically placing them within domestic settings. Many of these photos are from his life in Chicago and draw on aspects of his queerness – a part of his life that he does not share with his family…

I have poor time perception, or chronoception, often fumbling with questions about when past events occurred. Air travel, an experience that fucks with routine spatial and temporal rhythms, is made particularly difficult to grasp. In November 2021, taking my first break from hyperlocalness under COVID-19 measures1, I flew to Vancouver for a six-week stay2. Flights are strange ways to spend hours. Although from Toronto it only takes five hours, one of the shorter transit times I’ve gotten through, I experienced the trip as exceptionally long. For once, I’m confident that the sensation of elongated time is more connected to our state of…

Adrienne Huard is a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer Anishinaabe curator, academic, art critic, scholar, and performer. As a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer, Huard brings a unique focus and position to their research on desire within Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous visual culture on the prairies where they are embedded in the community and draw on these networks in inspiring ways. A citizen of Couchiching First Nation, Ontario, Huard was born and raised in Miiskwaagamiwiziibiing/Winnipeg. After graduating in 2012 from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in photography, they pursued and completed a Bachelor in Art history at Concordia University in Tio’tià:ke/Montreal. Thereafter, Huard completed OCAD’s…

Have you seen these images before?” asked the artist. Viewing a livestream from my couch at home, I watched Sara Cwynar move about the room in an all-red outfit, staging a series of scenes: Seen from above, the artist sits in a metal folding chair atop a red-gridded piece of paper and holds up different cut out images above her head for the camera to see. Monitors on either side of the stage stream this view for the physical audience. There isn’t a fixed perspective throughout, a dramaturgical choice replicated via the narration. At times, Cwynar’s voice almost syncs up…

I. The first impending signs of Saint-Pierre’s May 1902 cataclysmic event became visible weeks prior, in the latter half of April. Months earlier, however, there were faint intermittent rumbling sounds and steam coming from the direction of Mount Pelée. The steam persisted, travelling outward to the town adjacent to it, St. Pierre. The residue of the spewing gas left a foetid odour in the air and this kept on for weeks before worsening. This was followed by an increasingly loud banging like that of a thunderstruck or cannon fire, but negligent authorities continued to overlook the power of one of…

Last summer, I biked to Point Douglas, an eclectic, old Winnipeg neighbourhood dotted with stately historical buildings and defunct industrial sites, to find Tsēmā Igharas’ installation, Tailings Pool. Housed on an empty lot, the piece seemed, from a distance, to be a large, nondescript pile of gravel, not unlike the rubble of a construction site. But as I approached, the smooth, angled sides of the mound came into focus, and a jaunty neon yellow swimming ladder revealed itself, straddling the edge. Climbing up to look in, I found a bean-shaped pool of tantalizing blue, glinting in the dry heat, noxious yet seductive. Playfully…