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The art history of Toronto is specifically and heavily indebted to performance artists. Accepted definitions of what constitutes “performance art” vary depending on who you are asking, and the landscape of spaces that make room for it has changed drastically. But where there is institutional neglect there have always been those who make their own opportunities. Describing her practice as a mix of “prop comedy, experimental theatre, performance art, absurd literature, existential anxiety, and intuitive dance,” Bridget Moser has been making audiences laugh with her performances and video works since 2012. Her characters and vignettes lampoon real people, or more accurately personas,…

Three boots hang from the pole that greets me; something of an archway, a threshold to sidle and cross before the room comes into view. Two more poles partition the space of Split Hairs to suspend Kyle Alden Martens’ boot-sculptures—the lines of gaping bodies in an abattoir or the draped garments of a walk-in wardrobe, everything hangs in the air like open secrets. ———- To my left, boots of deep purple leather drip with scissors and loose threads, punctuated by three jackets sewn shut. To my right, a line of snakeskin boots with turquoise soles and dangling watches. The matter of handicraft—thimbles,…

The day after the opening of her solo-exhibition, Primary Information, I met Julia Dault in the basement ‘Bunker’ at Bradley Ertaskiran—a space that she specifically requested for her third presentation at the gallery. There’s a certain drama to the room, given the mass of concrete, visible rebar, ventilation ducts, and amalgam of building material that cover the walls, like mineral deposits from preceding epochs of use. There we sat, shoes off, cross-legged on the most uncannily-coloured carpeting I’ve ever seen—not quite sulphuric, nor mustard, but somewhere between the two on the binary of fertilizer and food. The colour of the carpet…

It’s thanks to the conversation with Michael DeForge transcribed below that I end up on YouTube reading the featured comments on an abridged audiobook version of Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction memoir Communion: A True Story. Philippe Mora’s 1989 film adaptation of the same name, Communion, is one of two central inspirations DeForge cites for his most recent book, Holy Lacrimony (2025). What makes the film so compelling, DeForge says at one point in our interview, is that it “sidesteps whether or not the experience is real,” in favour of taking seriously the material consequences of the protagonist’s experience—in this case, of alien encounter. I would say this,…

We grew up with our tongues pressed so hard against our cheeks, it’s no wonder we all needed braces. That’s a title for one of my own paintings: a couple kissing against a violently green background. I used the kiss between Drew Barrymore and her costar in the 90s film Never Been Kissed as a reference but it really could be any B-movie kiss, and that’s the point. A writer whom I admire, and frankly have a bit of a crush on, lent me a monograph about the painter Elizabeth Peyton. A review by Roberta Smith contextualized Peyton’s cringingly sincere, fan girlish portraits…

John Brady McDonald is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the Mistawasis Nehiyawak. He is the great-great-great grandson of Chief Mistawasis of the Plains Cree who was considered a visionary leader and the first signatory of Treaty 6 in 1876. McDonald is also the grandson of famed Métis leader Jim Brady, who is generally considered one of the most influential Métis leaders and activists in Saskatchewan and Alberta of his time. Brady disappeared while on a prospecting trip in June 1967. His body has yet to be recovered. Forced to attend the Prince Albert Indian Student Residence in Prince…

Con miradas siempre nos damos todo el amorHablamos sin hablarTodo es silencio en nuestro andarAmigos simplemente amigos y nada más —Ana Gabriel, Simplemente Amigos In her 1988 song, Simplemente Amigos, Ana Gabriel belts out a confession disguised as restraint. It’s about a love that must exist in the shadows, spoken through a secret code of gestures and glances. The ballad moves between longing and endurance, mapping the tension between desire and secrecy. Similarly, Reynaldo Rivera’s photographs translate the impossibility of public love into forms of tenderness—where desire becomes both memory and a way to exist otherwise. His Los Angeles is not the…

When you’ve been living on, or with, the internet for over a decade, it can be difficult to recall your first encounter with a writer that you’ve become closely acquainted with over the years. When that first encounter isn’t a book—but an essay, conversation, or even simply a diffuse involvement in a certain school of online writing—it absorbs into the larger web of your own personal internet ecosystem. I thought my first brush with Larissa Pham was when I read her essay Crush in The Believer, but upon revisiting it, I found it was only published in 2021, and it feels as…

Public Parking Publication is delighted to announce the participants in our 2026 editorial residency. 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 serve as residents of the publication for an extended 12-month period. Throughout this time, they will work with our team to publish a series of texts, either self-written or in collaboration with other writers of their choosing. Previously, we’ve hosted…

In August of 1945, the friendship between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and writer Anaïs Nin turned into a nasty feud. Deren immortalized the clash in a poem dedicated to Nin: For Anaïs Before the Glass The mirror, like a cannibal, consumed,carnivorous, blood-silvered, all the life fed it.You too have known this merciless transfusionalong the arm by which we each have held it.In the illusion was pursued the visionthrough the reflection to the revelation.The miracle has come to pass.Your pale face, Anaïs, before the glassat last is not returned to you reversed.This is no longer mirrors, but an open woundthrough which…