Archive

We connected with Baltimore native :3lON a few months ago after serendipitously coming across is work on SoundCloud. :3lON uses his music and sounds to construct atmospheres that feel as though they occur in zero gravity. And his soft languid warm voice orbit and interweave loosely with the pulsing backing production. His work almost serves as a refuge outside tangible reality. It is vulnerable but carried with control. It is effortlessly harmonious yet dissident. In our conversation, :3lON shares with us how music-making came into fruition for him tracing back his earliest memories of creating and finding interest in sounds. He also shares…

Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they’ve been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. On this episode, we speak to the exquisite Gabi Dao. Preface: our chat happened a few bits ago so some of the talking points are from our initial point of exchange but nonetheless, it was rather a delight getting to be in conversation with the Vancouverite as she details a little about her life as an up-and-comer in the arts. Dao seems…

Japanese Canadian Kieta Morimoto’s meticulous and ambitious paintings appear to be situated within the same space as European Old Masters and in a way, creates an intriguing subversion that keeps you staring in contemplation. His paintings draw on a learned interest in premeditated compositions, modeling, and refined surfaces. We asked Morimoto share with us a few words he might freely associate with his paintings and below is what he came up with: extraordinary, Ordinary, Magic, Light , City , Common People , Fantasy, Ambivalence, Memory Lane , Nostalgia, Melancholy , Peaceful You can check out a sample of his work below:

To the uninitiated eye, the wide-ranging and ever expanding genre (if it can be called that) of western contemporary dance can be a fiddly entity to find a point of access to. Having amalgamated itself with what seems like an infinite possibility of facets including ties to jazz, theatre, ballet, performance art, as well as African and Japanese dance, it’s a shapeshifting thing to even try to pinpoint. When you get choreographers like Anne Teresa Baroness De Keersmaeker making pieces that elevate the simple vocabulary of running, sitting, walking, and hopping into passages of whimsy, /or when you watch a mainstay like Pina Bausch fluently…

Whiteness is a default. Whiteness is normal. It’s so normal it is trivial to most who identify as white and even those who don’t. I am still unsure to what extent artist TJ McLachlan sincerely knows this even after our conversation. But unlike most who roll their eyes or get hot and bothered at the hint of a ‘check your privilege’ assertion, McLachlan has set his art practice to have dialogues about this same contentious thing called privilege as it relates to whiteness and patriarchy. And to that, there’s a clear awareness of self in a place like the Canadian landscape—to a…

We meet Beamsville Ontario-bred artist, Jordyn Stewart, at a point where her creative output extensively involves action making with the audience of a recording camera. A lot of these performative activities are both parts instinctive and measured inquisitive responsiveness to her early memories—memories of the physical natural environs she was situated in, memories of home, memories of winter activities, the familiar, the domestic etc. What arises from these enquiries are often peripherally absurd gestures like mixing found disparate land rubble in a mechanic blender or walking on gathered pieces of rocks or plotting a personal skating rink the size of her…

With the rise of computer graphics software, the internet, and other digital technological advances that occurred through the nineties, it made it more and more accessible for age old mediums like painting and drawing to drift from tactile surfaces into virtual interfaces. Now, we see people like Cory Archangel, Artie Vierkant, and Petra Cortright incessantly bending, reconfiguring, and creating within that ever-so-expansive digital pictorial space. Reaching from that long set rubric of painting and drawing, Gothenburg via Berlin-based artist Aaron Scheer uses his work to engage that pictorial space within the screen. Making free form digital gestures with keyboard commands…

You don’t often get a lot of people unabashedly lauding their mothers for being elemental supporters in their creative pursuits. We paid a visit to Winnipeg residing artist, writer, poet John Patterson at his studio back late last summer and among various points of conversation were his mother’s influence at an early age to just freely make and make whatever he wanted. A pivotal part of why Patterson creates to date. Patterson shared with us some of his in-progress projects, why self-referencing seems to be a reoccurring inclination in his work, why he ran into problems as a result while in art school, and…

In 1975 after giving a commencement address at Harvard University, a student in the audience made a request to Mohammed Ali. The student asserted without hesitation “give us a poem”. Ali will then poignantly respond with two simple but weighty words that still reverberates today. He responded with “Me/We”. Decades later in 2007, those two words will become the bases of a Glenn Ligon neon text installation which fittingly hangs from the walls of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Chief director and curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden embraces the sentiment those two syllabi permeates through her work at the museum. In many…

The manipulated photographic image gained recognition as far back as the Surrealist movement with artists like Man Ray. It can refer to that of photos without any perceptible imagery or a prominently obfuscated subject. Or in the case of Gursky or even Wall, with the help of technological advances the photograph’s original state is seamlessly altered– in some of Wall’s cases even before the image is captured—in doing so, it opens up ideas of objectivity that photography promises and rather offering alternate worlds. Johanne Teigen’s work falls somewhere in the continuum of this image/reality manipulation lineage. Teigen is only interested in the captured imaged as a…