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In a text on Dana Schutz’s bio, The Saatchi Gallery described Schutz’s paintings as “teetering the edge of tradition and innovation.” I don’t think it will be too much of a stretch to designate the now Toronto-based artist geetha thurairajah’s works in a similar accord. It’s really no wonder Canadian Art Magazine included her as part of a group of creatives making “Forward Thinking Practices.” Like Schutz, thurairajah’s forms call to mind other weirdo painters like Philip Guston and even Nicola Tyson. Unlike Schutz’s deceptively whimsy worlds that tend to be filled with beach orgy scenes and self-eating characters thurairajah’s seemingly makeshifty loose…

Danièle Dennis is a keenly cognizant and inquisitive individual. Of self, of self as an African descendant, of self as a Jamaican, of self as Canadian, Of self as an African/Jamaican/Canadian living in North America, Of self as an African/Jamaican/Canadian artist working within a Western art historical context, of self in relation to her environment and community. Dennis is cognizant of her own potential biases and seeks to diverge away from them. “What is constantly marinating in my mind is the notion of learning and unlearning.” She tells me this in talking about freeing herself from previous predispositions about what she might…

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. In this episode with got in touch with multi-directional creative, Agnes Wong. The Eindhoven via Toronto-based creative share with us her experience living in the Netherlands and how that is informing the way she thinks through her work, where she would like to see her creative pursuits go in the future, some of her earliest impulses, and what she’s been curious…

Part way through the second verse in that Jenny Hval track, we hear her declare to a partner in a very matter-of-fact way: “My heartbreak is too sentimental for you” and as she does her voice soars upward and at once, we are in the middle of her cry. She brings us in the middle of a cascading end of what sounds like a relationship or her actual life or perhaps both. “I’m high, high on madness/These are my combined failures/I understand infatuation, rejection/ They can connect and become everything, everything that’s torn up in your life.” In different contexts these same exertions Hval…

Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they’ve been creating, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. In this installment, we had the pleasure of speaking with Edmonton’s Nathan Levasseur. We learned quiet a lot from Lavasseur as he shared with us how he thinks through his predominately design based approach to his practice, his thoughts on emotional labour, male vulnerability, and bit on what he was like as kid among other talking points. It’s really interesting that people who…

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. In this installment we speak with Toronto based artist Shellie Zhang We first got in contact with Zhang right around the onset of US presidential elections late October into early November. In our chat we find out how the US’s new presidential administration personally affects Zhang, her experiences growing up between China, the US and Canada, where she’d like to see her creative…

“Currently I live in Orlando, Florida and we are about to get hit by a hurricane and I’m not exactly sure what that is going to entail. Let me get back in touch with you in a few days.” That’s artist and educator Brooks Dierdorff back in October when we first got in contact with him. Category 5 Atlantic hurricane–Hurricane Mathew–had formed and was just about to pass through Lesser Antilles and Southeastern United States among other adjacent regions. Hurricane Mathew was set to bring widespread destruction and damage through high-pressure winds which it did in its dissipation. It caused a catastrophic amount of fatalities as it moved through Western…

It’s about 8am in Winnipeg and 9am in Montreal. I wait as Zinnia Naqvi gets online to begin our video chat. My internet stream is cooperating, within moments Naqvi appears on my screen. “Hi there, don’t mind me. I’m just having my breakfast” she declares.  When I first got in touch with Naqvi mid autumn, she’d just been settling in after relocating from Toronto to Montreal to begin her graduate studies at Concordia.  At the root of her work is documentary based photography and video. Naqvi is aware of the social and political drawback that surfaces out of this medium and the complexity of this is what her work investigates. Naqvi’s work has developed to include sculptural…

We asked Scott Kemp how often he raises his voice and he tells us: “not often. I speak softly.” We only asked because of how seemingly passive and visually subdued Kemp’s art objects are in first view. It got us wondering how much of one’s personality shows up in their art and, like in Kemp’s work, where the logic of a piece starts and where personal tastes come in. The Vancouver-based artist recently exhibited Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf at the artist run centre Duplex. The show takes an ostensibly nonlinear route to talk about complex ideas of social structures as they relate…

As we all do our part to somehow keep the global economy engine running especially this time of the year, here is one piece of literature that will certainly make for a thoughtful present this gift giving season. Publishing house Phaidon recently put out a pocket-sized hardbook cover of over 300 pages featuring insightful quotes taken from interviews, documentaries, memoirs, letters, and diaries on some of your favourite creatives all over. It is carefully curated with sections on topics like money, failure, beauty, fame, sex, the creative process, discipline , and originality just to name a few. It’s a perfect resource for any emerging…