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Half way through our conversation with artist Hannah Doucet she suggests we take a quick pause. “Wait, I kind of want a beer, does anyone want one? I feel like I’m getting very warm because I’m talking about myself too much and that makes me uncomfortable” she modestly offers. Doucet’s self-deprecating tendencies are readily apparent throughout our visit to her work studio. “Sorry, but I’m getting ready for a show now so my studio is kind of a mess and it starting to get into John’s[studio-mate] space” she apologizes as we arrive at her studio. When she’s not facilitating workshops at Art…

We had the great pleasure of speaking with the delightful and well spoken unrelenting writer, artist, poet, and all around creative thinker Jazmin Papadopoulous. Our conversation with Papadopoulous extended across a myriad of topics including why Papadopoulous prefers to be referred to by pluralist pronoun; ‘them or they’ instead of ‘her or she’ or ‘him or he’ and why that preference is not a politically driven one but rather a more personal protective choice. We further discuss Papadopoulous’ one time foray at a clowning school, thoughts on marginalization and the stigmatization attached around that concept, video art, audience, victim-hood, and gender identity among other topics. Papadopoulous recently completed an artist residency at Cartae at…

Somewhere during the latter half of this past spring, while perusing through Midwest America, I made my way through the Detroit area and then into bordering Canadian city Windsor, Ontario. For no particular reason, I’ve always wanted to visit that place. I didn’t really have any imagination of the place. In my mind, it was just another place that exists in Canada. When friends relocated there, it became a reason to trip. For the first while there, I had to keep reminding myself I was back in Canada after crossing over. Not because it reminded me of the towns and cities I just journeyed…

Over a span of roughly five years, after being out of the protection school, photo centered artist Ashley Gillanders has been making gradual advances in her photographic practice. Partaking in residencies and mentorship programs in Winnipeg, Bnaff, and New York, exhibiting in various artist-run centers locally, receiving artist’s grants and awards, Gillanders’ work has gone from exploring human interaction with the built environment to human interaction with the natural environment and the overlap of the two. Her work has developed onto a practice that joins conventional and experimental processes to photography. Gillanders’ new collection of work counter acts what we commonly know…

Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about their current work, some random facts about them, some telling ones too, and just about anything else that comes up. In our second edition, we speak with creative, Katrina Mendoza. Mendoza is sort of in between places–making choices, feeling creatively directionless, figuring things out as someone out of art school with a strong inclination to create but also someone questioning why she creates, what makes her excited to create, and if it’s worth making work that benefits just her while disregarding the world around her. It was…

Ottawa native, now Winnipeg based artist Talia Shaaked uses her paintings as a way of looking into intellectual and emotional encounters with architectural and urban environments. Shaaked’s work acknowledges the poetics of the built environment and how perceptual place and space can be experienced through the human condition. After spending some years in Montreal and graduating from Concordia University, Shaaked jumped at the opportunity and rerouted her way to Winnipeg to join the eight month residency at Cartae to move her practice forward in a new setting. We caught up with Shaaked to talk about what she’s been learning and producing during her time at the residency, we also learn a bit about psychogeography, and who Guy Debord is. Talia Shaaked is a…

At some point between the shift in temperature when we start to slowly do away with coats and sweaters, and dust begins to pick up, it can seem like entering into a new altered world by which we slowly have to adjust to. Some point between this shift we made some time to visit artist, Pablo Javier Castillo Huerta in his now former studio as he was in the middle of transiting out of his studio.“Sorry for all the junk on the floor. I moved a bunch of my books out so I have less junk now than I did yesterday, but I’m just in the middle…

From the series ‘Every Bedroom I’ve Lived In’ Alyssa Bornn takes an intimate and closely considered course to recalling from memory and presenting us with floor plans for the titular series by way of a flatbed scanner. Below are results of her experiments which employs an array of materials including plexiglas, wax paper, packaging plastic, glass and plastic protective film all of which she selected for their ability to manipulate light therefore helping retrace and draw on these architectural spaces she resided in.  Bornn speaks on the scanograph series: Throughout the duration of a six-minute pass on a flatbed scanner objects are arranged to map…

We were very delighted to catch multifaceted Winnipeg-based artist Mariana Muñoz Gomez at her studio amid her tight schedule and deadlines inching closer. Gomez was in the middle of gathering and selecting work as part of a forthcoming group exhibition. The current collected work sees Gomez employing a wide array of media including printmaking, video and elements of sculpture to process and think through ideas of otherness, marginalization,language, and duality of identities. In our below chat with Gomez, she shows us around her studio, the pieces of work lying around her studio she’s accumulated over the past year, and what she has been discovering about her own work.  [Gomez had been…