Archive

Over the past few years, artmaking became an extension of parenting for Dominique Rey. She created matching costumes for her and her children, Madeleine and Auguste Coar, and would set up a camera for a period of what she called ‘intentional play.’ In doing so, Rey captured images honouring the relationship between mother and child. I first met Rey at her studio in the Point Douglas neighbourhood of Winnipeg, where she invited me over for tea after I reached out about this article. After months of researching her work, I was running late and worried I was making a bad…

Lynne Tillman writes books–novels, short stories, essays, criticism–that continuously provoke thought. Since the late 80s and the formation of the New Narrative movement in American literature, Tillman has created a body of work deeply engaged with art, culture, history, ourselves, and our relationships with one another. The first book of hers I read was her 2018 novel Men and Apparitions about an ethnographer named Zeke who studied family photographs. Tillman’s seamless blend of found images, commentary and aphorisms on pop culture, and a narrator naturally inquisitive about others so hooked me that I spent my summer after college reading it so slowly,…

Hannah Godfrey was working at the Cube Microplex in Bristol when she first realized she was an artist. Training to be a 35 mm projectionist—“it took me about seven years,” she jokes—in the Cube’s “anarchic” environment provided the perfect, scrappy setting to experiment creatively. For someone who didn’t go to art school, the Cube offered an incredible “sense of possibility.” Putting on exhibitions, booking bands, and screening alternative cinema, she was learning how to make things happen while trying them herself. “You could do anything,” she recalls fondly. She was part of a noise band that only ever played in…

When I arrive at Joseph Tisiga’s home in Anjou, a neighbourhood in Montreal’s far East End, he is outside smoking a cigarette and scrolling through his phone. “The world news is hitting a higher octave these days,” he says in greeting, his dark brown eyes widening as he takes another drag. There’s a weariness in his voice that hints at a deeper exhaustion. Perhaps its the weight of a mind continually processing the world in complex ways. Or simply the strain of parenting a young toddler. Conversations with the Kaska Dena artist tend to mirror the tone of his work:…

Soap: the most quotidien of the quotidien; also, a nearly 120 billion USD global industry1 playing both to aspirational consumerism and anxieties of contamination as a reminder of the messiness of our mortal bodies; also, a crystallization of hygiene as a category far exceeding health-related concerns as a phenomenon tied to constructs of race, class, gender, and sexuality; also, art. Soap has appeared as a motif throughout art history—from seventeenth-century Dutch oil painting to twentieth-century Surrealist photography—yet the past three decades have marked a shift from the visual representation to the direct incorporation of soap in installations charged with familiar sensory resonance….

Muhammad Nour ElKhairyisa Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, and film programmer from Jordan, currently based in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal). He holds an MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production from Concordia University.  His experimental fiction and non-fiction video works are concerned with the legacies of colonial, political, and economic power in and beyond Palestine. Elkhairy’s work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries. Several years ago, I wrote about ElKhairy’s video work I Would Like to Visit (2017) for an article in Canadian Art on new directions in conceptualism. We discussed that work a little in the interview that follows. But when we…

Photographs are a small act of sentimental preservation. Photo albums, scrapbooks, and videos are sites of revisitation and display, and as such contribute to the legacy of the museum as a cultural archive. As an institution, the museum has always been a conservative stronghold—a constant from its privatized roots to its marked transition to a public locale. A portrait of preservation, its artefacts are protected by extensive security measures and object handling rules that safeguard these relics of history. But the rules of safeguarding have changed, and the evolution of archiving means connecting with history in an advanced technological era….

I was aimlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed when my screen was engulfed by a blue light. I was taken aback by a video of an underwater Times Square; along with the images, the sound of a submarine ecosystem soothed me, making me stop and take a few minutes to fully grasp what I was seeing. Before me was Mulan, a video by Montreal-based artist––from Chinese descent––Chun Hua Catherine Dong, projected on 95 digital billboards. The first time I watched the video was in a virtual reality headset but the effect was similar as I was transported into an aquatic environment full of color…

In his introduction to Permanent Red, first published in 1960, John Berger offers an approach to art criticism that begins with a simple question: “What can art serve here and now?” Berger was a fervent Marxist, and his style of criticism reflected the social and political concerns that dominated his work. He believed, among other things, that the 20th century was “pre-eminently the century of men throughout the world claiming their right to equality.” When he looked at a work of art he asked if it helped or encouraged people to know and claim their social rights. He didn’t mean this literally—such an…

John Kameel Farah has something to say. In a recent video posted to his social media accounts, he can be seen playing a harpsichord ahead of a concert in Amsterdam. “Many Europeans would probably deny the connection, but to me it seems obvious that the harpsichord/cembalo is a musical descendant of the kanoun, an instrument used in Arabic/West Asian music,” he wrote in the caption of the post. “In addition to playing masterworks by Bach, Byrd and others, I love to stylistically invoke the kanoun through the harpsichord, firstly because I love the sound, and also because it illustrates a historical point…