Longform

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…

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, we talk to Alison Postma. After spending the last couple years in Guelph finishing art school, Postma is out on her own, she relocated to Toronto, she’s been experimenting with her work by push out of her familiar working conventions while also figuring out how/where to direct her own independent practice. Read our full conversation with the AIMIA AGO…

We met Beth Schellenberg during her stay at Ace Art’s Cartae Open School residency which Schellenberg completed along with four other resident creatives earlier this summer. A lot of what Schellenberg is interested in the work she investigates into centers on how we identify ourselves in digital spaces and how that changes our perception of ourselves in tangible reality. Schellenberg speaks further on her research and her experience in the residency: I’m exploring this liminal space between our virtual realities versus our physical realities. That place exists on our phones or on our computers or with our webcams before we actually post it;…

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. Over the last couple months we’ve been keeping up with multi-displinary artist Kyle Alden Martens as he packs his belongings and transitions to Montreal after years of residing in Halifax. For a while, we though we’d lost touch with him but he would assure us he hadn’t. Over the course of roughfully four months of long distance internet communication we felt…

Jessica Karuhanga is having a steady incline of a year. From getting the chance to be part of Archives Matter Conference at Goldsmiths in London UK to presenting work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, to getting the break to teach and share her knowledge on the very medium she’s been thinking through over recent years at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, Karuhanga is a persistent force. Her performance-based works developed out of working through drawing and object-making which then led to installation-based work that would later implicate the body and in turn opening up possibilities for articulating her cultural histories,…

For just about forty minutes earlier this summer, we got to have a sit down with Zahra Baseri. And in that amount of time we were fortunate to have learnt a great deal from the Iranian-born, Winnipeg based artist. Her individual experiences and observations living in an oppressive Islamic regime has stirred her to take a bracingly honest and critical look in the society she lived through. The absence of the female voice in the Islamic society she grew up in is a palpable assessment in Baseri’s recent BMO’s 1st Art! award-winning Outcry series. Below is our conversation with Baseri: we go into the nuances of her…

“A while back I worked for Lower Fort Garry which was an old Hudson Bay Company Fort between Winnipeg and Selkirk. It was a summer job where I was a historical interpreter. I had to dress up like it was in the 1850s and pretend that I lived in that era which is in a way ridiculous. It is this history or fiction that we were trying to portray to people and that got me thinking a lot about my own family and our history. The history that actually exists and the history that we portray along with the official government…