Area Of Intrigue

The following short story is a companion piece to my short film DATUM. The film examines salt, the mineral on which the human body runs and upon which human trade and civilization is built. Interestingly, the main export of salt mines is road de-icing salt, which would render the mine obsolete if climate warms to the point that we no longer need road salt. The salt mine is an underground space of extraction entangled with predicting the conditions of the above ground. Set in an ambiguous future past, I imagine the retired salt mine overtaken by servers of a climate archive…

I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are fantastical. My dreams are exceptionally vivid or banal but somehow revelatory. Sometimes I dream of my late parents and I choose to believe that they are letting me know they are keeping an eye on things.  While working for decades as a server/bartender, my sleep cycle regularly included a specific stress dream. Unwelcome and unpleasant, my colleagues called it a “waitermare.” Typically this dream would feature a scenario wherein I navigate spectacular obstacles to complete a service-related task. For example, I attempt to cross a busy multi-lane highway with…

“When you’re doing corpse paint, do you go over the mustache or not…?” Justin Bear L’Arrivée laughs amongst a group of BIPOC metalheads. We were all getting ready for the evening’s events at a table in the back of Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art’s gallery space in Winnipeg’s Exchange District, where Justin acts as Artistic Director. The exhibition is titled “Warpaint,” a solo show by Swampy Cree, Dene, and Mennonite artist Brianna Wentz. Everyone at the table (save Justin and Laura Lewis, another incredible Winnipeg artist) modelled for Brianna back in 2022 in preparation for this exhibition: she invited a…

The aftereffects of violent deeds – abuse, genocide, sexual assault, extractions of labour, property, and resources – travel through time and space. Neuroepigenetics researcher Isabelle Mansuy suggests, “adverse extreme experiences in childhood can modify the body so much that it can have imprints or traces even in reproductive cells.”1 These acts burrow inside human DNA strands, and our descendants may never escape their echoes. When it comes to music, chord progressions, notes, and melodies linger as well, finding their way back into the current moment, as if to confirm Carlo Rovelli’s observation of Newton’s laws: “there is no distinction between past…

1. Perennial Lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring —OED Online Since moving to New York a few years ago, my mornings have become about keeping time or being on time. I wake up at 6:00am, go to the gym at 7:00am, get back home at 8:00am, shower at 8:10am, drink a cup of coffee 8:30am, get ready at 8:45am, and leave my apartment at 9:15am. I walk the same route each morning turning left once I am out the house, then a slight right at the end of the road and then left again where I…

Bamboo traps are used for catching fish. When you get the fish, you can forget the trap. Snares are used for catching hares. When you get the hare, you can forget the snare. Words are used for catching meanings. When you get the meaning, you can forget the words. How can I find someone to talk to who has forgotten the words? — Zhuangzi Elee sat up in bed. It was just before dawn, our third day in the hospice. Outside, the sky was washed with grey. I had been awake for a while, sitting in the chair next to the…

Everyone has a different perspective and tolerance to workload. My vision of the art world has changed over the ten years I’ve been contributing to it. While it has a lot of positive aspects (or else I wouldn’t work in this field), I feel like it is based on idealized beliefs and unhealthy work ethics. If you’re employed by an institution, you’re expected to work full-time and visit exhibitions/attend openings in the evenings or weekends. There isn’t a lot of flexibility in terms of schedule and the pay rarely makes it possible to work part-time. I always had a good…

like white paintings, and this gives me anxiety. Kazimir Malevich. Robert Ryman. Michael Buthe. These makers of white paintings are synonymous with high art made by white men in the tradition of minimalism that has come to be regarded as pretentious, elitist, and transcendent. What does it mean for a racialized queer woman like me to like white paintings? I was recently reading the poet Kazim Ali’s new and selected works, Sukun, and was relieved to find that he too likes white paintings, specifically those by Agnes Martin, the Saskatchewan-born, Vancouver-raised, America-educated artist known for her “grids” – large square-shaped canvases primarily…

Preservation has two meanings:  keeping something of value intact, protected, and free from decay, or, alternatively, preparing food for future use by preventing spoiling. To preserve ideas, things, and places is to slow the passing of time to maintain their original state. Preserving food, however, is to transform it. For example, through fermentation, food can be preserved via a metabolic process that generates new products from sugars through the absence of oxygen and the introduction of microbes. Static or active: to embalm or to pickle.  The act of preserving spaces and objects is historically that of the embalmer, but, in…

I “What makes Nigerians tick?” I was asked recently by one of those folks, you know, who by hook or crook would be found asking Africans here where they really are from. On a blessed day, I would’ve ignored the question, pretended I didn’t hear the blasphemy, or, even better, offered a not-so-polite dressing down. It’s frustrating to be constantly harassed with antiquated, racist questions: where are you from?, what makes your people unique?, how do you greet in your language? Questions that many of us know to be loaded with intents and mal intents to put us where we are perceived to belong. Elsewhere, anywhere…