Critical Inquiry

I was pleased to hear that the incision would run from one side of my neck to the other, following a natural wrinkle. The original plan was to begin a descending cut under one ear for several inches, then proceed across the neck and back up to the other ear – a “horseshoe incision” that wouldn’t age as well. In any case, I was facing a bilateral neck dissection to remove a large malignant tumor on my thyroid and an unknown but significant number of affected lymph nodes in the area. To my relief, this was a curative operation with…

“[…]unfinished!” -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952), the last word of Lucky’s monologue My life as a husband, father, composer, pianist, and writer often feels like an endless series of chaotic and unrelated events. From my public life in artistic performance, to my private life in artistic creation, to my personal life with friends and family, my life is endlessly generative. It is both exhilarating and exhausting. My work as an artist allows me to make some sense out of my life’s material chaos. The process of making art does this for me because, to me, art is the capturing, reordering, and…

Children can represent both truth and rebellion.* —Chiara Bisconti, child viewer of La torta in cielo, written response to the film, 1973 I am a militant of the workers’ movement who is trying to make cinema and I intervene in a disorderly way. —Lino Del Fra, director of La torta in cielo, personal correspondence, 1974 In 1973, Italian communist film director Lino Del Fra and his constant collaborator Cecilia Mangini released a children’s film, La torta in cielo (The Cake in the Sky), that was also a satirical antiwar film, in which liberation takes the form of an enormous flying cake. The film was…

There is an old Greek legend that tells us about Croseus, the King of Lydia, and his visit to the Delphic Oracle. He sent gifts to the oracle in advance of his visit, and when he visited her, asked if he should wage war against the Persians. The oracle of Delphi told him that if he went to war, a great empire would fall. Encouraged by her words, he invaded. It was his own empire that was destroyed in the process.1  Some years end with a semicolon, some with a mysterious ellipses … 2020 was like this, when we sat…

On December 31st, 1999, I rallied my best Beanie Babies and prepared for death. Although skeptical of the hype, I gathered my possessions like a pharaoh preparing for the afterlife, just in case. My theatrics were in vain, and the world entered the new millennium on a mercifully anticlimactic note. When the sky didn’t fall, Y2K fell sharply out of vogue, and the tidal wave of novelty items which bore the brand were relegated to the bargain bins of history.  The origins of celebrating New Year’s Eve on December 31st are inherited from the Roman Empire, aligned with the Julian…

A descent into darkness both literally and allegorically accompanied Atlanta-based artist Paul Stephen Benjamin’s recent solo exhibition, Black Summer, at Efraín López gallery in New York City1. The nascent gallery’s small and windowless subterranean space appropriately housed the products of Benjamin’s material and cultural research on the manifold meanings of blackness as a color and state of being, which together form the broad, elusive crux of his conceptual practice. Working across media including photography, painting, video, and sculpture, Benjamin’s corpus bridges integral moments of Black history and art history with an operative aesthetics of blackness—the ways in which blackness circulates as an…

In a laneway garage tucked behind the junction of Lansdowne and Dupont in Toronto, Ontario, Joys Gallery exhibited Maja Klaassens’ most recent solo show, The view is total sea, curated by Joys’ founder and director Danica Pinteric. Visiting during the show’s run in spring of 2023, I heard a murmur, the work washed over me, gently reconfiguring my sensibilities; it carried me back to life’s mundanities with a new glimmer and fresh interest in simple profundities. Months later, I am still stuck on this work.  The act of seeing becomes as similarly naïve an act as holding onto the belief of…

The Golden Boy is Winnipeg’s most famous top. The statue’s homoerotic qualities are so overt that it’s easy to see it as a knowing wink to the queer community. This is the plausible-if-revisionist history suggested in Purple City, a new short film by Noam Gonick and Michael Walker. Modelled after the Greek god Hermes, the statue that adorns the dome of the Manitoba Legislative Building is the symbolic centre of the film, which stages episodes from the city’s queer and occultist mythology. There’s an apt symmetry to Purple City which both begins and ends with Walker, who appears throughout the film, roaming the steps of the Legislature…

For the Toronto Biennial of Art’s second iteration in 2022, “What Water Knows, the Land Remembers,” multidisciplinary artist Nadia Belerique was commissioned for a new version of her installation HOLDINGS (2020–ongoing). In this series, plastic barrels used for shipping cargo were situated within the context of the artist’s familial practice of shipping items to relatives in the Azores. Installed in large stacks, each drum contained a tableau of objects viewed through different stained glass portals. Belerique’s choice of materials, including stained glass, is a means of expanding the tactics of photography, such as framing, depth, and the distance between objects. Through her…

Black Diamond is a small town located forty-five minutes south of Calgary. In a mutual decision by local councils to prioritize “cost savings,” it was recently merged with the nearby town of Turner Valley, Alberta, and the area comprising the two has, as of January 1, 2023, gone by the name Diamond Valley (clever!). We must not forget that these are all colonizer names—although youthful, punkish me had a fantasy that Black Diamond was named for the KISS/Replacements song, and not for the prevalence of coal in the area. The actual, earthy land of Diamond Valley ripples off to the east, shaking…