Critical Inquiry

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…

Late one early-autumn night, I crawled through the narrow tunnel of a plastic Klein bottle constructed on my college campus. The 3D equivalent of a Möbius Strip, the bottle was a skeleton of flexible PVC pipes and a skin of clear plastic stitched to it with white twine. To guard against mild winds, the bottle was staked to the ground and pulled taut, tied to the bare branches of the trees above. My crush crawled through first, and I followed into the wide arched belly of the bottle. We lay side by side talking for hours, shielded from the light…

“What art might offer is always modest on its own, and, from one angle, art has never looked smaller. But from another angle, in the right conditions, it might offer something close to an actual survival skill.” — Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy I. Critic Ben Davis offered this concluding thought in his new collection of essays, Art in the After-Culture. His was the final book I would read in 2022, and these words seem an appropriate summation for a time in which writing about art feels both absolutely urgent and entirely inconsequential. Art’s “smallness” becomes…

Come for the trash, stay for the culture – @fucknomtl There’s an ingenious profile of artist David Salle written by Janet Malcolm titled “Forty-one False Starts”, and composed of forty-one distinct ledes introducing the subject from a different angle. I’ve been thinking of this essay throughout my frustration with starting this piece, which has amassed a sizable pile of discarded introductions in an attempt to express the spirit of the past year. As it turns out, locking atmospheric social tides into language is a slippery business, and so after several false starts, I find myself distracted in my inbox. A Substack I…

I “Bros, are you following this nonsense? I’m incensed, man! On days like this, I just wish I didn’t sign up to be a professor in the humanities or in the US. Our people sell us short.” So read the text message from my friend TJ. By “this nonsense” TJ was referring to an academic journal article—published by the African Studies Review—by two white women and the resulting social media furore about it and the responses of some African academic peers who were on social media defending the women’s right to free speech. “You take these things too seriously” was my…

The landscape of language in Shannon Ebner’s exhibition FRET SCAPES is weathered multiple times over. The show has two main parts: a floor-to-ceiling poem entitled FRET and a series of thirteen black-and-white photographs. The poem is composed using what Ebner calls a “wet letter alphabet”— photographs of paper letters pasted with water onto an anonymous white wall. In Ebner’s photographs, the dampened characters work against the natural forces of time, evaporation, and gravity which have caused the letters to slip and wrinkle. The photographs that make up Ebner’s wet-letter alphabet are sheathed in individual Photo-Tex sleeves and mounted on the wall of the gallery…

Working under the title ‘The Photography Workshop,’ the photographers, historians of working-class history, and educators Jo Spence (1934-1992) and Terry Dennett (1938-2018) collaborated and co-habited for a little under ten years. Rubber stamped on the backs of hand-printed postcards, included in the frontispieces of books, and marking files of photographic prints and negatives, The Photography Workshop was the banner under which Spence and Dennett conducted their photographic and pedagogical practice. While almost always produced or planned from their rented North London flat—which was also their studio and dark room— The Photography Workshop was not tied to a specific location or…

It was something like 3 a.m. on one of those nights nobody knows how to end the first time I saw Cléo Sjölander’s exhibition Exuvie at Espace Maurice. Heaven knows it’s got to be bedtime, goes the song looping in my head all summer and into the fall. I’m disappointed to discover that I have the lyrics wrong, and the song “Ceremony”—one of Joy Divison’s last, and released as New Order’s first—apparently goes: “heaven knows it’s got to be this time” (Ian Curtis never transcribed the lyrics and his vocals were muffled on the original recording, so I guess there’s a chance I’m still right). Besides, I think…

Have you seen these images before?” asked the artist. Viewing a livestream from my couch at home, I watched Sara Cwynar move about the room in an all-red outfit, staging a series of scenes: Seen from above, the artist sits in a metal folding chair atop a red-gridded piece of paper and holds up different cut out images above her head for the camera to see. Monitors on either side of the stage stream this view for the physical audience. There isn’t a fixed perspective throughout, a dramaturgical choice replicated via the narration. At times, Cwynar’s voice almost syncs up…