Longform

In April of last year we—Alana Friend Lettner and M. Leander Kalil—encountered Maggy Hamel-Metsos’ installation Simile Aria at Fonderie Darling in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). We knew very little about Hamel-Metsos; we did not yet know of her predilection for conceptual interrogations via sculptural means, nor of her various obsessions with opera divas, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, and bullfights. We knew only that she had a residency at Fonderie Darling, that she had exhibited internationally, and that we had to see Simile Aria before it was taken down, according to urgent encouragements from several of our friends. Simile Aria featured a single repurposed church organ suspended from the…

Despite the quintessential plucky gallerist represented in many a media about ”life in the big city,” literature depicting the commercial art world, and doing it well, is far and few between. Enter James Cahill, an academic, art critic, and one-time gallerina (a decidedly gender neutral term). The British writer, who currently lives stateside in Los Angeles, made a name for himself as a novelist in 2022 with his debut Tiepolo Blue, exploring the psychological tailspin of a Cambridge art historian preoccupied by Rococo frescoes, as the Young British Art movement of the 1990s begins to encroach on his aesthetic worldview. His…

On a bright February day, I arrived at the Toronto shoreline of Lake Ontario bundled in my winter layers covered in a dusting of fresh snow. I tapped the slush from my boots against the Harbourfront Centre’s doorframe to visit The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Conscious of swishing fabric and leaving melted snow in my wake, I entered Vuntut Gwitchin artist Jeneen Frei Njootli’s solo exhibition The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze. The Power Plant exhibition brings together works from a period of over ten years, revealing the artist’s sustained engagement with the relationships between body, land, and…

Lucy Frost, the narrator of Lisa Robertson’s brilliant new novel Riverwork, is a woman in her sixties: she’s a self-professed “failed poet,” “a hag.” She’s a “scoffer and a scrawler,” “a fibber, and a snipper, a doubter, and a haunter of shame.” She spends her mornings slowly reading the memoirs of Chateaubriand, just ten pages at a time, such that she may experience “the sensation of personally containing the duration of the book.” She spends her afternoons cleaning the homes of Paris’s professoriate class, and her long, sleepless nights reading, sifting thru, and transcribing the notebooks and bundles of paper, the…

Last year, the independent art book press Primary Information published Stay away from nothing, a look at the relationship between Peter Hujar, the photographer of 1980s New York’s downtown artists, and Paul Thek, the mercurial and somewhat mythic painter and sculptor, from 1956 to 1975. Studiously edited by Francis Schichtel, the book presents facsimiles of Thek’s correspondence with Hujar, taking place on postcards, in letters, on notebook paper, full of notes and scribbles, as well as images of Thek taken by Hujar. The book ends with a short afterword by Andrew Durbin, author of the recently released biography The Wonderful World That…

Colloquially dubbed the “multicultural biennial” and maligned by mainstream critics for “preachy” politics, the 1993 Whitney Biennial was a historic juncture in contemporary art history. Films on view explored queerness and civil rights activism, and visitors became immediate, unwitting performers by way of Daniel J. Martinez’s artwork comprised of multicolored admissions buttons: metal pins worn as proof of entry, each containing a fragment of the phrase “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting To Be White.” It was a landmark display; the curators prioritized media-based works, and the selected artists engaged equally with formalist techniques and political theory. Today, it is lauded…

I had already learned so much from Rainer Diana Hamilton’s poetry before reading This Reasonable Habit. Co-written with Violet Spurlock and published February 2026 by Spunk Editions, the long poem begins with a bicoastal phone call and unfolds at an imaginary summit where 26 characters—A through Z—convene, over the course of three days, to answer questions like: “Is ‘shyness’ a moral failing?”, “What makes good sex?”, “What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone?” Ever searching for guidance on living, relating, and loving, I finished the book with a rush of gratitude for the sheer abundance of thinking it opened up, meaning…

I can’t quite remember when I first encountered Sameer Farooq’s work. It may have been during the years I was working full-time in a museum. What I do remember is the surprise of seeing his name, years later, on the roster for a movement class I was teaching at Mosaic Yoga on Sterling Road—just a few doors down from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. I felt shy about striking up a conversation with an artist whose work I so deeply admired. Eventually, though, I gathered the courage to introduce myself as more than his Pilates teacher and asked…

Prior to reading Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, 2026 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14), I had frankly a very brief and limited grasp of Peter Hujar’s and Paul Thek’s lives and work. The art gallery I used to work for in 2022 curated an online presentation from a selection of Paul Thek’s etchings, reprinted from copper plates originally discovered in his storage unit in 1989, the year after his death. Among a few that the website presented were depictions of “Plums,” “Bouncing Earth,” “Burning Book,” and “Tarbaby.” In my role at the gallery, I had…

Aline Bouvy is a Luxembourgish visual artist who lives and works between Brussels and Luxembourg. Trained at ERG – École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, she has built a multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, installation, sound, moving image, and publication. Rather than treating objects as self-contained statements, she uses the exhibition as a constructed situation where norms and social codes are tested in public. Bouvy’s work is informed by a feminist outlook and an acute attention to the power mechanisms that shape desire. With rigorous systems, careful construction, and a deliberately offbeat humour,…