Longform

Two summers ago in a New York gallery, I saw a work by Vancouver-based artist Steven Cottingham that has stayed with me ever since. Hanging plainly on the wall, Untitled (2016) comprised a single denim jacket, sourced from a Bangladeshi garment factory where workers complained of mass hallucinations and ghost attacks until management temporarily ceased operations for an on-site exorcism. To some onlookers, the incident was evidence of the spiritual realm intervening to offer overworked labourers a break from exploitative working conditions. The jacket lingered because it falls within a category of artworks that I tend to gravitate towards: nondescript objects which contain ideas and provocations…

Carmen Thompson (Diitiidaht/Kyuquot/Coast Salish), 46, has lived and breathed costume design for the last 15 years. Her given name by her uncle is Tl’aakwaa (Nuu-chah-nulth), meaning copper. Copper is a versatile, malleable material with high electrical conductivity, twisted into jewellery, coins, and metal alloys. Copper is a trace dietary mineral, it lives in our bones, and seems to be everywhere else. Thompson’s career embodies malleability. She has played a vital role in the complex visual language of costume on multiple full feature films, commercials, award shows, television, theatre, and opera. Her father, Art Thompson, was a prominent Victoria artist working…

Hadassah ‘Hazy’ GreenSky is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and visual artist based in the Metro Detroit area where she was also raised. She is a member of the Waganakising Odawa peoples from the lands now referred to as Harbor Springs, Michigan. Like many other young Indigenous women in the midwest [and across the Americas], GreenSky was subject to cheap ill-mannered name-calling like “Pocahontas” by non-Indigenous people when she was growing up. Her personal experiences of racism is a condition of systemic structures and barriers held up by white supremacy all throughout North America. Speaking to GreenSky, she shared with me that…

s we move towards reshaping the world into a reality where the most marginalized and oppressed people are able to thrive, unimpeded by state and racial violence, the mediums in which identity manifests are a moving target. Racial and ethnic categories continue to shift, dodge, and take on new forms simultaneous to the expanding social consciousness of systemic racism’s histories. Whiteness in particular continues to evade blame and repercussion for the historical, structural oppression and volatility it has and continues to systematize. Instead, we have witnessed performative allyship from individuals and institutions of power that is as ineffectual as it is…