Longform

Over the last decade or so, Jennifer Liao has been switching through various hats as a writer, director, and producer. Currently based in Toronto, Liao has had the opportunity to work on shorts, full-length features, as well as spots on the small screen and if that is not enough, she also manages to hold down an unrelated office day-job. The Calgarian-bred multi-directional creator and thinker has been able to work through several projects spanning diverse genres including horror, comedy, crime, and drama. She shares with me her continued inclination for humour in dark storylines. And it makes sense that in…

An unassuming lone sheep attempts to comfort and empathize with an actress directed to sob. A choir ensemble sings in unison but they make no sound, only mouth movements suggesting a performance of sorts. Assembled trays of grass and seedlings sit and lounge on gallery floors. They are mingled and illuminated by Flavin-esque florescent tubes playfully hung yet serving as a source of photosynthesis for the green living organisms below them. A herd of goats peruse a blindingly illuminated white-walled gallery. There’s a trapezoid plinth in the middle of the gallery, a member of the herd hops on the plinth…

The lights click off. We’re sitting in the dark facing a flat-screen TV, waiting for the video to start. The scene opens to the exterior of a suburban home at night. As the camera pans slowly up towards the lit square of an upstairs bedroom window, the stylized text of the work’s title appears in the centre of the screen: Turbo. The sounds of a revving car engine accompany the text, which is also the namesake of the fictional character played by the artist, Alvin Luong. Luong’s work is a unique combination of sincerity and satire, of political resistance and…

Tosha Stimage is driven to stop language in its tracks at all turns. To wring it out, distress it, place it where it has no guarantee, and disclaim until it just feels strange. Speaking with the artist, educator, organizer, and attentive thinker, Stimage, you get her necessity to make language an elusive entity. “There’s a kind of freedom in not having to be a definition, to allow oneself to be connected to other things, other ideas in a very infinite way”, Stimage illuminates in thinking about the black body in relation to the authority of language and willfully turning towards obscurantism. Stimage is never immune to…

I was lost, I was riding around in circles. I was getting nervous. I thought I would never find the space. Eventually, I saw a small group of people huddling outside, and I made my way in. I found myself at the performance of Much too Much to Say directed by Zorya Arrow in a small building on Ellice Ave. (Winnipeg) at sundown. The space looked like it was in flux. Different patches of flooring and paint revealed its many histories. It was clear, the space and the bodies inside it informed each other. The cast Arlo Reva, Arne McPherson, Bo van…

Hailing from Burgaw, North Carolina to Mexican parents, the once aspiring international diplomat, teen court defense attorney, and all-around high achieving Diego Camposeco turned down his undergrad acceptance letter to Harvard and instead opt to stay close to home where he would later attune his pull towards photography in relation to his community of Latin Americans who continue to shape the social, economic and cultural landscape in the south. Photography work that set out to account the places and experiences of demographics in a truthful and objective manner often overlooked the impossibility of this task and the sure fact of the image maker’s subjectivity. Camposeco’s…

A quick scan through Darby Milbrath’s collection of work over the last however many years highlights a palpable impression of undulating motion. Her oil-marked surfaces seem to take the eyes in swim-like flows and swells. They are shapeshifting, fragmented and often appear to billow off into indefinite terrains. They carry the sensibilities of Frankenthaler’s colour flood play, the looseness of British artist Sue Williams and even at times Cecily Brown’s fierceness. Milbrath mines from an inward narrative but manages to transcend mere linearity. The Toronto artist willfully quotes from painting’s past of expressive gesturing and in the process frees up…

Do you ever take an extra second to break down the logo and imagery on that Monster Energy drink can you’re sucking back in the studio? Melbourne-based painter Michael Georgetti is pulling through to illuminate the sometimes visual tactics and hidden meanings behind the brands, logos and mass-produced commodities we get assaulted with on a daily basis. Georgetti also raises some questions about the art worlds place within consumer culture and the post Internet world. Fresh off his PhD Georgetti packs research and intention into every one of his freestanding abstract paintings. Are simple marketing tactics all it takes to transform a…

From seemingly nonsensical dadaist objects, frenetic performances, lyrically debaucherous monologues, Molly Colleen O’Connell’s oeuvre is a wonky jungle chock full of unpredictable detours. As far as interdisciplinary artists go, O’Connell is a chameleon if there ever was one. She meanders her way through comics, installations, ceramics, paintings, video performance, stand-up poetry/comedy, clowning; the list keeps going. This is all achieved in a sensibility akin to that of an inquisitive active child with a measured logic. An undergirding strength to anything she outputs is a comedy, but it will be beside the point to limit her as a comedic act. Through…

At a time when we continue to be skeptical of spoken language and the written word grows desensitized, it becomes more imperative to look elsewhere for alternate ways of relating and moving through our surroundings. As dance and other rhythmic movement-based practices remain synthesized within an exhibition context, it also takes hold with the demarcations of the institution giving way to mutable potentials for establishing meanings. If a number of rising practices today like Anne Imhof’s and Angelica Mesiti’s, are foregrounded by physically inscribed forms of communication, then there’s a case to be made about reaching beyond words and known language. To…