Longform

Our conversation with Ryan Scails traveled in multiple directions steering us beyond his mere creative output. In the end, we get somewhat of a sustained portrait. So much so we are splitting our conversation with Scails into a two-part post. Above all, we learn how most of Scails’ experiences outside of his creative work implicitly weaves itself into his object making. Throughout our exchange, Scails remains casual and candid as he shares bits of his upbringing in Bethel, Connecticut with a social justice activist mother, a father brought up during Jim Crow and how their individual influences continue to be windows through which he interacts…

For some time now, Zeesy Power’s performance centered inquiries on our tacit social and cultural fabric has progressed further into what she is presently at task with—our engagement with digital technologies. To a great extent, Powers accentuates for us again and again, what may appear inevident or rather latent in our quotidian interrelations. Powers is painstakingly working along the ever-gaping learning curve to understand code and the technical complexities behind the mobile screens and gadgets that continue to entangle significant parts of our everyday experiences. “It’s so critical to how we are experiencing the world and will continue to experience the…

Chandra Melting Tallow is an artist whose output can be described as poly-directional. And this has come to include their sound work under the moniker Mourning Coup. A project which progressed out of their former work in conceptual performance art. Their work has been presented in Istanbul, Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal among other places. The Vancouver based, Blackfoot and mixed ancestry from Siksika Nation has been steadily creating work whenever able amid disabilities beyond their control. The visceral reverb-laden incantation wails that bookend Tallow’s full-length debut is the result of five years of crafting and chipping away at Mourning Coup’s Baby Blue…

We connected with Baltimore native :3lON a few months ago after serendipitously coming across is work on SoundCloud. :3lON uses his music and sounds to construct atmospheres that feel as though they occur in zero gravity. And his soft languid warm voice orbit and interweave loosely with the pulsing backing production. His work almost serves as a refuge outside tangible reality. It is vulnerable but carried with control. It is effortlessly harmonious yet dissident. In our conversation, :3lON shares with us how music-making came into fruition for him tracing back his earliest memories of creating and finding interest in sounds. He also shares…

Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they’ve been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. On this episode, we speak to the exquisite Gabi Dao. Preface: our chat happened a few bits ago so some of the talking points are from our initial point of exchange but nonetheless, it was rather a delight getting to be in conversation with the Vancouverite as she details a little about her life as an up-and-comer in the arts. Dao seems…

To the uninitiated eye, the wide-ranging and ever expanding genre (if it can be called that) of western contemporary dance can be a fiddly entity to find a point of access to. Having amalgamated itself with what seems like an infinite possibility of facets including ties to jazz, theatre, ballet, performance art, as well as African and Japanese dance, it’s a shapeshifting thing to even try to pinpoint. When you get choreographers like Anne Teresa Baroness De Keersmaeker making pieces that elevate the simple vocabulary of running, sitting, walking, and hopping into passages of whimsy, /or when you watch a mainstay like Pina Bausch fluently…

Whiteness is a default. Whiteness is normal. It’s so normal it is trivial to most who identify as white and even those who don’t. I am still unsure to what extent artist TJ McLachlan sincerely knows this even after our conversation. But unlike most who roll their eyes or get hot and bothered at the hint of a ‘check your privilege’ assertion, McLachlan has set his art practice to have dialogues about this same contentious thing called privilege as it relates to whiteness and patriarchy. And to that, there’s a clear awareness of self in a place like the Canadian landscape—to a…

We meet Beamsville Ontario-bred artist, Jordyn Stewart, at a point where her creative output extensively involves action making with the audience of a recording camera. A lot of these performative activities are both parts instinctive and measured inquisitive responsiveness to her early memories—memories of the physical natural environs she was situated in, memories of home, memories of winter activities, the familiar, the domestic etc. What arises from these enquiries are often peripherally absurd gestures like mixing found disparate land rubble in a mechanic blender or walking on gathered pieces of rocks or plotting a personal skating rink the size of her…

With the rise of computer graphics software, the internet, and other digital technological advances that occurred through the nineties, it made it more and more accessible for age old mediums like painting and drawing to drift from tactile surfaces into virtual interfaces. Now, we see people like Cory Archangel, Artie Vierkant, and Petra Cortright incessantly bending, reconfiguring, and creating within that ever-so-expansive digital pictorial space. Reaching from that long set rubric of painting and drawing, Gothenburg via Berlin-based artist Aaron Scheer uses his work to engage that pictorial space within the screen. Making free form digital gestures with keyboard commands…

You don’t often get a lot of people unabashedly lauding their mothers for being elemental supporters in their creative pursuits. We paid a visit to Winnipeg residing artist, writer, poet John Patterson at his studio back late last summer and among various points of conversation were his mother’s influence at an early age to just freely make and make whatever he wanted. A pivotal part of why Patterson creates to date. Patterson shared with us some of his in-progress projects, why self-referencing seems to be a reoccurring inclination in his work, why he ran into problems as a result while in art school, and…