Longform

Lens-based artist and filmmaker Zinnia Naqvi and I met by chance during the 2023 Mayworks Festival where she presented The Professor’s Desk (2023), a project that told the stories of four cases of discrimination in Canadian universities. At the time, I was a Teaching Assistant at OCAD University and the outgoing Executive Director of Graduate Studies for the OCAD Student Union; the name of Naqvi’s exhibition piqued my interest due to my political involvement with the institution and my desire to research and work toward better futures for students and faculty. Part of my job was to navigate and mediate conflict, to…

Chloe Alexandra Thompson works in sight, sound and somatics. A fluent technologist, her site-specific, digital, and performance works are deeply attuned to our perceptions. The Cree, Canadian composer and sound artist incorporates sources from audio coding language software such as Max and Pure Data. Using coding to invent amorphous digital instruments, her work is brought into physical form through spatialized speaker arrays. Her installations of multiple loudspeakers are programmed to distribute sound in intentional patterns and locations. The result is intricate, heady and difficult to convey in words. At the crux of art and technology, these experiential sonic pieces play…

My first introduction to Angel Bat Dawid came from a simple Google search: “Black woman clarinetist” when I was trying to find repertoire from underrepresented composers to program on my undergraduate senior clarinet recital a few years ago. Oftentimes, classical music recitals consist of mostly White, cisgendered men from Europe with the occasional woman’s composition featured; therefore, I was well accustomed to unsuccessful Google searches of the apparent mythical Black woman clarinetist. One lucky search led me to the music of Dawid, or the genre she names “great Black music”. Before Dawid’s ascension to performer status, her life was informed…

If ever there’s such a thing as the cultural character of an epoch—that is, a quality or cultural attitude that distinguishes a historical time from another across spaces and places—the contemporary epoch, at least in the West and perhaps in Africa, will be best characterized by that complicated concept called trauma. Trauma has become the “cultural script” of our time, writes Parul Seghal in a New Yorker essay titled “The Case against the Trauma Plot,” “a concept that bites into the [cultural] flesh so deeply it is difficult to see its historical contingency.” The cultural fascination with trauma, while best…

“The best place I can imagine my work is at a party,” says Lan “Florence” Yee in a video introducing their recently exhibited textile series, Tangerine, After Grapefruit. Borrowing from Yoko Ono’s 1964 artist book, Grapefruit, Yee’s large format rendition takes nine 5×5 linen sheets in which hand-embroidered instructions ask the viewer to perform several curious prompts like “Sigh in at least seven different tones” and “Go somewhere you’ve wanted to visit for a long time. Don’t come back.” Tangerine, After Grapefruit was also photographed, made into book form (a collaboration with Toronto-based micropress San Press), and distributed to the public during Yee’s first Toronto solo exhibition, Just Short…

Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker whose material practice is entwined with experimental research. These two aspects of her work are inlaid, as it is nearly impossible to speak about one without the other. Originally from Charlottesville, Virginia, Elizabeth’s family history is embedded in her work, in particular its oscillating histories of racial passing throughout the United States. The artist often considers her own experience, and that of her family’s, as a way of examining broader social structures, and how those structures are at odds with lived realities. Her research process acknowledges these limits, her questions leading her…