Profiles

As I leave artist Lorna Bauer’s house after my visit to her home studio, our third meeting, she gives me a hug and wishes me luck on an upcoming move. We make plans for a drink on her back porch, “once things start to bloom.” Walking away I make notes on my phone about the visit. Patricia’s garden upstate. Daffodils, hydrangea, magnolia. Grouse like a dirt bike. Adair’s drawings. Pollinators. States of transformation. Like glass in its molten state. Like the latent image on film as developer meets fixer meets water meets heat. Like a flowering tree in April in Montréal. …

Over the past few years, artmaking became an extension of parenting for Dominique Rey. She created matching costumes for her and her children, Madeleine and Auguste Coar, and would set up a camera for a period of what she called ‘intentional play.’ In doing so, Rey captured images honouring the relationship between mother and child. I first met Rey at her studio in the Point Douglas neighbourhood of Winnipeg, where she invited me over for tea after I reached out about this article. After months of researching her work, I was running late and worried I was making a bad…

Hannah Godfrey was working at the Cube Microplex in Bristol when she first realized she was an artist. Training to be a 35 mm projectionist—“it took me about seven years,” she jokes—in the Cube’s “anarchic” environment provided the perfect, scrappy setting to experiment creatively. For someone who didn’t go to art school, the Cube offered an incredible “sense of possibility.” Putting on exhibitions, booking bands, and screening alternative cinema, she was learning how to make things happen while trying them herself. “You could do anything,” she recalls fondly. She was part of a noise band that only ever played in…

When I arrive at Joseph Tisiga’s home in Anjou, a neighbourhood in Montreal’s far East End, he is outside smoking a cigarette and scrolling through his phone. “The world news is hitting a higher octave these days,” he says in greeting, his dark brown eyes widening as he takes another drag. There’s a weariness in his voice that hints at a deeper exhaustion. Perhaps its the weight of a mind continually processing the world in complex ways. Or simply the strain of parenting a young toddler. Conversations with the Kaska Dena artist tend to mirror the tone of his work:…

Amy Ching-Yan Lam and I look over the menus at a packed cha chaan teng (Hong Kong-style diner) in Markham, a suburb of Toronto. In the background are sounds of clattering dishware and Cantonese conversations. People are crowded into the small entryway as they eagerly await a table, glancing at diners who might be finishing up their meals. The energy in here is frenetic, but not unpleasant. Lam speaks Cantonese. I don’t. In this setting, the language conveys ease and maybe belonging, but is not required for ordering our midday meal. Descriptions of the dishes are written in Traditional Chinese…

When rewatching old artist talks of AO Roberts in preparation for our conversations I came across a quote of theirs: “I have so much to say but I don’t want to tell you anything at all.” There’s a tension within Roberts’ work between revealing and obscuring, a generosity to the viewer as well as a distrust. AO Roberts is a Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist working in sculptural installation and sound. They have also performed in numerous noise projects and punk bands such as Wolbachia, Kursk, Hoover Death, and VOR. During the winter of 2022, I chatted with Roberts several times on Zoom, myself…