When Edouard Manet exhibited In the Conservatory, critics accused him of making concessions to the public. The painting features a well-dressed couple in a greenhouse, comically missing each other’s vacant stares and looking rigid amid an explosion of plant life. More recently the “excessively finished” work was read as an “anxious attempt to reconsolidate the visual field in whose disassembly Manet had already participated.” For art historian Jonathan Crary, the malaise of modernity is signalled in the “fraudulent earthly paradise” of a greenhouse.

Coetus Floreus at Galerie Nicolas Robert might also be mistaken for a conservative display of skillfully rendered flowers, figures, and faces. Continuities between the honeymoon phase of European modernity and our more circumspect late-capitalist era appear throughout the exhibition. But if the motif of flowers was used by Manet to stage a conflict between nature and culture, this group exhibition exposes our tendency nowadays to recode nature as culture.



Lorna Bauer, The Westmount Conservatory and Greenhouse, 2018, inkjet print

A provocative link is made between Manet’s century and our own in Lorna Bauer’s The Westmount Conservatory and Greenhouse. Bauer began photographing the iconic Westmount building between its renovations while preparing for a residency in Paris to study the green spaces of Baron Haussmann’s 19th Century urban renewal program. The photo’s middle ground is occupied by zinnia flowers visible through paint, plaster, or milkshake spatter on a pane of glass. In the background, the building’s ceiling recalls Montreal’s Victorian past as a lone leaf in the bottom-left corner breaks free from the picture into the viewer’s space. Mocking our desire for a direct encounter with the organic, a bronze bamboo leaf sculpture hangs nearby, fully liberated from the greenhouse’s architectural space but frozen in the gallery’s commercial space.

A line between real and simulated encounters with nature is drawn as well in Michelle Bui and Gillian King’s works. Bui’s fake flowers are arranged in an arch pattern and flattened on a metal grid. No attempt at authenticity is made. Dollar-store models for the daffodils in Dimanche were selected for their “synthetic look,” and the translucent resin flowers in Sunny Day Out are like hung skins or glittery candy “licked into shape.” By contrast, King’s Iron Yolks is painted with pigments extracted from rose petals, irises, ferns, onion skins, wildflowers, and rust sediment. Her marks are indexes of a direct encounter with materials gathered in the Ottawa area, but their gestural energy conveys a tactile memory of, or ritual communion with, nature more than an objective record of it.



Zachari Logan, Hives 2, from the Wild Man series, 2018, red pencil on mylar

The flowers in Kris Knight and Zachari Logan’s works lead through a web of references, from the campy to the crafty, to the romantic or erotic, and once again back to the 19th Century. Knight’s paintings feature an ephebic figure laying in tall grass and clovers, or peering out coyly from behind a hand fan inspired by 19th Century socialites and 21st Century TV drag queens. In Slipping Petals Knight turns his flowers and porcelain-smooth faces with deference toward Oscar Wilde. Pressed roses appear on the inside cover of The Picture of Dorian Gray, wilted, dead, and dying like the novel’s protagonist.

Logan’s dazzlingly well-executed pastel drawing on black paper titled Dead Flowers I engages the same themes of impermanence, longing, and loss, but the work is also an homage to the 18th Century paper artist Mary Delany. His tissue of references thickens in a diptych titled Moon Roses (after Debussy/after Verlaine) but Logan is careful to make emotional rather than academic connections with these artists – with the austere and somber approach of Delany for instance, and with Debussy’s uncluttered evocations of still and lonely moonlit nights.

Logan’s two small red crayon drawings parse the flower’s personal, natural, and cultural significance. The artist appears in Naked in the Roses from the waist down walking through an overgrown field. Our view is obstructed by an impossibly detailed drawing of a rose near the centre of the composition. At once a cover for the voyeur and an intricate design for a dispassionate viewer to peer into, the rose here is ambivalent.

In Hives 2 the distinction between a flower’s simple beauty and its erotic charge is sharper. A large poppy, ferns, and leaves are arranged around a penis, like pubic hair, or more amusingly, like a boutonniere with a fleshy pin. The drawing follows a rule for Logan’s entire Wild Man series of merging plant material with figures and faces, but here the combination presents a functional equivalence. As the artist notes, despite our romantic investment in flowers, they are, as a matter of fact, “the sexual organs of plants and the part of them we are most attracted to.” As the works across the exhibition suggest, our feelings, beliefs, and traditions are unavoidably caught up in the folds of these living, growing, dying, and always culturally coded natural things.


Coetus Floreus continues until August 25.
Galerie Nicolas Robert: https://www.galerienicolasrobert.com/
The gallery is accessible.


Tammer El-Sheikh is a writer and teacher based in Montreal. His art criticism has appeared in Parachute, Canadian Art, ETC and C Magazine.

The inherent intimacy of inheritance, transmission, and knowledge-sharing all operate in Jeneen Frei Njootli’s current exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Titled my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money, it includes a series of four large sheets of steel and a newly commissioned video work. Frei Njootli pressed handmade beadwork onto her body and then, relying on the natural oils from her skin, transferred the beaded texture to the surface of the steel. She takes the formula of intentional wear and tear (like commodities that are treated to appear aged), and applies a mercurial poetics to determined patination.



Jeneen Frei Njootli, my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money, 2018, installation view (photo: Michael Love)

Her video work has a similarly layered form that superimposes a projection of the artist’s back onto a sheet of steel. The image is veil-like without coyness or ethereal qualities. A beadwork pattern impressed on the surface of her skin gradually vanishes from her back as the surface evens out, and then reappears as the footage plays in reverse. For the static works, the range of visibility of her body-marks on the steel is influenced by slight shifts in temperature and air in the gallery. However, despite being a time-based medium, the video positions Frei Njootli’s body as always present on the surface. It is the site of reception where knowledge and circumstance are internalized – unseen but always somewhere in the depth of the frame.

The exhibition proposes an anti-capitalist aesthetic regarding the stain of human labour. The stain given to be seen is not a generalized kind of labour though; it’s specific to the artist and the identity of that particular body. This body is employed as an interface for the complex touching of hands, beads, body, and steel. These human-to-material relationships speak volumes about systems of domination, but what we retain in their wake is necessarily fugitive. The system of contemporary art facilitates this touching, so we have to ask: To what extent are these anti-capitalist aesthetics cannibalized by the white cube? Can institutions facilitate the fugitivity of the dispossessed?

Every gallery grapples with these questions whenever they show work that discursively contends with dispossession, colonial violence, and gendered labour (an indirect way of referring to the exploitation of women). We don’t rely on artists or exhibitions to provide answers (we would never get anywhere), but Frei Njootli’s notion of the “given to be seen” supplies us with a means of edification that inverts the settler paradigm of circulating and withholding knowledge – the history of knowledge on demand. This exhibition leads one to think more about selective opacity and the agency we foster in receiving what is given to be seen – a receiving that results in affirmation, rather than accumulation.


Jeneen Frei Njootli: my auntie bought all her skidoos with bead money continues until September 16.
Contemporary Art Gallery: https://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/
The gallery is accessible.


Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She is an editor of Charcuterie and co-curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Her books are Nascar (Blank Cheque, 2016) and Cuts of Thin Meat (Spare Room, 2015). She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.

There must be a word in German that captures the feeling of nostalgia for a time you experienced indirectly. For me, that would be the 1970s, when my only exposure to the art world came through a black-and-white television screen while I read my comics. Hints of what was out there emerged in trashy movies and news reports on idiosyncratic instances of youth culture. By the time I hit my teens in the eighties, I would scour magazine racks and record stores for clues about the recent past that I had just missed. It was still bubbling up through zines and 45s that documented the output of that transitional decade. Primitive tools of reproduction and distribution were being used to re-evaluate the idealism of the sixties, to reject it outright, or to create new models in its aftermath. Or at least thats how it seemed to an innocent adolescent desperate to escape the mundane existence of his basement bedroom.



Hudinilson Jr., Caderno de Referências No. 43, 1990s, photograph prints, newspaper and magazine cutouts, photocopies, and documents on paper

I recalled that thrill of discovery as I looked at the grainy photographs and fading photocopies in Scrap Metal Gallery’s compact retrospective of the works of the Brazilian artist Hudinilson Jr. His late seventies/early eighties output on his own and with the collective 3NÓS3 provides further evidence that the post-hippie politics and punk rock aesthetics of the time were active in places other than New York and London. Historical guardians like curator Philip Monk with his exhibition Is Toronto Burning? and filmmaker Mike Hoolboom with his book on the Funnel film collective have kept our local version of this era alive. It doesn’t take much digging to see there were innumerable instances of similar scenes across the globe, fueled by a scepticism of commodification combined with a rejection of institutions that would only ever coopt expression. The artists of this age found the tools to make meaning in the public realm, intervening in space and print, documenting actions with photography and distributing the evidence of their work through mass media like newsprint or readily accessible (for those with office jobs or students) photocopiers.

Hudinilson Jr. was particularly enamoured with Xerox technology and used the medium to map his body. He would subvert this hub of bureaucratic surveillance (copying documents to retain documentation) by pushing the machine to its limits. Photocopiers are undone through the beauty of their imperfections. They are a timely metaphor for loss as they add noise with every reproduction. The increasing grain or distortion highlights the fallibility of the medium – undercutting its authority, throwing its permanence into question, tossing any appeal to originality out the window, and opening the door to a serial stream of unique works as each copy degrades the last. Now that pdfs have replaced paper, the art of this moment will be regarded as more and more quaint, except for those who remember the oppressive rhythm of such office equipment and the thrill of exploiting it for rebellious ends.



3NÓS3, Ensacamento, 1979/2003, photography

Resistance is always part of the equation when a new generation of artists comes up against what came before, but Hudinilson Jr. and his Brazilian peers also had to deal with an oppressive military dictatorship. One of the most striking works in this exhibition only remains in the form of photographs and newspaper clippings. The three members of 3NÓS3 spent the night of April 26, 1979 bagging the heads of public monuments in an urban intervention that silently but decisively commented on historical blindness and erasure in both a symbolic and literal way. Hudinilson Jr. would eventually get to enjoy the fall of the dictatorship in 1985 and he would continue to make art until his death in 2013, but he remained resistant to the expectations of the art world. His work doesn’t provide much satisfaction on an individual basis (though some subtle collages in the back of the gallery are politely framed). Instead, his creations carry that sense of something happening – something exciting, potentially dangerous, and outside the spotlight. It might not be for the ages, but it was definitely of the moment. And that feeling of what it was like in that moment is worth savouring.


Hudinilson Jr.: Cut Up The World continues until September 16.
Scrap Metal Gallery: http://www.scrapmetalgallery.com/
The gallery is partially accessible.


Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.

The thirty paintings and hooked rugs in Alexandrya Eaton’s exhibition Becoming hang in a grid on either side of a central corridor of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Bright colours, simplified female figures, and flowers are repeated along with texts that hint at character and narrative: she danced, she loved, she had a courageous heart, she felt sorrow. Visitors might be moved to ask: “Who is this mysterious woman and what was her life like?” The artist has subverted the vibrant palette and language of the sixties and used them with sincerity to evoke a particular character and personality. It is as if the Pop Art movement had started in Maritime kitchens and living rooms instead of New York lofts (with rug hooking taking the place of silk screening) and drew inspiration from strong women and mothers rather than pop culture and its stars.



Alexandrya Eaton, She Was Not Afraid, 2018, wool, burlap

In fact, Eaton found her inspiration in memories of her own grandmother and these words by Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but becomes, a woman.” It is fitting that the work is installed in a passageway, that we walk from one end to the other as if through life and yet experience all the images at once, much like memories. Sometimes the figures multiply like cookie cutter shapes, leading one to think of kitchen scenes, paper dolls, suburbia, and its implied capitalism. The repetition of miniskirts and business suits reflect a feminism in transition. The flowers and rug hooking allude to quiet domestic spaces, which are then contrasted with brash bold images of women dancing. As in every life story, there is pain and darkness, but bold confident colour, strength, courage and humour prevail here. Eaton’s series shows us a woman who is always changing and evolving in the face of sorrow and joy, but whose character remains constant, authentic, and inspirational.


Alexandrya Eaton: Becoming continues until October 7.
Beaverbrook Art Gallery: http://beaverbrookartgallery.org/en
The gallery is accessible.


Jon Claytor is an artist living and working in Sackville, New Brunswick. He is the co-founder of Sappyfest and Thunder & Lightning Ideas Ltd.

It could be Esker Foundation’s revolving entrance door, but my breath is taken away by the theatrical display that greets me from a semi-circular dais. Two sheer black housecoats stand upright with sleeves extended as if actors from The Costume Institute. They hang on simple steel stands, reminiscent of kimono displays, with earrings hung inside and outside on their fabric. Some are made of dried flowers and others of sculpted metal, like charms to be carried with the wearer of the coat. Then, after getting context from these human-scale housecoats and earrings, we enter a giant world.



Vanessa Brown, Late Night Trip to the Jeweller’s, 2018, installation view (photo: John Dean)

Next to the housecoats, hanging on an enormous stand, are two large-scale, pastel-coloured earrings, complete with massive ear hooks. Next to the earrings lie two more on the dais, face-down, displaying a secret compartment on their backs to hold a single cigarette. Behind them, leaning against the wall on the dais, is a gravestone-shaped piece of metal engraved with symbols: wine glasses, a teardrop, a snake. These motifs repeat throughout the exhibition. Above all, a clock on the wall is too tired to observe, its eyelash-rimmed eyes sleeping, its numbers askew, and its hour and minute hands absurdly long.

This piece, titled Late Night Trip to the Jeweller’s and part of Vanessa Brown’s exhibition The Witching Hour, is the recounting of an artist’s “stress-induced fever dream” where language is a system of symbols, and information or stories must be passed along the inside of garments. The work is stunning for its playful imaginativeness and skilful craftsmanship. It revels in the humorous impracticality, the anti-usefulness, of its objects: earrings too big to be worn, a clock that doesn’t work, a housecoat primarily meant to transfer messages. All of Brown’s steel and MDF sculptures follow this theme of humorous myth-making, ghostly silhouettes, and child-like – but large-scale – charms. The exhibition is an extended nightmare of a still life.

The staged presentation of the work and its highlighted relationship to the body calls to mind the artist’s expressed interest in fashion and, in particular, the minimalist, gender fluid ‘anti-fashion’ explosion of the 1990s in Paris that included Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. These designers, both having moved from Japan to France, played a transformative anti-Imperialist role in fashion at the time, rejecting trends and traditionally gendered silhouettes for more minimal works, often with unfinished, scrappy hems or variations on the kimono. The role of wearable art in collapsing gender roles and flipping the gendering of professions runs parallel to Brown’s use of steel. She contextualizes steel as feminized and jewellery as de-feminized, and challenges associations with scale as carrying a gendered power. Reactionary now to our time, The Witching Hour realizes the mythical space between three and four a.m. when the dreams and spells of women can thrive.


Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour continues until September 2.
Esker Foundation: https://eskerfoundation.com/
The gallery is accessible.


Lindsay Sorell is an artist and writer who recently collaborated with the Advanced Toastmasters of Calgary for the IKG Live 1 performance festival and completed two solo exhibitions of new work: Exercises in Healing at Contemporary Calgary and Buddha, Why Am I Alone? at AVALANCHE! Institute of Contemporary Art. She is currently working on a large-scale watercolour painting of food and is the editor of Luma Quarterly. She is Akimblog's Calgary correspondent and can be followed on Instagram.

It is a pleasure to see art institutions continue to expand their definition of gallery space by making use of exterior walls, stairwells, adjunct billboards, and, in the case of BAND Gallery’s Redefining Black Identity, wooden fences. The first in a forthcoming series of On the Fence exhibitions that will explore Canadian archival photographs of Black Canadians, this inaugural iteration features portraits of Black Canadians from the 19th Century. The specific dates and identities of the sitters are unknown, but the images are drawn from the personal collection of Alvin McCurdy, a professional carpenter who moonlighted as an antiquarian. You probably haven’t read that word in a while (or ever), and if you have, it was probably in a pejorative sense to label someone’s interests or worldview as narrow minded. Nietzsche believed that the antiquarian objectivized history and drew no meaningful connections between the past and present. However, BAND’s current exhibition exemplifies an alternative view of the antiquarian: a figure laser-focused on preserving the memories some would prefer we forget.



Redefining Black Identity at BAND Gallery

I first arrived at BAND (Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue) expecting to enter the house-turned-gallery space, but was surprised to find Redefining Black Identity on the surrounding fence. I began my tour under a maple tree that spilled over the fence from the backyard. The first portrait is of a woman, taken ca. 1870s. She sits in what appears to be a beautiful home. In the background I can make out brocade curtains and either an ornately decorated door or elaborate wall molding. The arm of the chair she sits on has tassels (which I love) and the sleeves of her dress are so perfectly pleated that I can’t help but smile thinking of how important this occasion must have been.

The photos continued as I walked along the sidewalk: one of an impeccably dressed young man leaning on a book placed atop an accent table (ca. 1875), another of a tastefully accessorized woman and her son (ca. 1900). She wears a waist-cinching belt and a pair of shoes with the most delicate button details; he wears an oversized newsboy cap in houndstooth. My favourite is the last in the series, underneath the leafiest linden tree: a woman with her back to the camera, perched atop a railing, feathers in her wide brimmed hat, her hair styled in a thick long braid down her back. She stares off into the distance with a leather minaudière in hand (ca. 1875).



Redefining Black Identity at BAND Gallery

Had it not been for Alvin McCurdy (born in Amherstburg, Essex County, Ontario in 1916), who made it his personal project to seek out and collect all things relating to Black Canadians and Black Northerners, where would these photographs now be? Just as much as Redefining Black Identity presents those who “defied attitudes and ideologies of the time,” it also reveals the results of someone who defied racist, exclusionary institutional practices by creating their own archive. An antiquarian in the truest sense, McCurdy’s collection contains seemingly trivial or ephemeral items such as newspaper clippings, postcards, scrapbooks, letters, research files, meeting minutes, and photographs relating to local, contemporary Black culture. And yet this highly specific collection remains, according to the Archives of Ontario, the most important source of information about the history of the Black community in the province. McCurdy’s archive paints a picture of 19th Century Canada that is rarely on view and hardly discussed, in order to, in McCurdy’s words, “build a bridge of memory...to span the years and grasp, out of the past, certain accomplishments that may be utilized for the betterment of ourselves and for all mankind.” Though some would have antiquarians relegated to the ranks of hoarder, Redefining Black Identity demonstrates the necessity for, and power of remembering, collecting, and sharing. Take that, Nietzsche.


Redefining Black Identity continues until September 21.
BAND Gallery: http://band-rand.com/
The gallery is not accessible (but the fence is).


Letticia Cosbert is a Toronto based writer and editor, and is currently the Digital Content Coordinator at the Koffler Centre of the Arts. Letticia studied Classics, earning a B.A. from the University of Toronto, and an M.A. from Western University, where she specialized in erotic Latin poetry. Her writing and editorial work has been featured in Ephemera Magazine, Sophomore Magazine, The Ethnic Aisle, and publications by Gardiner Museum, YTB Gallery, Xpace, and Trinity Square Video. She can be followed on Instagram @prettiletti.

In colonial Burma, a thirty year old woman named Ma Nge was found guilty of having sexually transmitted an illness to an officer of the British East India Company. Her punishment (flimsily justified as a public health measure) was to be tattooed on her forehead in black with the label “bazaar prostitute.” In quiet defiance, the Burmese tattooist ordered to do the court’s dirty work used vermillion instead of black ink, and concentrated his points in the middle of her forehead, thereby converting a punitive mark of colonial authority into a traditional Buddhist love charm.

For UK-born Indian artist Bharti Kher such struggles over women’s bodies are not so safely behind us. In Points de départ, points qui lient at DHC/ART, Kher pictures a world in which victims of sexual violence take up positions alongside a Hindu goddess, a phalanx of New Delhi sex workers, and a gigantic whale heart on the frontlines of the global fight for environmental and social justice. Worn mostly by Hindu and Jain women on the forehead as a “third eye,” the bindi’s various meanings as a cosmological sign, an apotropaic device, and a mass-produced consumer good are gathered in Kher’s works. A little like the Burmese tattooist, she critically redirects this and other charged signs to visualize postcolonial relations, mass migrations, and the mixing of the world’s biota that characterize our epoch.



Bharti Kher, Mother and Child, 2014, resin, wood, wax, and fur (photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli)

Kher’s imposing sculptures of women are lynchpins in the exhibition, driving home its strong feminist messages. Mother and Child includes a wood figure of a machete-wielding boy facing a partly dismembered, olive-skinned mannequin and her black shadow. The piece mixes a rough folk-art style with the polished beauty of a Bollywood starlet, but Kher’s main reference is the 2012 gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Panddey by fellow passengers, including one juvenile, on a bus in South Delhi. In a healing gesture, the mannequin’s left breast is severed and placed on the boy’s back as a “seed of compassion and empathy.” While this well-known case galvanized a popular movement against rape culture in India, Kher’s Six Women sheds light on the anonymous toil of sex workers in Kolkata. Seated with closed eyes and hands placed on their laps, the women are presented in a meditative state, allied and withdrawn from the dangers of their trade. In Cloudwalker, a Hindu goddess loosely draped in a sari and holding a rake secures an ancient pedigree for the Indian feminist movement Kher’s art animates.

In the exhibition’s remaining works, South Asian women’s adornments are used to extend these sculptures’ mute protests. Loosed from their usual bearers, bindis appear on the surface of a scale-model whale heart (a symbol of endangered love), or on pages from an old French atlas. Resin-locked saris are shown wrapped around plinths or fallen down stairs salvaged from old Indian homes. The works on maps, aptly titled Points of Departure I – XI, capture the geopolitical and historical scope of Kher’s vision, linking the interests of Indian feminists to international movements for environmental and social justice. Behind organic, geometric, or radiating arrangements of bindis, the images of a 1947 Larousse atlas impose a graphic intelligibility onto a planet in disarray, reeling from the horrors of WWII and courting a string of environmental catastrophes in the latter half of the 20th Century. The bindis mimic and transcend the maps’ agricultural, industrial, and political orderings of the world. In an especially poignant one of Eastern Mediterranean imports/exports, spermatozoid-shaped bindis drift across the sea from the Middle East, foreshadowing the diaspora of Palestinians after the 1948 Nakba and the refugee crises of the last several years. The publication of the atlas also coincides with the year of Indian independence, which adds a note of hope to the series.



Bharti Kher, I’ve seen more things than I dare to remember 4, 2015, bindis on paper (photo: Claire Dorn)

Kher comes across as an astute observer of world history and an artist-seer. Her predictions contained in a piece called Virus IX (2010 – 2039) include the release of Freud’s complete letters and Elvis Presley’s autopsy report – slim consolations in a future that also holds “a South Asian refugee crisis, the EU’s collapse and the sinking of Bangkok.” The list, like her other works, joins natural and human history in a story of the planet’s and the human species’ shared fate. In his study of the “social lives of things,” anthropologist Arjun Appadurai notes a family resemblance between goods as they move in and out of commodity status, and the biographies of persons. Kher takes up his challenge to “follow the things themselves” transculturally as she tracks the movements of human and non-human things along well-trodden paths of the colonial era and after. We see bindis converted from sacred signs to mass produced adornments to stand-ins for migrant communities, and the commodified women of Kolkata’s red light district are rescued from their market, if only imaginatively in the space of the exhibition. That Kher was apprehensive about engaging these women in yet another “transaction” indicates how closely linked people and things are in her work, and in the contemporary art milieu.


Bharti Kher: Points de départ, points qui lient continues until September 9.
DHC/ART: https://dhc-art.org/
The gallery is partially accessible.


Tammer El-Sheikh is a writer and teacher based in Montreal. His art criticism has appeared in Parachute, Canadian Art, ETC and C Magazine.

Janelle Tougas gives new life to innocuous material cast-offs in her exhibition Folle De Chagrin Mais Le Rire Déborde, De Novation en Novation at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones. But this new life is nearly non-declarative. Not necessarily latent, nor absent, but quiet, maybe shy, or perhaps hidden in plain sight. Yet it retains an eloquence in its economy of means. These off-hand bits and pieces are grouped into rhyming families and loose couplings. Their barely hued selves reoccur in mutating shapes and characters. They lounge unencumbered with the ease of a loose leaf caught in a breeze. They are simple but never succinct. Like a docile twig you might overlook on a walk, or a faint voice from the distance, they don’t necessarily want your attention, but they are there nonetheless.



Janelle Tougas

They seem unaffected or bored, but at the same time, they rest as though in the process of something not readily tangible. They reside in a middle passage. In a manner reminiscent of the Arte Povera movement, the material groupings here appear to rely on serendipity in the way they end up in the artist’s studio. However, a careful orchestration is also at play. Every connective tissue feels purposefully chosen to sketch out something specific. The humble detritus of fringe fabrics, leather scraps, cured wood chips, wax, and stone are propped on intricately polished platform-like furniture. They resemble something you might find at a luxury design showroom, except their function is interpretive. The combination is lo-fi with hi-fi values. It’s casually handmade but perfected. Disheveled yet charmingly symmetrical. These pieces of decor act like stages for a performance. They are only coltish enough to signal to you that they shouldn’t be stepped on. Regardless of how slight they perform and although they hardly take any space in the gallery, they create and elevate an intimately ambient scene.

Anthropomorphizing this installation of doodling sculptures is partly the result of our inherent impulse to map the body onto three-dimensional abstractions. But what’s more is the poetic potential dispersed through the gallery. Tougas succeeds at robbing us of definitive descriptive words or any one-to-one narrative we might immediately try to piece together. The works here make rich implications on the limits of language and in doing so offer glimpses of the idiosyncratic beauty surfaced from the artist’s material inventiveness.



Janelle Tougas

The work is doubly non-communicative and distances some of us from easy comprehension with its French titles. The artist eschews translation for what she called its “bureaucratic” nature. Acknowledging the impossibility of wholly expressing one language in another without compromising meaning, the titles, like the material compositions, are positions of proximity to a feeling of an ineffable familiarity. Tougas isn’t after a precise account or articulation through her material engagement here. Instead, she gestures lyrically without borders. And she invites us to pause and sit closely with the feathery delicacy and elemental simplicity of her constructions.


Janelle Tougas: Folle De Chagrin Mais Le Rire Déborde, De Novation en Novation was on display in July.
La Maison des artistes visuels francophones: http://maisondesartistes.mb.ca/
The gallery is partially accessible.


Luther Konadu makes things such as photographs, paintings, and prints which he occasionally calls art. He self-describes as a transcriber. He contributes content to a publication called Public Parking. Most days his favourite colour is green and one of his goals in life is to never be an art brat. He is Akimblog’s Winnipeg correspondent and can be followed on Instagram @public_parking.

The penciled-in premise of Museum London’s exhibition Lamina Stamina is starting to smear, echoing the inevitable off-gassing associated with the kind of plastic vinyl used throughout artist Kelly Jazvac’s career. In this survey of her work between 2008 and 2018, vinyl is draped, collaged, stitched, and even folded into intricate patterns. Her repurposed plastic now appears strange and weathered. What do we do with the material presence of what remains? The predominant feeling is one of inconvenience and guilt. The gnarled, wrinkled, lumpen shapes echo an exhausted utility and worth. The pieces are big and bulky, slippery and resistant; their material return can’t be ignored so easily.



Kelly Jazvac, Apron, 2013, salvaged adhesive vinyl (photo: Lucas Stenning)

Made from discards destined for the landfill, Jazvac’s vinyl work reenacts and performs this imperviousness (or stamina) via forms that collapse into and echo entities like black holes, vortexes, solar eclipses, and the weather itself. Other manifestations mark territory by overlaying the wall like a second skin, mirroring the tone and colors of nearby works like a sensitive camouflage. Conversely, the amount of work present feels more like a sampling, reigning in pieces such as the otherwise towering Battle of Leisure. The installation appears at times like the dormant fun zones of an unoccupied children’s science center with sculptural works as discarded objects of play and learning. The gallery’s grey rumpus-room-like carpeting further contributes to this vibe.

In an adjacent space, Jazvac’s research-based practice is introduced via collaborations with the University of Toronto’s Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, MSc student Anika Ballent, Dr. Catherine Neish from Western University, geologist Patricia Corcoran, cellist Marie Gélinas, and a group of young videographers. Their attempts to document ways to think and talk through environmental contamination become something alternately circuitous and slippery.

In Forward Contamination, a video made with Ballent and Neish, bits of plastic fused with natural forms (or plastiglomerates) are being singled out by touch – each piece placed with tweezers into a comet-like trail. Two voices discuss space treaties, panspermia, and how not to contaminate other planets even while we keep doing this on earth. The vague, crunchy sound of friction can be heard as tweezers sort through debris. When a drum kit starts up and begins to drown everything out, the conversation starts to break down, voices straining to be heard. The final thoughts become a yell, alarmed and sped up. What comes out of all this thinking? What can humans learn from contemplating all this “physical and ideological” contamination? A voice shouts: “I guess you have to count it!” The metaphor is clear: trying to take account of the pervasiveness of environmental pollution is akin to feeling your way through what has and is still actively accumulating, changing, and settling into irreversible sediment. Jazvac suggests that in the midst of all these conversations, we start with the feeling of what we participate in every day.


Kelly Jazvac: Lamina Stamina continues until September 30.
Museum London: http://museumlondon.ca/exhibitions/kelly-jazvac-lamina-stamina
The gallery is accessible.


Kim Neudorf is an artist and writer based in London, Ontario. Her writing and paintings have appeared most recently at DNA Gallery and Forest City Gallery in London, Paul Petro and Franz Kaka in Toronto, and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre in Kingston.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, the first thing we often hope to see upon entering a gallery is a place to sit. Lucky for us, It’s difficult to put a painting in the mailbox: Toward new models of artist publishing is equipped with a couch amidst the surrounding artists’ books and on-demand artist publishing. The exhibition is anchored by the presence of Publication Studio Vancouver, which recently vacated a shared retail space in Chinatown. The print shop and reading areas in Emily Carr University of Art and Design’s Libby Leshgold Gallery supply space for movement and effectively portray a practical form of gestating art book practices. Laying bare the production of publications demystifies some of the art historically heavy and canonical names under the book vitrines nearby.



It's difficult to put a painting in the mailbox: Toward new modes of artist publishing at the Libby Leshgold Gallery

The exhibition’s complimentary programming included a Summer School for Artist Publishing that convened a panel of seasoned speakers from Art Metropole, Publication Studio Edmonton, and Vancouver’s Information Office. This was followed by a Publications of the Future panel that sampled the forthcoming generation of print and literary practitioners such as Brick Press (Vancouver), Blank Cheque Press (Toronto/Vancouver), and Spit (Vancouver). All this was punctuated by launches, rebinding parties, and talks, plus a forthcoming congregation of Publication Studio delegates from the many corners of the multi-nodal publishing network.

In numerous vitrines are a selection of printed matter, artists’ books, editions, and other artists formats exhumed from local private collections and the Ian Wallace Artists’ Book Collection that is housed at Emily Carr University. These selections are conceived with cultural moments or artistic occupations in mind. One combines artists’ magazines, Fluxus-related publications, and loose or boxed publications like a facsimile box-set of Avalanche Magazine or 0 to 9, the magazine Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci operated from 1967 to 69. The assemblage formats of George Brecht’s Water Yam from 1964, a box of cards containing instructions or event-scores (aka flux-scores), alongside reissues of these artist magazines by independent publishers Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse highlights the ongoing desire to conceive of the reading of artist publications as an involved object or event. That desire is met by making these art historical objects and loose formats accessible through the reissues.

The redistribution of knowledge that is freely available online into more legible and pleasing formats is also a form of reproduction that factors into the occupation of artist publishing and the democratization of experimental practices, as well as plain and useful information. In late June, Publication Studio Vancouver printed and bound British Columbia’s report on money laundering – a 250-page PDF for the suggested cost of $15 or pay what you can. PSV’s playful presence and colourful covers, and the gallery’s communal space comes as a relief and is a hit within the condominium-inspired atmosphere of the new university campus.


It’s difficult to put a painting in the mailbox continues until September 16.
Libby Leshgold Gallery: https://libby.ecuad.ca
The gallery is accessible.


Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She is an editor of Charcuterie and co-curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Her books are Nascar (Blank Cheque, 2016) and Cuts of Thin Meat (Spare Room, 2015). She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.

What if we were alive, the group exhibition currently on view at Untitled Art Society, explores both the simplicity and the complexity of living. These eight videos investigate through effortlessness, strangeness, and creepiness the wonderful, hilarious, banal, and fantastic moments of our lives.



Salote Tawale, Sometimes you make me nervous and then I know we are supposed to sit together for a long time, 2015, video

Bridget Moser’s How Does it Feel finds her executing a series of carefully arranged but bizarre actions: awkwardly finding her way into the interior of a lamp or fighting her way out from behind sheer curtains. She plays a character of herself who interrogates how we interact with the world. In Live my LiefSteve Roggenbuck reads a love poem to a handheld camera. Only his mouth and nose are seen as he recites each line. The wind and rain are visible and audible in this lo-fi piece. There is a sweetness and innocence to it that helps translate the premise of the exhibition.

oualie frost’s videos feature the artist being fun and sweet, yet vulnerable and even messy, to create an honest portrait of being human. In one, she dances to Olivia Newton John’s Let’s Get Physical while working out. In AD in HD, she throws a hat onto her head, puts on lip balm, brushes her teeth, and applies black liquid eyeliner to them. The videos are playful but explore existence at its most basic.

The Splits by Allison Hrabluik presents a series of vignettes of individuals performing a range of activities. This piece correlates each activity through sound in an intricate woven narrative. And in Salote Tawale’s videos the artist performs actions in an outré but honest way: singing Creep by Radiohead in the dark, a cappella; or in black and white face paint, eating fruit with total abandon, the paint slowly rubbing off with each bite.

Through curator Natasha Chaykowski's critical eye, What if we were alive posits questions about being and culminates as its own poem. It tells a story about everyday life through the intricacies and boring details we often overlook. The beauty in this exhibition is the realization that these everyday commonalities are what makes life worth living and recognizing within them that this is what it means to be alive.


What if we were alive continues until November 3.
Untitled Art Society: http://www.uascalgary.org/
The gallery is not accessible.


Maeve Hanna is a writer and curator who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours in Visual Art and Literature from York University and the University of Leeds and a Master of Arts in Art History and Icelandic Studies from Université du Québec à Montréal and the University of Manitoba on location in Iceland. She has previously written for Black Flash, C Magazine, Canadian Art, esse arts + opinions, Frieze, Sculpture Magazine and the Senses and Society. She is Akimblog’s Calgary correspondent and can be followed on Instagram @mcbchanna.

The relentless heat this summer made for a reminder that nature dominates us as much as we attempt to dominate it. Gardening is as good a metaphor as any for the ways in which humans attempt to impose an order on landscapes that would otherwise determine their own arrangements through minor skirmishes and organic conflicts that emerge amongst the layers of participants that inhabit said space. Overlapping needs from the animal kingdom (everyone from invertebrate worms through assorted insects and visiting birds to common mammals including us ungainly humans), the plant world, and that obscure realm of suspected agency we call the minerals make for a wonderfully non-binary free-for-all of collaborative efforts.



Sofia Mesa, Field Walkers, video

A suggestion of that ordered disorder can be found in Strange Attractors, a curatorial publication project put together by Nomaduma Rosa Masilela on the occasion of this summer’s 10th Berlin Biennale – which is ending this weekend if you’re in the neighbourhood. If you can’t make it to Europe in time, a copy of this book can be found in the current exhibition of new East Junction art space ma ma. Titled Gardening, this three artist grouping triangulates a wide range of possible interpretations to the governing theme of gardening as a way of understanding “politically motivated migration.” Masilela’s contribution brings together collaborators, texts, drawings, and archival material, among other things, and requires the type of non-linear reading that almanacs, encyclopedias, and yearbooks invite. A bench and some lavender plants are provided to make your time perusing more pleasant.

The other two artists display slightly more straightforward gallery experiences. Sofia Mesa’s video Field Walkers compiles a series of single camera shots of young women moving through various fields in Colombia. There is a mathematical rigor to the way each figure moves across the landscape like a dot tracing a line. I would have been happy if the video went on for hours: as each horizon is traversed, there is a feeling of completion. However, that sense of ease is undercut once history takes hold: colonial dress and a line of telephone poles are just two clues to how this paradise has been spoilt. As each woman disappears from view, a sense of dread lingers.



Eleana Antonaki, Uncanny Gardening II, 2017, gold thread on silk, cotton fringe, metal rod

Dread has bubbled over into insurrection in the riot videos that provide the visuals for Eleana Antonaki’s Uncanny Gardening II. The soundtrack is a Euro-pop ditty about visitors from Planet Paprika and the introductory text pulls together hair memory (specifically eyebrow hair), gardening, and riots. The artist is clearly playing around with some sort of political commentary – order is imposed and resisted – but the actual intent is obscure. Her silk flag with the inscription “And Maybe Gardening Can Function As A Metaphor for Collective Memory” points the viewer in the right direction, but that hesitant “…and maybe…” means the answer will never be clear.

Which is exactly what one wants in an exhibition. If the answer was there, the work would be advertising. Kudos to Magdalyn Asimakis and Heather Riggs for establishing ma ma as a gallery where art like this can be contemplated. They have two more exhibitions planned for this location (Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Stefani Jemison and Julia Phillips) before November 12 (check their website to find out what happens next). If the Toronto art scene can be considered a garden, then young sprouts (aka independent project spaces like those mentioned here) are essential to the health of the biosphere as they inject fresh nutrients in the form of local and international artists into the soil that surrounds us.


Gardening continues until September 17.
ma ma: https://www.mamaprojects.net/
The gallery is accessible.


Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.

Many musicians turn to monikers or even use sound processors like auto-tune or the vocoder as a veil through which they can emerge from their discursive selves. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have likened their monumental landscape and architectural wrappings to that of a second skin. They reveal as much as they seem to obscure. In many respects, our skin, like the clothes we drape ourselves with, demarcates the physical limits of our being. Like fabric, the skin is a membrane that creates a division between the material world and our constructed image of it. The body is a site of social, personal, and cultural performance akin to the physical landscapes Christo and Jeanne-Claude accentuate as stages for their drapings.



Ekene Maduka, This isn't everything, oil on canvas

Flux Gallery’s recent exhibition Gather is an ensemble of works that delegates the meeting point between how a portrait is formulated and what role garments play in that formulation. Niamh Dooley, Emma Mayer, Hassan Ashraf, and Ekene Maduka all contribute images in which the figure is a point of focus – either of themselves, family, friends, or fictional selves. Ashraf also offers a poetry reading performance in Urdu wearing a shalwar kameez similar to his photo tableaux series where he inserts his presence amid different architectural sites across Winnipeg. Ashraf’s voice and unwavering physical presence both in the gallery and in the backdrops of the photos act as gestures of committed dissonance and refusal to blend in with the casual hegemony within which he positions himself.

On the other hand Dooley paints across three canvas panels and rightfully mythologizes her family by situating three female figures front and center. The central figure is cast against documents on the Indian Act and she’s bookended by the other two women dressed in their court uniforms positioned in a commanding stance of a sentinel.

Maduka luxuriates in fantasy and extravagant ideals on the surface of her canvas. The result reaches euphoric and surrealist heights. Like the paintings of Sam McKinniss, Maduka’s piece here exudes ebullience and is just a little bit off kilter for good measure. It epitomizes what writer madison moore describes as “political glitter bomb” in his idea of fabulousness from his book of the same name.

Mayer unabashedly elevates the everyday people close to her by putting their faces on custom-made shirts with an unironic 1980s-inspired cutesy pink ribbon. These handmade dedications are like treasures a teenage fangirl might meticulously compose for a beloved teen idol, except her obsessions are just her friends.

In moore’s book, he details the aesthetic of fabulousness as a result of struggle, suppression, anxiety, survival, and resistance. Entering the world appearing fabulous is a risk. But it’s no riskier to do otherwise. Like Christo's landscape interventions, the artists here intervene in their idiosyncratic ways and move through the world untethered – whether they steadfastly exhibit their inner exuberance, refuse to assimilate, spill out their schmaltz, or just simply be in spaces they aren’t expected to be. They choose to veil themselves with a second skin that brings forth otherwise suppressed desires that help shape a formidable portrait.


Gather was on display from July 26 until August 16.
Flux Gallery: https://www.aceart.org/flux-gallery
The gallery is not accessible.


Luther Konadu makes things such as photographs, paintings, and prints which he occasionally calls art. He self-describes as a transcriber. He contributes content to a publication called Public Parking. Most days his favourite colour is green and one of his goals in life is to never be an art brat. He is Akimblog’s Winnipeg correspondent and can be followed on Instagram @public_parking.

Borders and migration, land disputes and resource extraction, and race and gender-based discrimination will remain important themes for artists so long as the problems they reflect are unsolved. Like documentary reports, artworks that aim to raise awareness about these issues run the risk of feeling merely informative or remote from our day-to-day experience. Shannon Bool’s The Shape of Obus and Kapwani Kiwanga’s Sunlight by Fireside, a pair of exhibitions at Musée d’art de Joliette, began with research on French Algeria and the British Empire respectively. Both histories provide receding backdrops for debates in Quebec on national/ethnic identity and Indigenous rights. Besides their elegant variations on stock themes in global contemporary art, another thing that saves these exhibitions from the trap of the documentary is their resonance with these debates in the lead-up to the provincial elections.



Shannon Bool, Obus Girl

BC-born, Berlin-based artist Shannon Bool took the title for her exhibit from the architect Le Corbusier’s unrealized Plan Obus for colonial Algeria. Drawings for the modernization scheme meant to co-ordinate French and Muslim sectors of the capital city Algiers are mingled on large textile works and smaller photographs with images of real and imagined “Moorish” women from Le Corbusier’s sketchbooks. Among fourteen photographic prints in the series Obus Girls, Bool offers two contrasting visions of Le Corbusier’s integrative plan. Erotic postcard images are mostly harmonized with overlaid architectural drawings to accentuate the curve of a breast or a hip, the arch of a lower back, or a gesture line running from a model’s outstretched hands to her pointed toes. But the most arresting combinations are not so seamless. In one of the images an s-shaped sea-barrier flattens the small of a nude’s back, pressing her into the ground, while another shows a model with eyes cast down at forking in-filled spits that look like broken prosthetic legs. These monstrous hybrids convey what the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon called a “Manichean” scenario in which French Algerians looked down upon the inhabitants of Muslim ghettoes as “the wretched of the earth.”

Bool’s works insert Le Corbusier into a line of artists from Matisse to Picasso (and before them, Delacroix, Gerome, Ingres, and the rest) for whom the appropriation of “Oriental” women as motifs was a rite of passage. If the Obus Girls series shows the roots of this tradition, the mixed-medium work Women in their Apartment updates the Orientalist repertoire by superimposing Kim Kardashian’s glistening bottom onto nude figures rendered in the style of Picasso’s The Women of Algiers. This “cheeky” sleight reminds us that art history’s fantasies reappear in mass culture, but Bool’s works resonate powerfully with more local debates too, such as Quebec’s controversial face-covering ban Bill 62.



Kapwani Kiwanga, Sunlight by Fireside, 2018, installation view (photo: Romain Guilbault)

In the next gallery and outside the museum, Hamilton-born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga’s works take their point of departure from the history of the British Empire. In the back room a short video titled The Sun Never Sets offers a gloss on a 19th Century epithet for the British Empire. Minute-long still shots of nine former colonies show lightly blowing tree branches and lapping waves illuminated by a setting sun that never fully sets. The work’s ambivalence is clear – in the recorded twilight of the former colonies there are hidden traces of that Imperial promise to range over the planet. Legacies of British colonialism are signaled in a pile of earth removed from a rectangular grave-sized hole in front of the museum, and returned to it in cup-sized deposits by gallery-goers. The work, titled Positive-Negative (morphology), draws attention to ongoing land claims negotiations between the governments of Quebec and Canada and the Atikamekw First Nation whose ancestral lands are located within and beyond the electoral district of Joliette on Nitaskinan territory. In the glow of a ceiling installation called Red Sky at Night, which repurposes a crop shade meant to protect non-native plant species from the sun, the slow repatriation of Kiwanga’s dirt pile to the hole out front takes on a ritual significance. It is a quiet gesture of healing amid louder struggles over the province’s future.

The hole outside the museum competes with campaign posters for the attention of passers-by. Joliette has been a PQ stronghold for some time with considerable support as well for the CAQ party. For these two parties, the Quebec Liberals’ Bill 62 “does not go far enough.” This position, along with calls from the CAQ for “values tests” for newcomers to Quebec, suggests that Le Corbusier’s architectural challenge of integrating Muslim and French populations persists as a legal and social one in Quebec. Curator Anne Marie St Jean Aubre noted the importance of Bool and Kiwanga’s works as prompts for “conversations about the effects of colonialism here in Canada and Quebec, and closer to home for them in the Eurozone.” Negotiating national identity in Quebec and elsewhere is a thorny business that the museum alone can’t resolve. But the “scar-like trace” left on its grounds by Kiwanga’s work will serve as a local reminder that such negotiations stand to be enriched, not threatened, by the inclusion of as many voices as possible – especially those of Indigenous people and newcomers to Quebec.


Shannon Bool: The Shape of Obus was on display from June 9 to September 9.
Kapwani Kiwanga: Sunlight by Fireside was on display from June 9 to September 9.
Musée d’art de Joliette: http://www.museejoliette.org/en/
The gallery is accessible.


Tammer El-Sheikh is a writer and teacher based in Montreal. His art criticism has appeared in Parachute, Canadian Art, ETC and C Magazine.

After passing through a darkened vestibule, we emerge into copper light and are greeted by three spinning mobiles, Vanessa Brown’s cohort of sculptures collectively titled Veils of a Bog, submerged in the sonic bath of Michelle Helene Mackenzie’s multi-channel sound composition Post Meridiem. Three tiers of horizontal steel rods with notches at the tips spin like outstretched arms with their palms up. Organic matter such as dried flowers, branches, and bulrushes orbit with human designs like photographs and drawings. Seeing the mechanized rotation of Brown’s mobile sculptures as slow-motion pirouettes imply that they have bodies, but also that they possess personalities and excitements transmitted through the movement of the selected materials and surface treatments. Composing the sculpture’s anatomy are sheer textiles that are suspended like an excerpt of fog. Large photographs of Byzantine sculptures, mostly women and sections of their clothes, hang from the summit of the sculpture giving its steel skeleton a kind of skin that bears the representation of a body.



Vanessa Brown & Michelle Helene Mackenzie, Veils of a Bog, 2018, installation view

Mackenzie’s sound composition seems to fulfill the representation of a substance that preserves the movement and atmosphere in the exhibition room. The positioning of two audio elements locates us, the audience/visitor/interloper, in their bog. Firstly, field recordings of animals and insects are positioned high above the sculptures and play across four speakers. Second, a low frequency drone emits from four speakers and a subwoofer that are positioned against the walls and floor of the gallery. This arrangement steeps the infrastructure with the setting, further encasing our experience in the worlding of Brown and Mackenzie’s works. Mingling recognizable organic sounds with a less figurative or descriptive sound presents a sonic analogue to the sculpture’s materialism. Post Meridiem was produced as a site-specific accompaniment to Brown’s body of work, a score for the sculptures, but the notion of a “site-specific” is treated with a compelling flexibility. The “site” has been dislodged from geographic specificity and is comprised of a world that is reconstituted when these works come together to facilitate it.


Veils of a Bog continues until October 20.
Western Front: https://front.bc.ca/
The gallery is accessible.


Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She is an editor of Charcuterie and co-curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Her books are Nascar (Blank Cheque, 2016) and Cuts of Thin Meat (Spare Room, 2015). She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.

Earlier this week, Jeremy Dutcher was awarded the 2018 Polaris Music Prize for his debut album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. After making his way to the stage, he showered his elders and community with congratulations and thanks in Wolastoqey before addressing the audience in English: “Canada! You are in the midst of [an] Indigenous renaissance. Are you ready–” hollering and applause interrupts “–to hear the truths that need to be told?” The room lulls. “Are you ready to see the things that need to be seen?” Dutcher nods, smiles ever so slightly, and in a lower voice says, “I think.” The speech continues, but these words are what remain with me as I consider the Art Museum’s I continue to shape, an exhibition that contemplates art’s ability to reanimate and reconstruct history, orienting it towards the future. But, as Dutcher says in not as many words, the future is now.



Lisa Myers, Strainer #1 and #2, 2018

There are many truths being told and things to be seen in I continue to shape. A clear standout is Lisa Myers’ work. Her hand-assembled vessels are located in the gallery’s large center room and form an oaken triptych. Strainer #1 and #2 are unsealed, halved, and partially filled with the residual ashes of the artist’s personal wood stove. Exploring new uses and, perhaps, redefining the misuse of materials, Myers has the ashes slowly slink between the joints of her barrel to leave behind slim sculptural piles, disjoined and ephemeral. Myers’ triumph continues in a rear room with straining and absorbing 1 through 5, short videos of her hands scraping what looks and sounds like blood (you will feel it in your teeth), but, innocently, are only blueberries. Behind these videos are the resulting not-quite-indigo, not-quite-violet clouds serigraphed onto paper.

Back in the gallery’s center room, Charlene Vickers and Maria Hupfield’s dazzling and ostentatious sculpture of construction paper, duct tape, felt, and buttons suspends from the ceiling. A ten-foot-long rejoinder to Rebecca Belmore’s monumental megaphone Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, Vickers and Hupfield dub theirs Jingles and Sounds for Speaking to our Grandmothers. Belmore’s piece was originally created as a response to the Oka Crisis and traveled to many First Nations communities, asking people to speak directly into it and, so, to the land. Vickers and Hupfield not only revise the scale, but embed imagined sound (jingles) into the sculpture itself, while looking back (and forwards?) to the generation of our grandmothers. Also notable is the significant shift from their to our. “Are you ready to hear the truths that need to be told?”



Nicholas Galanin, The Saved Man, 2012

In another rear room, Nicholas Galanin hacks away at a mask with his pickaxe (Unceremonial Dance Mask), attaches a guard to the blade, picks up the fallen shavings, and takes them back to a studio. He (re)assembles something different and amorphous (The Saved Man) as the audio of the mask’s original destruction loops in the background, affixing two parcels of horse hair to the top, before the two spontaneously appear and begin dancing before a fire in basketball shorts and a t-shirt. To witness the destruction of a mask feels surprisingly profane and its reconstitution is mesmerizing. “Are you ready to see the things that need to be seen?”

Through their works in I continue to shape, thesse artists are trying to tell us something about time, about history and the future, and about this present moment. You should listen. You should look.


I continue to shape continues until December 8.
Art Museum: https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/
The gallery is accessible.


Letticia Cosbert is a Toronto based writer and editor, and is currently the Digital Content Coordinator at the Koffler Centre of the Arts. Letticia studied Classics, earning a B.A. from the University of Toronto, and an M.A. from Western University, where she specialized in erotic Latin poetry. Her writing and editorial work has been featured in Ephemera Magazine, Sophomore Magazine, The Ethnic Aisle, and publications by Gardiner Museum, YTB Gallery, Xpace, and Trinity Square Video. She can be followed on Instagram @prettiletti.

Artist duo Life of a Craphead throw colonialism to the forefront in Entertaining Every Second at Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary. There is no turning back. With humour and a critical eye, Amy Lam and Jon McCurly bring history into the room with all the pain, forgeries (as Jason Hirata writes in his exhibition essay), and lack of acknowledgement that has plagued Turtle Island for centuries. However, in this exhibition the colonial story reaches beyond the borders of Canada to encompass a global view on its impact across time and space.



Life of a Craphead, King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don River, 2017 (photo: Yuula Benivolski)

Near the gallery entrance is a video featuring a statue of a regal figure astride a horse floating down a river. King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don River posits a new history for this figure, essentially “dumping” it out of the public sphere. As a decolonial gesture, the performance in Toronto and subsequent video reassembles a piece of history to suggest a retelling as settler Canadians negotiate through reconciliation.

Chris Cran ‘Self-Portrait with Combat Nymphos of Saigon’ Painting Made into a Tote Bag is an appropriated painting that evades being a painting at all. The piece is derived from a work by the Alberta painter Chris Cran that was subsequently made into promotional material. Lam and McCurly reappropriate the work while simultaneously deconstructing it in a literal and figurative sense. Two large sections are cut out of the image. The act of ripping into the artwork, whether recreated or real, is a reclamation that references Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism and otherness through criticality, humour, and relative ease.

A text and visuals work titled It’s More Common Than You Would Think was commissioned specifically for this exhibition. It explores McCurly’s family history – in particular, an incident when his grandmother was robbed and killed by an off-duty American soldier in Vietnam. Through tender, rudimentary pen drawings and a woven narrative, the artists sketch out the tragic tale. The text is written in a colloquial fashion that is eloquent in its ability to retell a story lost to family secrets, mystery, and untold truths. Like much of the exhibition, this piece retells history to offer a reorienting of the truth.


Life of a Craphead: Entertaining Every Second continues until October 20.
Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary: http://www.truck.ca/
The gallery is partially accessible.


Maeve Hanna is a writer and curator who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours in Visual Art and Literature from York University and the University of Leeds and a Master of Arts in Art History and Icelandic Studies from Université du Québec à Montréal and the University of Manitoba on location in Iceland. She has previously written for Black Flash, C Magazine, Canadian Art, esse arts + opinions, Frieze, Sculpture Magazine and the Senses and Society. She is Akimblog’s Calgary correspondent and can be followed on Instagram @mcbchanna.

Patrick Klassen doesn’t see his rodent infested basement studio as a problem; rather, it’s an opportunity. Even as they create families and invite friends over, their company in his cramped workspace is a welcome scenario for making his provisional painting assemblages. In Hell in a Cell, his recent show with Marijana Mandusic and Michael Mogatas at the multi-purpose alternative space Forth, working within constraints becomes a poetic act of capturing the ephemerality of chance, accidents, and improvisation.



Patrick Klassen

The three artists bricolage their idiosyncratic ways through painting and, along the way, embrace errors, imperfections, and mice droppings. Klassen has always greeted the tradition of painting with open arms only to spin it through unrecognizable paths and aberrant turns. He continues this penchant for artistic openness by offering exuberant and playful approaches to abstraction that at times toggle back into suggestions of wobbly figuration. He covers found leftover scraps in paint, animating and creating new forms that either support the stretched canvas surfaces or jut out from them.

Mandusic takes this baton and runs with freeform enthusiasm and whim. But instead of sculpture-painting combos, she deliberately goes for sloppy smears of color that barely hold together on the surface newsprint paper. Balancing pedestrian mark-making with wonky gestural riffs, Klassen and Mandusic joined forces on multiple pieces in the show. The result is equal parts bizarre and rewarding. If jam sessions are propositions for the unexpected, then here the two artists’ offbeat mish-mashing make for something legible – however anarchic they appear. They both circumnavigate the canvas with skittish doodles and amalgamated scribbles with a mocking bent towards pictorial traditions.

Mogatas comes off as the quiet one in comparison to the other two. His paintings counter their childish painterly fits. In fact, he doesn’t use paint at all. He doesn’t seem interested in drips and splatter. Instead, he offers stretched surfaces, allowing the grain of the canvas or whatever fabric he chooses to speak for its own color and texture. Occasionally, he includes a print of an unassuming faint image as a complement to the otherwise empty picture plane. Without a hint of overt gesture or blunder, Mogatas’ images also rely on a generosity of intuition and serendipity through the process of making. This allows for a flawed delicacy unachievable otherwise. Parallel with works by the likes of Wade Guyton, intention and the provisional meld to a harmonically nourishing return for his inventions here.

In total, Hell in a Cell leverages the aesthetics of error as a strategy of display. Whether by way of errant marks, kooky objects, or atmospheric fields, the artists here rack up the rewards of appearing asymmetrical.


Hell in a Cell was on display from September 22 to 28.
Forth: http://www.forth.ca/
The venue is not accessible.


Luther Konadu makes things such as photographs, paintings, and prints which he occasionally calls art. He self-describes as a transcriber. He contributes content to a publication called Public Parking. Most days his favourite colour is green and one of his goals in life is to never be an art brat. He is Akimblog’s Winnipeg correspondent and can be followed on Instagram @public_parking.

At first glance, Rebecca Munce and Madeleine Mayo’s Star Rider looks like a neatly conceived exhibition of abstract and representational works. As I walk through Galerie Deux Poissons, a complementary relationship appears between drawings of medieval death-matches and sculptures that merge architectural and botanical forms. Mayo’s cyborg sculpture-garden provides a concrete setting for the floating soldiers, monsters, and royals in Munce’s drawings. Halfway through my walk I squeeze between Munce’s large drawing Swinging Rings on one side and the uncomfortably close tip of one of Mayo’s Nymphaea sculptures on the other. Suddenly, the battle scenes aren’t so safely contained – their threats are mirrored in the gallery’s gauntlet-like organization. This felt space for obdurate and vulnerable bodies seems closer to the philosophical point of curator Benjamin Klein’s pairing of these artists.



Rebecca Munce, Swinging Rings (detail)

The world of Star Rider captures aspects of what art historian Erwin Panofsky called the “qualitative and aesthetic” space of antique and medieval art. For him, before the advent of single-point perspective, artists represented bodies in an “aggregated and tectonic” manner, clustered, hovering or overlapping, but always tangible. By contrast, the “quantitative and theoretical” space of the Renaissance canvas “emancipated bodies from their mass” to render them with mathematical precision as understood rather than encountered. In their works, Munce and Mayo explore the anxiety, thrill, and potential of encounters with bodies, whether looming and impersonal, or sensual, eviscerated, and flayed.

In Munce’s drawings the antique “feeling for space” is evoked in narratives of love and combat, and a playfully reinterpreted myth of futile labour. The action of Swinging Rings unfolds across seven feet of paper, spilling out of arenas marked by broken red barriers. Near the first ring an oversized horse rescues a soldier from a castle tower, leaving its rider behind in a bloody mess, squashed under a runaway carriage. Inside the ring, seated and slaughtered figures in uniform, and hieratic, contorted, or love-locked nudes are arranged around a stage amid puddles of blood, booze, and barf. In the second ring, dismembered or pouncing soldiers surround a hydra. With the monster missing one of its heads and a soldier dangling from a guillotine directly in the line of its B movie blood-spray, the fight is tough to call. The whole scene is witnessed by impassive sovereigns in the middle of the composition – “spectators” who are “more villainous than any of the combatants” for Munce. Smaller drawings present violent and amorous “risings and fallings” in a less frenzied but similarly ambivalent light. The most iconic of these comprise the suite of Expected Sisyphus Drawings, where the well-known myth is given in five coloured frames that read like a film loop or a comic strip.



Madelaine Mayo, Both Uplifted and Downcast, Both at Once

Mayo’s biomorphic sculptures are spread out evenly, intervening in and dividing the gallery space. Court is held by the powder-green and yellow Nymphaea pieces. Modelled on water lilies but out-of-proportion, the sculptures each include a chrome plate and an array of webbed spikes that look like the dorsal fins of giant alien sea bass. Another monstrous plant appears in a painting titled In Fragaria’s Cleft. Here a spiked, star-tipped spine runs through a bisected strawberry evoking the anal fin of some other alien fish or a cat o’ nine-tails. Stellar and floral forms combine in paintings hung near the sculptures like “esoteric signs,” directing us with more sensed than understood commands. As unfamiliar as these works are, they convey attitudes, passions, and dispositions that are all-too-human. For Mayo, they are armour-like expressions of “assertiveness” and “defensiveness.” But they’re magnetic too, with bold colouring that encourages us to, in Mayo’s words, “feel it now” or engage viscerally with the work rather than intellectually.

Maybe relating all this to the space of antique and medieval art runs the risk of overthinking, but there seems to be some lesson, a hope, and a cautionary message in Star Rider along these lines. Munce describes her figures as “swimming in an endless space” and trapped in narratives that are “amplifications of our (equally violent and insatiable) times.” The space Mayo’s works conjure is similarly open and intuitive, and vibrating between threatening and seductive bodies, our own and those of her creation. She describes earlier works as giving voice to a “feminist utopic desire” for inter-corporeal relations between human and non-human creatures. Here as well, Mayo and Munce cautiously anticipate a world of embodied rather than measured and comprehended relations – for better or worse. Surely Panofsky never dreamed of divining a feminist utopia from the space of antiquity and the Middle Ages. In our own Dark Age, that task is best left to artists.


Madeleine Mayo and Rebecca Munce: Star Rider continues until October 13.
Galerie Deux Poissons: https://www.galeriedeuxpoissons.com/
The gallery is accessible.


Tammer El-Sheikh is a writer and teacher based in Montreal. His art criticism has appeared in Parachute, Canadian Art, ETC and C Magazine.

If you were looking for an exhibition space as far from a white cube as you could get, a church might just be it. Neither cubic nor stripped of colour, a hall of worship comes laden with stories and symbols, fraught with beliefs and burdened by an overriding narrative that tends to elicit deep-seated reactions. My prejudices about religion have softened over the years and rather than dismiss it as a misguided and conservative doctrine, as I did in my youth, I can now see it as a potential forum for shared meaning, community, and the possibility of transcendence. St Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto’s west end provides an excellent model for such a conception of spirituality with its regular exhibitions of contemporary art installed within the functional spaces of the building – from pews to alter – and its open arms approach to drawing in visitors. The afternoon I visited Ouroboros, the current exhibition, there was a singalong that I initially mistook for a choir practice happening. The massed voices made for a unique accompaniment to my viewing of the exhibition and I had to politely decline a couple invitations to join in.



Ellen Bleiwas, Handhelds, 2018, natural latex, pure gum rubber, beeswax, cotton string, copper steel, aluminum, mirror

This welcoming gesture was echoed by the integration of the assorted works within the space of the church. The congregation must be used to exercising tolerance for the unexpected and new, but I imagine even their receptivity was tested by some of the interventions. In particular, I would have loved to see the reactions of the Sunday regulars to Ellen Bleiwas’ rubbery beeswax and wire tubes distributed amongst the hymnbooks along the back of each pew. These alien objects are designed to be held and the tiny mirrors within serve as a handy tool to aid in the reflection of the praying adherents.

Twin sunsets from two corners of the planet (one the nearby intersection at Bathurst and Bloor) lift the viewer/parishioner out of their individual meditations to consider their place on the planet, under the heavens, and part of a larger cycle of time and space. These videos are by Emily DiCarlo and her Dutch collaborator Hanneke Wetzer. Overhead, Marian Wihak’s chandelier rotates like a celestial mobile that catches the ambient light and draws eyes upward. The church’s own art – including murals by three members of the Group of Seven – enters into dialogue with the visiting artists and shifts any presumptions to what’s contemporary with the introduction of the building’s history and the even older story of Christianity.



Gunilla Josephson, I Love You, 2016, video installation (photo: Ken Woroner)

Closer to the front, surrounding the baptismal font, Adrienne Trent has assembled a wall of icons that give pets the same status as saints. Including these companion animals within the domain of spirit expands the scope of community at the same time as it revises our understanding of ethical responsibility. If this is truly a place of love than that love and all the attendant reciprocity that follows should be extended to all living things.

On the subject of love, Gunilla Josephson’s I Love You is situated front and centre on the church’s altar and as such engages in the most direct appropriation of this sacred environment. The video depicts two children whose heads have been spliced together and then made to rotate as they whisper assertions of happiness and loss. The whole dynamic of “here, not here” is shared by the worlds of religion and art. The ways in which each discourse often speaks in cryptic murmurs that intrigue and confuse, but promise something greater is evident throughout this space. While contemporary art galleries isolate their works in a vacuum of white, churches are infused with an overwhelming noise of competing contexts. It’s a testament to the artists involved and the care in curation that this exhibition survives that combination and perhaps even transcends it.


Ouroboros continues until October 14.
St. Anne’s Anglican Church: http://www.saintanne.ca/events/ouroboros
The venue is partially accessible.


Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.