When I moved to Montreal just over ten years ago, I picked up a copy of an artist-run centre directory – the fledgling art critic’s Lonely Planet. After counting as many parallel spaces in the province of Quebec as there were in Ontario and BC combined, I felt like I’d arrived in a contemporary art paradise. Looking back over the last year of reviews, the value of this deep tradition of publicly-funded spaces in Montreal has been confirmed for me.

Among my highlights for the year are two artist-run centre exhibitions: curator Zoë Chan’s Performing Lives at Optica and Atelier Céladon’s Whispers That Got Away at SBC. In both, the works on offer dealt with identity formation in marginal and diasporic communities, and the enduring virtues of care and humour within them. They were also international, with Anishinaabe and Inuit, American, Mexican, French, and Iranian artists taking up topics ranging from traditional hunting techniques in the North, to proto-feminist mythology in ancient Greece, to the Guatemalan Civil War, the situation of the Roma in France, and the Caribbean Canboulay festival.



Ai Ikeda, Mutation Series #1

Montreal is also a hotbed of DIY artist activity. A third notable exhibition of the year for me was Ai Ikeda’s at the short-lived St. Henri garage-cum-gallery Calaboose. Ikeda’s paintings and ceramics were set in the flood-lit garage for an allegory about post-Fukushima environmental catastrophe featuring tiny mutant fruits and giant phallic salamanders. The founders of the space – Danica Pinteric and Garrett Lockhart – seem poised to do more innovative programming in the years to come. And after a recent announcement about an NGC-sponsored prize for small galleries and artist-run centers, the chances of survival for projects like this in and beyond Montreal are stronger. For a less sanguine and more probing check-in on the city’s DIY and artist-run culture, on its alliances with real estate and commercial interests, and its occasional lack of political vision, see Saelan Twerdy’s excellent article in MOMUS.

One of the works in Ikeda’s exhibition, Mutation Series #1, was a personal gem. In it a tiny Mexican salamander is shown peering out of a translucent membrane with the planet earth at its back and an uncertain future ahead. With just over a month until my daughter’s birth, this picture captured my trepidation and giddy hope about parenthood. Above all, that’s what 2018 has been for me – a year of beginnings! Looking backwards over the year for this round-up feels forced as a result. So, I’ll take some liberties and add two favorite contemporary art moments about charmed beginnings and utopian visions of the future. These won’t make the official top-three list, but they’re key entries in my sappy dad-critic’s diary.



Bridget Moser (photo: Karin Zuppiger)

Bridget Moser’s Conversations in Contemporary Art (CICA) presentation at Concordia University was wonderful for beginnings. Full disclosure: I’m cheating here since I scheduled the talk, and because it wasn’t an exhibition, but Moser very generously included a performance interlude about halfway through. She launched the talk with tongue-firmly-in-cheek stories about formative experiences, including watching an episode of the TV show Boy Meets World in which an adolescent character debuts her performance artwork for a totally uncomprehending boy, and a shirtless stage-crashing stunt by Moser’s 2012 Banff Residency mentor Michael Portnoy during Bob Dylan’s performance at the Grammy’s. On a more serious note, Moser’s approach to beginnings has been described in semiotic terms as a kind of “zero-degree” for prop-comedy in which the utilitarian identities of objects – toilet plungers, ironing boards, thigh masters, etc. – are cleared away for her almost interpersonal interactions with them. See the talk here.

One last highlight: Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines at Centre Clark. The title speaks to the artist’s beginnings in a trailer park near Yosemite Valley, but the multimedia work also imagines, via the Alice-like adventures of Moulton’s alter-ego Cynthia, a fulfillment of the New Age promise of communion with nature, perfect psychic and physical health, and the everyday enchantment offered by well-chosen home decorations. These are pursued by Cynthia in a friction-free virtual space where nature is pictured as a screen-saver image, the secrets to psychic and physical health lie in self-help mantras, and everyday enchantments are a click (or a consumer choice) away. It’s hard to ignore the work’s message about the squandered legacy of the counterculture of Moulton’s parents’ generation, but its restless energy, un-precious humour, and sheer dreaminess are cause for hope in better worlds to come.


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

A wise Vancouverite once said a life in the arts is a life of mimicry. This past year, I often felt a cognitive strain from experiencing artworks with a certain bewildering déjà vu. Of course there’s an inevitable mirroring at the crux of contemporary art that can be genuine and productive, but I regularly caught myself yawning and disaffectedly half-looking at arid, wishy-washy derivatives presented as art in 2018. However, this year’s three highlights were stories of artists, curators, and organizers rising to the occasion and unrelentingly doing the most above all turns.



Logan MacDonald, Seal Simulacrum, 2016

There was a palpable pulse to Logan MacDonald’s The Lay of the Land installation at aceartinc. in the spring that continues to reverberate in my mind. Entering the exhibition without any inhibitions, I was immediately arrested by the layers and layers of sprawling photo material and the terrains they attempted to map out. It was a show that demanded multiple revisits. The four or so weeks it was on certainly wasn’t enough time to sit with the work. With each visit you found yourself discovering the dense lattice-work of the exhibition anew. At its heart was an artist self-untangling in physical space. It was every bit as unflinchingly introspective as it was dialogical.

The act of making room for others to be seen, to freely experiment, and for discovery is a noble act of empathy, especially in a world divided by individualistic pursuits. And so when small independent artist-run organizations and project spaces sprout, they become fodder for the larger cultural narrative. This year Blinkers created a confident new entry for a city and an arts community that undoubtedly needs it. Initiated by four friends/artists, Blinkers has already positioned itself as an intermediary for critical conversations happening in Winnipeg and elsewhere. Since its opening, it has presented exhibitions, talks, and one-off events by and for artists and thinkers across the country. They are in their very early stages and still have more to offer, but if any of what they’ve done thus far is an indication, then it seems like the possibilities could be infinite.



Sophie Sabet, Though I’m Silent, I Shake, 2017, single channel video, 2017

Use of the word “resistance” reoccurred this year in different contexts. It shouldn’t be a surprise to see it as a response to what feels like a whirlpool of global political happenings, much of which seem to be out of any individual’s control. But resistance can take any number of forms and I can argue that all three of my picks for 2018 are in some small way driven by it. This was especially so for Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet curated by Noor Bhangu at Gallery 1C03. The hugely varied and compact exhibition brought together a cosmopolitan group of artists including Susan Aydan Abbott, Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter, Sarah Ciurysek, Dayna Danger, Christina Hajjar, Ayqa Khan, Luna, Matea Radic, Sophie Sabet, and Lessa Streifler. A testament to the unending magic of collaboration between artist and curator, and an embrace of opposite experiences towards a unified vision, it spoke to what it can look like when female-identifying and gender-defying bodies’ archives are substantiated through performativity. That in and of itself is undergirded by a penchant for resistance.

Lastly, I would like to send to a few special shout-outs to folks who one way or the other have been of impact this year. To Marijana Mandusic for hammering down three wonderful shows throughout the year, kudos! To curator Sarah Nesbitt, your time in Winnipeg was short, but you’ll be dearly missed. To my editor Terence Dick, for being patient and making me readable throughout year. And to Christian Hajjar, for being a trooper and for insistently pushing femme, female-identifying, and diasporic voices forward through your publications. RIP to James Luna and Jack Whitten, the world will not forget you. 2019, do your worst.


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.

Exhibition reviews are usually about art as the destination, but my highlights from the past year of searching and seeing were all about the journeys that got me there. The art is the pay-off, but the stories behind the gallery-going are the adventures I’ll remember and they reflect the foundational people and places that make the culture possible.



Paul Walde, Of Weather (for Geoff Hendricks), part of the work of WIND AIR LAND SEA, as seen on AkimboTV Views (photo: Lulu Wang)

If I retain one memory of being a professional art commentator from 2018, I would like it to be my frantic late afternoon/early evening hot rodding around a Mississauga industrial park with Views co-director Lulu Wang as my co-pilot when we documented the final day (no re-shoots!) of the gargantuan exhibition the work of WIND AIR LAND SEA presented by the Blackwood Gallery for ten days this September. I have a soft spot for site-specific shows where the art world comes face-to-face with the general public and has to re-evaluate its self-presentation, pretenses, and resilience to the elements. The theme of climate change and environmental crisis practically necessitated this collection of international artists be outside, so it was perfect that we were there on such a beautiful day (check out the episode here). The whole experience – getting away from downtown Toronto, hunting for art with the help of a map, running into friends, chatting with strangers – was a blast. And the art was pretty good too!



Yet another selfie taken in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms at the Art Gallery of Ontario (photo: Terence Dick)

My antipathy to lining up kept me away from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s blockbuster exhibition of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms until an old friend who happens to work there offered me and my wheelchair-riding son a pre-opening hours peek at said rooms. We still had to stick to the allotted seconds of viewing time, but I’d already seen a couple of Kusama’s mirrored boxes before and my kid tends to get overwhelmed by visual stimulation so I was fine with the glimpse minus any hours-long wait. In fact, I was happier catching up with my friend, but having a chance to see the thing everyone had been talking about got me rethinking my scepticism around hugely popular exhibitions and what they all mean.

I like visual art because it isn’t popular, so I can visit galleries and be alone with art. Those isolated, unmediated experiences are increasingly rare. I also like my art to resist easy interpretation and reward contemplation, which doesn’t translate into crowds. At the same time, I understand the economics of the institutions and no one can justify an empty gallery, so numbers count. But the last couple of big name acts that filled the halls of the AGO (David Bowie and Guillermo del Toro) pandered to celebrity and popular culture, so it was inarguably awesome that the attraction this year was a celebrated contemporary artist with historical significance who also happened to be a woman and an artist of colour. Beat that, MOMA with your Bruce Nauman retrospective and Whitney Museum with Andy Warhol yet again.

At the opposite end of the exhibition spectrum were two temporary galleries that demonstrated the unstoppable urge to make and present art in environments that like art but make it hard to survive as artists (such as a city with ever-increasing rents and ever-fewer vacancies). Roving art space ma ma made its home for part of this year in transitioning warehouse on Dupont. The exhibition I saw was inspired by gardening and I can think of no better metaphor for cultivating culture. Bunker 2 has been around a bit longer, but I stumbled upon its current home in a parking lot a block north of ma ma. The clever directors of this gallery/shipping container pay the cost of a parking spot to afford square footage for their artists. Tough times call for creative measures and if you can’t rely on artists to come up with workarounds, who can you rely on? That little bit of optimism is just what I need for a year of political pessimism in spades. Here’s hoping those of us in Ontario can survive 2019!


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.

Chrysanne Stathacos wasn’t an emerging artist when I first heard of her, but she was new to me. It was the summer of 1999 and I was working as a gallery attendant at The Power Plant. To prepare for the exhibition of her Wish Machine, we had to spend a day in a back room filling hundreds of tiny Ziploc bags with a small photocollage and a miniature vial of essentials oils. My memory of that day and the inescapable association I have with that piece and this artist is dominated by the horrific hangover I had due to a post-music festival debrief the previous night when a bottle of port was consumed. As I held my gagging in check and kept my breathing as shallow as possible, I counted the minutes and fiddled with the finnicky bags while the pungent smells invaded my nostrils. The rest of the summer was a breeze in comparison and I’ve only rarely come across Stathacos’ work since then, but the vivid recollection of that nauseated experience (one diametrically opposed to the intended effects of the artwork in question) remains a touchstone in my personal history of altered states.



Chrysanne Stathacos, Alchemical Golden Rose Mandala, 2018-2019, installation

Speaking of altered states, I can’t help but guess that Stathacos’ current appearance at Cooper Cole has something to do with the recent legalization of cannabis in Canada. Her paintings and prints on canvas feature marijuana leaves as well as ivy and create a hybrid representation-abstraction that takes the natural patterns of vines and leaves, and transmutes them through pigment into timeless records of the psychedelic potential in these plants. Pleasant enough as visual stimulants, what gives them further resonance is the residue of the living things that made them. A selection of these works were completed in the 1990s and intended to have a healing value. With the passing of decades, they carry not only imagery but also connect people through time. Art is that wonderful, horrible magic that takes life and renders it inert as well as the reverse by making dead things feel alive. This cycle is realized in the flower petal mandala Stathacos has been creating and will continue to contribute to as it too changes through dehydration with the passing of every day. Circles within circles, dashes of colour, each one on its own journey, each one a part of the greater whole, each one in danger of being blown away by an errant breeze each time a visitor enters the gallery.



Chrysanne Stathacos

Given Simon Cole’s penchant for exhibiting artists from the past (Vikky Alexander, Scott Treleavan) alongside his coterie of more recent talent, I shouldn’t be surprised by his inclusion of Stathacos in his exhibition schedule, but it was a pleasant reminder of the larger scope of time that encompasses art history and the artists who keep contributing to it. Her works were also a reminder – one I need after spending too much time popping in and out of galleries, week after week, year after year, looking for the newest thing – that art is meant for the long haul, not for passing glances. These works have lives of their own and become companions over time. Some might be more fragile than others, but they all connect us to a vibrant history and a living engagement with the world. At the start of a new year, looking back is as important as looking forward, and this exhibition provides an excellent opportunity for both.


Chrysanne Stathacos: Gold Rush continues until February 2.
Cooper Cole: https://coopercolegallery.com/
The gallery is not 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.

Writing on the paintings of Cy Twombly, Roland Barthes speaks of an “essence of writing” that is “neither form nor usage but simply gesture – the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen: a garble, almost a smudge, a negligence.” Such gestures simultaneously say: I can only be this way and no other way; and: I am not where you are, I am elsewhere. A similar notion is played out in the new work of Jamie Macaulay on display at Forest City Gallery, wherein the gestural is both inward-facing and inevitably tied to a singular trail of perceptions. In contrast to his earlier work, these new paintings and drawings are looser, less inscrutable, and a working-through of much more personal coordinates.



Jamie Macaulay, My Burning Rib, 2018, oil on canvas

Referencing a W.G. Sebald anecdote of Flaubert, In the Hem of Emma Bovary’s Winter Gown refers to a moment in which the entirety of the Sahara is glimpsed in a grain of sand. For Macaulay, the notion of the initial gesture as indicative of the whole of experience begins in the line, the mark, the stain, and the layering that support the loosest of images. Through the use of repeated motifs, these initial gestures become emblematic of moments that are themselves shifting and changing.

In a lineup of small drawings, some of these emblems are easier to identify, appearing as the repeated forms of flies, snakes, clouds, and disembodied feet. Other drawings are messier and read less like stacked, cartoon currency. Their stories are oriented as strings of resemblances with the occasional textual anchor: book-bottle-hotdog-potato-sack, sardine-smashed-in-Hell, crawling-torso-impaled-by-iron-web.

Groupings of small paintings read as keys to each others’ tightly-cropped logistics, where serpentine legs and floating feet are most often the central actors. These books, bottles, buildings, feet, flies, and other objects are often left to their own pictogram-like devices, occasionally upstaged by a single, scrawled word like “inferno” or “insomnia,” or caught in a snake’s grip. The repeated narrative tone is of struggle, aimlessness, or futility.

The results are much different when Macaulay combines the behavior of the scribbled word with the cartoony doodle, allowing the resulting motif to mutate, flipping back and forth between text and image. In two paintings which sit between more animated groupings, the resemblance-strings become a wall of interconnected lines and marks. In the smaller of the two, what might read as two squat stacks of lumpen flesh quickly wriggle away from any further associations. In the larger, the wall of shapes is further organized by pared-down texture, designated by the simple jottings, cuts, and striations of graphic lines. I read the paintings as if they had the urgency of text. Yet the effect is more of an obscure nervous system with each section given a specific, mysterious role within the bare skeleton of a unique organism.

These paintings find their own way to refer towards, refusing to rely on the aura of symbols or the dregs of abstract noise. They behave as pictures do, as text does, but not completely; they ask me to think beyond the meaning of what they’re saying, and instead to make meaning with and alongside them. As Barthes says of Twombly’s scribbles, the result is an “indetermined and inexhaustible sum of motives.” The gesture that acts “without perhaps really wanting to produce anything at all.”


Jamie Macaulay: In the Hem of Emma Bovary’s Winter Gown continues to February 15.
Forest City Gallery: https://forestcitygallery.com
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.

Delicate and precise.
Destruction on a catastrophic level.
Experimental cells devouring the veil between nature and industry.
These are elements that emerge in The New Gallery exhibition Inversion by Calgary artist Jill Ho-You. The printmaker and professor at Alberta College of Art and Design brings together the formal art of intaglio and chin collé in printmaking with the degradation of materials over time due to their interaction with organic and animal materials both literally and metaphorically.



Jill Ho-You, In The Dust I, 2015

Featured in the exhibition are petri dishes with tiny specimen-like drawings of different embodiments of industrial materials: snippets of bridges, beams, and concrete buildings. Included with these is live bacterial culture that will slowly degrade or change the artwork housed within the petri dish. Similar to specimen collections, these tiny artworks act as specimens of culture that is no longer sustainable.

Ho-You’s intricately etched prints envision a world in ruin, but not from natural disaster. Instead, buildings collapse and collide, sinuous bone fragments disintegrate into the territory we stand on, and earthly organic materials metamorphoses around the broken down, dilapidated remains of contemporary civilization. These works envision our world as we know it through an evolution – or rather devolution – of time and matter. As the world seemingly crumbles these works attempt to forecast a future where Mother Nature reigns powerful and true again as organic matter takes over, pursuing the ultimately and timely demise of technology and construction. In our current political climate and in consideration of climate change and the degradation of the natural atmosphere, Ho-You’s exhibition is timely and apt. Using the traditional art form of intaglio printmaking further emphasizes a world where technology has eroded and we must return to early forms of technological advancement.


Jill Ho-You: Inversion continues until February 9.
The New Gallery: http://www.thenewgallery.org/
The gallery is 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.

If Madeline Mackay’s solo exhibition Not Yet Earth at Martha Street Studio reminds us of anything, it is the sheer materiality of this often elusive matter we call flesh. If you aren’t a surgeon or haven’t studied human anatomy, the very thing that encompasses our bones and gives our bodies shape might seem trivial. For Mackay, the thingness of flesh is the center from which she directs her interests. It is as much a form of self-examination as it is something that branches off to include any being with a body. Her exhibition is less about “body art” (i.e., identity as gender, sexuality, or ethnicity; although, I wouldn’t rule it out completely) and more about the body as material. It takes a different direction than say, what we’ve seen performance artists do with their bodies. Mackay zooms right inside and underneath the skin to makes sense of its arbitrary physicality.



Madeline Mackay

On entering the gallery, you are met with a series of thirty-plus etchings in a grid pattern. The prints are studies of butcher meat cast-offs the artist assembled for her drawings. Her interpretations don’t immediately read as the insides of a body. The etching process obscures them. They aren’t bloody or the gooey slop you might imagine. What we see instead are various grays amalgamated from her black ink registrations. The depictions of meat could easily read as wave-like scribbles or abstract mark-making. It’s as if she’s been staring at and thinking about these bits of flesh so incessantly that they blur into one another.

Mackay offers additional renderings of found meat by way of CMYK screen-printing or mixed-media drawing. Each work contains its own abstract logic. Any reference to specific bits and pieces of meat is lost. They exist as entities in and of themselves. Her inspiration is only revealed in a video where a hand (presumably the artist’s) parses through knots of gathered flesh beside what looks like a muddy puddle. This action is contemplative and feels intimate. It’s not as grotesque as one might think, nor does it have an anthropological or medical distance to the way the flesh is handled. Instead, it is held with a delicacy as though feeling out the textures for any lingering memory these animal parts might still hold. Hers is an introspective and quiet look at what was once a part of a larger mobile being, now diminished into mere detritus waiting to decompose into the ground.

MacKay takes what is very much a part of us and makes it feel unfamiliar by accentuating the banality of its tactility. She is less interested in capturing the exact likeness of flesh and more focused on its strangeness as an autonomous object when it is no longer part of a living, breathing body. The work here illustrates the many ways the flesh can be transformed and disfigured as well as our own bodies’ fragility and resilience.


Madeline Mackay: Not Yet Earth continues until February 8.
Martha Street Studio: http://www.printmakers.mb.ca/
The gallery is 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.

Perhaps it’s the new year with all its accompanying anxiety, but I was actually eager to visit an exhibition about death, hoping that the content would substantiate my macabre mood. Misery loves company, right? Dying is a participatory exhibition presented by Taboo Health (a non-profit collective of curators and health professionals) as part of the 2019 DesignTO Festival that spans Artscape Youngplace’s second floor hallway as well as the third floor gallery Critical Distance Centre for Curators. As the exhibition title and festival context suggests, Dying explores death through design and art, and, overall, treats the subject empathetically by spotlighting families, caregivers, and healthcare workers who often bear the burden of loss.



Justin Tyler Tate, DIYing Free

At Critical Distance Justin Tyler Tate stages his DIYing Free, a do-it-yourself cardboard coffin (you can download the template and make one yourself here) that is open source, sustainable, and apparently legal depending on the rules of your cemetary of choice. I timidly entered the gallery and quickly scanned the room for the coffin, but it did not immediately appear. I passed through another door-like opening and found myself in a small viewing room with four black banquet chairs sitting on top of a grayish black carpet, facing an unadorned, cardboard coffin. It was more rustic than I expected (but what did I expect?) and somewhat creepy. I may have shuddered and walked out immediately if it weren’t for the oddly amusing video projected on the far wall. A voice (the artist’s?) both jovial and somber narrates details about the casket. There is also a sign that asks you to take off your shoes before you get inside for a selfie. In his artist statement, Tate posits whether DIYing Free will be viewed as grim or enlightening, curious or distasteful, and I believe he has managed to elicit all four reactions. A free, downloadable cardboard coffin is certainly thought provoking and ingenious, but is the selfie exhortation and its hashtag (#coffinselfies) a frivolous addition or a successful disruption of the funereal process?

Dying continues on the second floor where there are several personal sculptural and photographic pieces reflecting on end-of-life care and the end of life itself. Though sincere, many of these were superficial and failed to live up to their participatory ambitions, but the clear standout is Constellations by Karen Oikonen and Kate Wilkes, an eight by sixteen foot “wall” that asks you to map the death of someone in your life, prompting you to recall how long they suffered, how prepared you were for the loss, who supported you, and who caused you stress, among other pointed reflections. I made my way through Constellation with a friend who lost a close family member some months ago. Using a red ball of yarn we followed the multiple-choice questions and wrapped its threads around each corresponding answer. By the end we could both see that her particular experience of loss was accompanied by an incredible amount of support, but the map also revealed that this was not the case for many others.

Surprisingly, Dying did not validate my dark mood, and I exited the exhibition rather cheerful, pleased to have had an opportunity to contemplate and interact with such solemn topics. As I left the hallway not totally creeped out and not sad, I blurted out “That was fun!” before immediately feeling guilty for saying so, but perhaps it is to the exhibition’s credit that they managed to achieve their goal of making me “comfortable with the uncomfortable.”


Dying continues until January 27 as part of the DesignTO Festival.
DesignTO: https://designto.org/
The gallery is accessible.


Letticia Cosbert is a Toronto-based writer and editor, and is currently the Director of Koffler.Digital 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.

Facing the front door of the tiny DIY gallery soon.tw, Vincent Larouche’s exhibition Bouches de Cendres Actives opens with what looks like an art crime. In Hyenes a hunter takes aim across the missing middle panel of a triptych at a grisaille portrait of a child. Inside the gallery proper, Larouche makes more mischief with a spread of cartoon wall paintings and canvases. His works breach the boundary between art history and visual culture, and point to more serious trespasses in Montreal’s quickly gentrifying Mile Ex.



Vincent Larouche, Bouches de Cendres Actives, 2019, installation view

A bespectacled blond girl hurries up a set of stairs toward a broken window as a masked bandit with an oversized credit card darts off in the direction of a real window. Too disconnected to present as a mural, the works are like cave paintings in a revved-up comic world. A network of gazes between three canvases hung among the cartoons moves us into darker and more historical territory. A naturalistic portrait of the Virgin Mary (the missing panel from Hyenes) hangs near a long-faced, middle-aged man with an illegible note in one hand and a pistol pointed at his head in the other. His reasons apparently don’t matter. Both stare across the room to an “undead” blue-faced man dangling from a noose in the centre of a slapstick bathroom scene titled Bestiare 2. The emotional tone of the exhibition is hard to pin down, but another of Larouche’s cartoons provides a cue. At floor-level a google-eyed man with pockets turned inside-out and a cavity where his frontal lobe ought to be, throws his hands up in despair and sheds a single tear. Other characters convey hysteria or antipathy or vacancy and numbness. In a telling contrast, the estranged Madonna and child harken back to the pathos and drama of the Renaissance, while the cartoons with their twisted grins and crossed, blood-shot and troubled eyes allude to non-cathartic millennial feelings.

Larouche’s taste in visual culture is eclectic. He reads everything from Marvel and DC comics to the more “vulgar” works of French beatnik cartoonist Max Cabanes. Echoes of Spirou and Tintin come across in the show’s naïve moments as well, alongside unambiguous nods to South Park and anime. The artist’s images don’t cohere in a narrative, but as the exhibition title suggests their “activity” fills the room with a single, frenzied voice. The characters are taken from various online sources, reworked, coloured, cut down or blown up and arranged with ample breathing room as image-events or exclamations in the space. If the action painters of the mid-twentieth century turned to clip art and cartooning, this is what their work might have looked like. Larouche’s chops as a painter are evident here, as is his awareness of the history of his discipline. But an irreverent rewrite of that discipline seems to be at stake too, in the equalizing or “non-hierarchical” treatment of cartoons and religious motifs – unattributed pictures that he simply “found on the internet.” A paranoid angle on this wellspring for source material is given in the exhibition’s publicity image (also “found on the internet”) of a laughing face tattooed or drawn on the back of a young punk’s shaved head.



Vincent Larouche, Bouches de Cendres Actives, 2019, installation view

Given the recent sale of soon.tw’s home at the historic #305 Bellechasse, this exhibition reflects a wariness if not paranoia about the changing relationship in Montreal between artists, developers, and creative industries. In its bid to become a leading creative city, Montreal has attracted a growing number of tech companies. Around soon.tw in Mile Ex, a new University of Montreal AI complex, the game developer Behavior Interactive, and Microsoft Research offices are raising the city’s cultural capital and with it prices for nearby artists’ studios. In response, a group called #nosateliers has organized to secure affordable studios for working artists in the city. With the sympathy of the Mayor’s office and its policy to oblige new owners to save spaces for artists, the group remains hopeful. But a lot depends on language. As soon.tw’s director Jérôme Nadeau notes, while the new owners of #305 Bellechasse have agreed to make artists’ spaces available, the difference between a creative firm’s offices and a painter’s studio might well be papered over to raise rents. In this context, and against the slick lines of the gallery’s freshly painted walls, Larouche’s zany characters start to look like creative-office decor – avatars of overworked and underpaid artists in what he calls a “new corporate imaginary.”


Vincent Larouche: Bouches de Cendres Actives continues until February 16.
soon.tw: https://soon.tw/
The gallery is not 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.

Borrowing its title from a W.G Sebald poem, Chechen artist Aslan Gaisumov’s exhibition If No One Asks, currently on display at the Contemporary Art Gallery, is a gentle contemplation of the unseen. The central work, People of No Consequence, is a video loop of Chechen elders entering a room in a municipal hall, sitting in chairs, and waiting patiently. They assemble in a customary way with the men in traditional Cossack hats taking up the front rows. Following behind them are the women dressed in skirts and headscarves; almost as if instructed, they choose seats in the back half of the room. The men habitually play with their walking sticks. Everyone looks down or around, and waits. The dull white room feels theatrical with dramatic valance curtains covering tall windows and rich mahogany doors. The seats are arranged in anticipation of a presentation. The back wall offers a sharply contrasting image: skyscrapers fill a blue sky. This photo adds an absurdity to the scene of participants waiting for something that is never revealed.



Aslan Gaisumov, People of No Consequence, 2016, video installation (photo: SITE Photography)

Opposite the projection wall, the exhibition entrance is accented with a small framed work titled Memories of War. It is comprised of one page from a found book. The only words revealed are the title (War Memoirs) and “war.” The rest of the text has been blacked out. While distinct from the video, what links the two pieces is, in essence, the withholding and silencing of histories.

It isn’t until the end of People of No Consequence that a few screens of text reveal the video’s larger context. In the city of Grozny in 2016, 119 Chechen survivors gather for the first time since their deportation from the Soviet Union in 1944 having been falsely accused of collaboration with Nazi Germany. Within the span of less than three weeks, more than 500,000 people were expelled from their homes, less than half of whom survived their forced transportation. In further conversation with curator Kimberly Phillips, she explained to me that the generation who lived through the deportation generally feel unwilling or unable to talk about the events. She requoted Gaisumov, who explained that one of the male participants said, “Why should we speak? Let those who did this do the talking.”



AslanGaisumov, Memories of War, 2016, found text (photo: SITE Photography)

Drawing from Sebald’s themes of memory, war, and the human condition, the viewer unknowingly witnesses the grief that sits – and waits – in these bodies. Gaisumov’s video assembles complicated reflections on silencing, intergenerational trauma, acknowledgment, and reconciliation. While the full significance of the moment isn’t visible, this work explores the liminal space that exists in the waiting.


Aslan Gaisumov: If No One Asks continues until March 24.
Contemporary Art Gallery: https://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/
The gallery is accessible.


Justina Bohach facilitates various modes of cultural production within contemporary art. She has published with Blonde Art Books, The Mainlander, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. She is currently part of the curatorial team at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She can be followed on Instagram @then.on.second.thought.

I saw perfect prisms and multicoloured, meticulously drawn parallel lines and – admittedly – checked out. I was overcome with a feeling of emptiness. This I attributed to the number of artists doing paintings of parallel lines in art school which, I joke, numbed my ability to view line paintings as anything other than someone’s 4:20 bong hit. However, as I came across Antonietta Grassi’s diptych Fils de Sources, which appears to be the aerial view of a weaving on a loom, I was forced to reconsider this exhibition and all geometric works I had previously viewed and conceptually fixed.



Antonietta Grassi, Fils de Sources, 2018, oil, acrylic, and ink on canvas

Grassi writes of her exhibition at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, “After the loss of both my parents in a short period of time, I began to integrate structure and geometry into my work as a means to contain the chaos and grief that ensued.” Prisms, the illusions of folds, and sparkling thread lines can be made out, layered over penetrating shades of orange, Pussyhat fuschia, Post-it yellow, and fax machine brown, in her collection of oil, acrylic, and ink paintings titled Contemplations for Obsolete Objects: Postscript. Grassi’s background as a designer and colour forecaster (a researcher and interpreter of colour trends in Montreal’s garment district) makes colour for her a broader cultural thermometer. Her choices reflect both the socio-political climate and the process of having to throw out much of her parents’ now-obsolete collection of objects: sewing machines, fashion patterns, old computers, and beige filing cabinets filled with yellowed documents. Colour is both personal and public.

Considering structuralism as a means for containing grief, Michel Foucault’s examination of the space left by death comes to mind. In discussing the “death of the author,” he considers the historical legal process through which individual property has become associated with name, tracing it back to Roman law, which defined the legal existence of the individual. For Foucault, property is a purely legal thing that is separable in meaning from its “owner” or “author.” Once it is separated from that owner, where does the property lie? What is done with this absence of the owner? For him, their name remains and continues on as a form of encrypted knowledge. (Credit should be given here to Daniel Laforest’s brilliant lecture, “Michel Foucault & the author & etc.,” given in Critical Theory II on January 22 at the University of Alberta.)



Antonietta Grassi, Reboot, 2018, acrylic and ink on canvas

I have recently re-introduced sewing and beading into my own life, as some form of encrypted knowledge of my mother and grandmother. I started out by using the patterns my mother used at my age, cut where she cut, pinned where she pinned, folded where she folded. Tactile experience and “owning the means of production” in a guild-like sense have become obsolete for many women today under capitalist society. If you are sewing, often it is in the conditions of a bound labourer, realizing the dreams of another designer for little pay. As Grassi writes, the experience of viewing deeply is “something which is perhaps in itself precariously scarce and obsolete in our present time.” In her act and propagation of “viewing deeply,” she examines the space created by absence as she would colour – as an imprint of realities past and present. It is both intuitive and methodical, “emotional and removed” - as she endeavours to be. Grassi has both touched and scared me.


Antonietta Grassi: Contemplation for Obsolete Objects: Postscript continues until February 23.
Harcourt House Artist Run Centre: http://harcourthouse.ab.ca/
The gallery is not accessible.


Lindsay Sorell is a Métis artist, writer, and MA student in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She researches decolonizing political theory and cultural criticism, Métis history and identity, and Indigenous practices of sovereignty and resistance. She is the Research Assistant for Dr. Laura Bear and is Akimblog's Edmonton correspondent. Follow her on Instagram.

Landscape and bodies thrive and collide in Erotic Nature, a series of sensual and sexy colour photographs by Susan Clarahan currently on display at Jarvis Hall Gallery as part of the Exposure Photography Festival. The Canmore-based artist positions her models diversely, rolling them over, sitting them up or inviting them to kneel, exposing rear ends or crotches in moments of radical consent. Nipples are revealed under mesh bodysuits and sequins grace autonomous beings caught mid-action about to pounce on a lover in a gesture of joy and rapture. In Portals to Other Portals, two bodies lean into each other, mimicking the landscape around them, a Pacific Northwest vista. The women resemble the mounds of greenery-infused mountains amongst sea passages in their loving embrace.



Susan Clarahan, Portals to Other Portals, 2018, print from colour negative

Clarahan taps into the erotic, witchy, goddess-invoked power of women and the feminine mystique casting a glimmer of divination throughout her series. She employs a queer aesthetic and feminist lens to focus and intuit the powerful modern woman, offering a framework for discussing feminist issues. Each of her photographs requires the viewer to imagine what preceded and what will follow the captured moment. In each it is clear the women pictured are in full control, delighting in their power and pleasure. It is a series which allows us to relinquish our fears, to celebrate and embrace the power of the sex positive movement.

To accompany the exhibition Clarahan commissioned three writers – Megan Gnanasihamany, Randee Keiver and Sara Torrie – to reflect on the work through poetic interventions that accompany the exhibition in a catalogue publication. Their words along with her photographs succinctly assemble a vision of the erotic.

there is a divine method here but, buried
under the pool of my deliquescing vision, I am
relying on your rules for the pull.
- Megan Gnanasihamany


Susan Clarahan: Erotic Nature continues until February 23.
Jarvis Hall Gallery: https://jarvishallgallery.com/
This gallery is 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.

When Lux Interior of the Cramps sang about searching for "some new kind of kick” way back in 1981, he was probably alluding to recreational drugs or some transgressive fetish, but he could have just as easily been talking about art. Even after forty years, I’m still in pursuit of the same kicks I got hooked on when I heard the Stooges or Diamanda Galas and saw Cady Noland or Mike Kelley for the first time. There are those experiences that hit you deep within the reptilian brain and they register as a confusion that elicits a unique kind of pleasure. It isn’t the same delight associated with witnessing beauty or simply feeling happy, and it inevitably subsides as familiarity sets in or another level of appreciation takes over (criticism, interpretation, connoisseurship, etc.). And so we keep on searching.

Some artists and movements provide more kicks than others. Louise Bourgeois has kicks. Luanne Martineau kicks. Valérie Blass? Kicks. Kent Monkman? Kicks. Ian Carr-Harris? No kicks. Michael Snow? Some kicks; others, not so much. Surrealism tends to kick, but not always. Hans Bellmer? Kicks. Jean Arp? No kicks. The list could go on. Conceptualism? Not a lot of kicking. Post-conceptualism? Some kicks kick in – not always, but the window is open. The general rule is there has to be a strong visual stimulation that initiates the first response and that response has to be felt in the innards initially, not the intellect. Think of it like a gut punch that leaves you woozy and then take it from there.



DaveandJenn, Play Bow, 2018 (photo: M.N. Hutchison)

Art partners DaveandJenn might easily be mistaken for makers of pleasant things, but in truth they deliver kicks. Their current exhibition in the back of General Hardware Contemporary is as good a place as any to get a taste of what this tastes like. For those of us more familiar with their layered paintings on glass, the sculptural works featured here add a new dimension to the world they’ve been creating over the past fifteen years. They share a similar combination of delicacy and dream-logic with Shary Boyle (who kicks, FYI), but there’s less psycho-sexual meandering and more bio-morphic post-botanicalism. The precious materials with which they work and the fine detail of their rendering tricks you into leaning in so you examine the coral forms and flowery petals alongside bleached skulls and phallic tentacles. It’s a trick that David Altmejd (another master of kicks) deploys with equal finesse. There is something about works working with minutiae that elicits vertigo and hits you where you live. Combine that with uncanny imagery that fluctuates between the living (wood, feathers, plants) and the dead (gold, ceramics, bone), and you’ve got me hooked.



Alex Hatanaka, Territory, 2018

Identifying kicks refers to an aesthetic response, not an evaluative one. Which is just to say: not all art delivers kicks. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The works by PA System (another art duo, this one comprised of Alexa Hatanaka and Patrick Thompson) in the gallery’s front space are a good example of art that hovers within the visual, intellectual, and geographical field without delving into the abject. The largescale print that is the centrepiece here might be familiar to some from the AGO’s 2017 exhibition Every. Now. Then. In this and the smaller works on display the landscape is translated into fine line drawing that makes maps cosmic. PA System do a lot of work in collaboration with Inuit youth in Cape Dorset and I can’t help but imagine that a mirroring of sky and earth is inevitable from the surrounding vistas (though I’ve never been up there, so what do I know?). Looking up you feel a sense of wonder and expanse. Once you’ve had your fill of space, head to the back room for a different fix.


DaveandJenn: Whenever It Hurts continues until February 23.
PA System continues until February 23.
General Hardware Contemporary: http://generalhardware.ca/
The gallery is not 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.

Stepping into Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s exhibition Fountain Mist at the Owens Art Gallery feels like you’re stepping into a sleek modern laboratory where consumerism and desire are distilled to their essential colours, forms, and origins. The Costa Rica-born, Montreal-based artist takes the vernacular of advertising and removes any allusion to branding. Popular cleaning products with the labels removed become beautiful, brightly coloured vases. Stock advertising images gain new meaning when their commercial text is removed. Everything is at once high-keyed and sexual, but also sterile, cool, and clinical. There is a magical alchemy of opposites at play in this bizarre lab and the results might be surprising.



Juan Ortiz-Apuy, Garden Party, 2018, inkjet print

In the center of the room is a classic Ikea storage system that has been deconstructed and reconfigured to create a pristine multi-layered display unit. On each plane of the unit are placed simple forms of household products. On the gallery walls are largescale collages which also use the bright colours and stock images of advertising. A pyramid of generic spray paint cans is stacked in front of an enormous decal of an orange liquid splash. An even larger decal of an upside-down spray bottle lid floats high above the show. An elegant and unusually slender eggplant placed in a beautiful lavender vase leaves no question that there is an underlying inherent erotism at play here.

On the one hand, this erotism has been so thoroughly aestheticized as to give the objects on display a sterile and unnatural aura that leads one to ponder how capitalism repackages our desires and sells them back to us sanitized and clean. One the other hand, the mischievous alchemy of the show is that, unhindered by logos or labels, these images and objects have a sort of playful freedom – as if they might just have a mysterious life of their own.


Juan Ortiz-Apuy: Fountain Mist continues until March 6.
Owens Art Gallery: https://www.mta.ca/owens/index.php
The gallery is partially 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.

If you think of Nigerian-born painter Ekene Maduka as singer, you can hear her dashing from high pitched eccentricities to hushed lullabies to wordless chanting and back to dramatic, tuneful wailing within a single song. You might also find yourself holding back a giggle, not because of her over-the-topness, but because she knows how to weave in an equal measure of levity. You know she is not being seriously serious, but only kinda-sorta.



Ekene Maduka

Maduka’s series of paintings for her exhibition Walk Back Home, now on display at La Maison des Artistes Visuels Francophones, act like a compilation of short stories that offer snapshots of a peculiar cast of characters. These brief switch-ups linger long after you’ve moved on to the next image due to Maduka’s virtuosic detailing with her brush. Across eight or so stretched canvas and circular wood panels in multiple sizes, we see the image of the same figure reappear in different outfits, shiny bling, and varying moods. Said figure is, of course, the chameleon Maduka. Her method is less Cindy Sherman identity swapping critique and more a way of relating to her family. She traces how her own individuality is inscribed by parents and siblings. Part of the collection sees her playing the part of her father, mother, and sisters as well as alternates of herself. In one image she even has a twin and they appear to be in the middle of pampering each other as if getting ready for their close-up.

In another rendition, we see a figure in a traditional Gele head wrap caught laughing hysterically. Each version of Maduka is dressed to impress and cast against a nondescript backdrop, not unlike any of art history’s favourite 17th Century European painters. But she quietly rejects tradition and instead opts for something close to the here and now. As a by-product, we see something that’s uniquely hers and sits outside of a specific historical moment. Walking through the exhibition we encounter works leaning casually in a corner, in the window panels, or edging off the walls – all which add to the wonky, off-kilter depictions in the picture planes.



Ekene Maduka

Perhaps the most formally uncharacteristic piece, Longings for Ulo, accentuates the distinctive misdirection undergirding Walk Back Home. Rendered in photographic detail, the painting captures the delirium of Maduka’s own sense of displacement. We see her looking out at us from a desolate winter landscape. You can feel her shivering in discomfort. She looks like a stranded passenger in the middle of a storm. All she has is her ECOWAS passport ID. You want to reach in and give her a ride, but you can’t help but be amused by the larger-than-life fur on her parka. Maduka knows how to render an earnest inward gesture only to distract from it with humour. And she’s only laughing with us because she’s got to get through the day somehow.

It might be out of line to say a show of paintings depicting the likeness of the human form is abstract, but that’s a designation that is very much parallel here. Much of what Maduka communicates seems to point in multiple directions all at once. We are seeing her over and over again, and each time it’s like seeing her for the first time. Her approach to portraiture not only refocuses the potential for contemporary figural painting, but it reinforces the idea of creating a portrait as elliptical and irresolvable.


Ekene Maduka: Walk Back Home continues until March 2.
La Maison des Artists Visuels Francophones: http://maisondesartistes.mb.ca/
The gallery is 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.

Technology connects us in powerful and unpredictable ways. Much of this activity, while so central to our lives, is invisible to the eye and thus easy to ignore. Khan Lee’s analytical yet airy exhibition Wings of Desire at Republic Gallery plays with the aesthetics of technological frequencies and the attention (or the lack thereof) given to them. The idea for the exhibition grew from the artist’s ongoing interest in cell towers. They are common to a city’s landscape yet often go unnoticed.



Khan Lee, Tsawwassen, 2019, watercolor on paper

Lee is an experimenter. “I need to suffer,” he explains in describing his process of working with unforgiving materials. The exhibition looks, aesthetically speaking, very different from his usual colourful sculptures made from everyday objects. What makes this distinctly Lee is his penchant for setting up elaborate propositions that he is forced to figure out without constraint to a particular medium. This process is evident in his subtle watercolour work. His exhibition is an experiment with a set of parameters that facilitates an investigation into ways of seeing what is right in front of us but not visible to the eye.

Along one wall of the gallery is a suite of cell tower paintings. Nearby is a set of six white cast hands posed as if taking selfies with an invisible smartphone. In place of a plinth, the hands are propped up on a window ledge. Their appearance echoes the ubiquitous gesture of someone documenting their gallery visit.



Khan Lee, Canadian Inventory of Radio Frequency, 2019, oil on wood

Lee has also cleverly created a DIY signal receiver: two pizza pans hang vertically in the front window picking up a cacophony of signals. A computer monitor displays the real-time activity of these frequencies. A large-scale painting on panel strips shows Canada’s radio spectrum allocations marked out in blocks of pigment. The result is an elaborate colour-coded graph made with paints left over from a colour theory course Lee took in art school. This is his first oil painting project. The final piece in the exhibition is 430THz. A solitary bulb fills an empty corner of the room with light. Its frequency is the lowest detectable to the human eye.

The exhibition title Wings of Desire is borrowed from Wim Wender’s 1987 film, and calls attention to the invisible frequencies that surround us. In the film, unseen angels listen to the thoughts of humans – an analogue for receiving data across radio frequencies. Commenting on the high volume of cellular use today, Khan notes: “Imagine you were an angel today – it’s intense.”

End note: Bruno Ganz, the actor who played the angel who chose to become human in the film Wings of Desire passed away on February 15, the day after the opening reception of Lee’s exhibition and the first full day the show was open to the public.


Khan Lee: Wings of Desire continues until March 23.
Republic Gallery: http://republicgallery.com/
The gallery is not accessible.


Justina Bohach facilitates various modes of cultural production within contemporary art. She has published with Blonde Art Books, The Mainlander, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. She is currently part of the curatorial team at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She can be followed on Instagram @then.on.second.thought.

I spent much of the week following the opening of Nep Sidhu’s solo exhibition Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded) suffering from FOMO. As I scrolled past dozens of selfies, blurry details of tapestry, and what seemed to be the most fashionably dressed crowd on Instagram, I couldn’t believe that this was the night – of all nights – I decided to stay in. One week later, when I finally arrived at Mercer Union, I was glad to be greeted by a small crowd of ten or twelve, an unmistakable wave of quiet (which is not the same as silence), and a feeling that even Instagram spoilers could not have reproduced.



Nep Sidhu, Medicine for a Nightmare (from the series When My Drums Come Knocking, They Watch), 2019, cotton, wool, jute, zari, hair, steel (photo: Toni Hafkenscheid)

As I made my way down the hall, only briefly did a pair of framed photographs catch my eye, and though they are mysteriously missing from all exhibition documents, they seemed to indicate that I was entering a sacred space. In the front gallery, two large tapestries spanned the walls and I was flanked by two vinyl-black busts with lips painted red. I decided to save the tapestries for later and ambled my way around the busts. Made in collaboration with Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, they consist of peculiar materials like incantation, DNA, and coral (the red lips?), as well as more familiar ones like stainless steel, brass, and aluminum. Engraved on each are excerpts of Sikh scriptures, many of which were destroyed in Operation Blue Star, a massacre orchestrated by the Indian government against Sikh resistance fighters at the Golden Temple Gurdwara from June 1 to 8, 1984. It is precisely the memory and loss suffered during this attack that Sidhu commemorates, recuperates, and tends to throughout this exhibition.

Next I turned to the tapestries, specifically one which borrows its name from the exhibition title (or, the other way around) and is part of a series called When My Drums Come Knocking, They Watch. Golds, reds, blues, and flesh tones form a skene around two men, one dressed in white, the other in seafoam green, as they stand before the HazÅ«r Sāhib, one of the five holiest Sikh sites. This is only one element of the storytelling and memory found within this tapestry (and the other), and you ought to read the accompanying essay, written by the exhibition’s curator cheyanne turions, to fill in the sonic, material, and iconographic gaps I am unequipped to convey in this review.



Nep Sidhu, Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded), 2019, installation view (photo: Toni Hafkenscheid)

Medicine for a Nightmare culminates in the rear gallery with a tripartite installation comprised of a three thousand pound sculpture titled Formed in the Divine, Divine Form fenced with soil from the Golden Temple (to honour and invite Sikh people who were lost during and beyond Operation Blue Star to witness the work) and placed above a shallow pool of water flecked with delicate white flowers. A vinyl photograph of plates from Hazūr Sāhib is affixed to the adjacent wall and a gong is struck over a seemingly endless ambient drone, reasserting the tranquility, or quiet, with which the exhibition began.

The sheer grandeur of Nep Sidhu’s undertaking speaks to the gravity of the massacre, the many ways in it has affected Sikh people’s lives, and the ways in which community and acts of care persisted. Yes, there is trauma and grief embedded within this work, but even more than that is Sidhu’s deep affection for Sikh communities.


Nep Sidhu: Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded) continues until March 23.
Mercer Union: http://www.mercerunion.org/
The gallery is accessible.


Letticia Cosbert is a Toronto-based writer and editor, and is currently the Director of Koffler.Digital 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.

Toronto-based artist Nahed Mansour’s exhibition at Articule takes up the figure of the belly dancer in mostly American popular culture. The integrity of the show’s concept is provocatively broken down in a kaleidoscopic range of works. From found footage to album covers and sheet music, to carbon transfer drawings and archival photographs, Mansour presents us with less of a history of belly dance than a study of variously Orientalized, racialized, and commodified bodies that perform it.

The historical and nameless Little Egypt who introduced American audiences to the dance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is more elusive in this show than past subjects of Mansour’s works such as Michael Jackson and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. She disappears behind an ever-growing archive of fetishistic representations of “the Orient” – indexes for Euro-American anxieties about a spectral Middle East from the 1800s to our post-9/11 era. Mansour’s Little Egypt is caught between the frame of 19th Century scientific racism, in which she appears as an aberration and a target for moral police, and a swirl of ambivalent feelings for Middle Eastern culture in the wake of the “War on Terror.”



Nahed Mansour, Little Egypt Doesn’t Dance Here Anymore, 2019, installation view (photo: Guy L’Heureux)

A found medical illustration of a stomach opens the show, freezing a sign of the dance under a deadening scientific gaze. A black and white photo of abdominal muscles zooms us out to the dance’s source of strength, which is promptly undermined by a neighbouring photo of The Board of Lady Managers from The Chicago World’s Fair – the group that campaigned to ban Little Egypt’s performance in 1893. Another wall text refocuses our attention on the dancer’s offending part with backhanded praise: “the abdominal muscles are the only portions of anatomy or mind that show any cultivation,” but they are displayed “to serve the basest uses.” With these elements Mansour shows how, like the so-called “Hottentot Venus” of 19th Century European freak shows, Little Egypt’s body is constructed in discourses on decency and sex hygiene as a moral and physical threat.

Mansour’s muse is informed by the artist’s research on a surge in the dance’s U.S. popularity since the nineties. Scholar Sunaina Maira argues in her paper Belly-Dancing: Arab-Face, Orientalist Feminism, and US Empire that after the Gulf Wars and especially after 9/11 the dance mobilizes mixed “imperial feelings” among white, middle-class, liberal feminists for a figure of the Arab woman who is, at once, envied for her sensuality and corporeal power, and pitied for her suffering within an imagined Arab-Islamic patriarchal culture. For Maira, the recent tolerance and even mania for belly dance passes over uncomfortable realities of racial-profiling, deportation, surveillance, and detention within the US, and the ongoing history of US military interventions in the Middle East.

Several works in the exhibition take up the prehistory of these ambivalent feelings in 20th Century popular culture. A pulpy version of the Chicago Fair story from the 1951 film Little Egypt directed by Frederick de Cordova plays on a TV monitor. With this, Mansour plunges us into a technicolour fantasy of the belly dance in which the Fair’s originally Syrian and Algerian dancers are nowhere to be found. Instead, actress Rhonda Fleming offers an appropriately white-washed iteration of the belly dancer, a little like Rudolph Valentino’s vaguely ethnic portrayals of Bedouins and “Lounge Lizards” in the 1920s, or more recently Ridley Scott’s controversial all-white casting for Exodus: Gods and Kings. We are drawn further into the pop cultural imaginary of the dance in a vitrine containing records of the song “Little Egypt” by Elvis and The Coasters, and a Sonny Lester album cover offering instruction on “How to belly dance for your husband.”



Nahed Mansour, The Streets of Cairo - North America, 2019, drawing (photo: Guy L’Heureux)

At the back of the gallery two large drawings of dancers titled The Streets of Cairo - Middle East and The Streets of Cairo - North America hang on adjacent walls. The titles indicate a difference between the groups of dancers, but they are hard to tell apart. The women pictured are stitched together into panoramas of giants, genies, and goddesses of Orientalism near and far. These pictures, along with a case of ghostly drawings of dancers on carbon paper titled …displayed to serve the basest of uses and a set of carbon transfer drawings on American one dollar bills titled Importing Little Egypt and arranged in a pyramid cast the belly dancer as currency – a unit of value in American popular culture and an endlessly repeated form or a received idea.

Whether Mansour affords the figure any agency in the show is uncertain. We get the sense that she is both drawn to the image of the dancer and wary of its appropriation. Look closely at the drawings in Importing Little Egypt and a message comes across in the alignment of the dancers’ eyes with the bills’ Eye of Providence – the reviled, coveted, or otherwise looked-upon figure of the belly dancer in Mansour’s hands finally, and vengefully, returns the gaze.


Nahed Mansour: Little Egypt Doesn’t Dance Here Anymore continues until February 24.
Articule: http://articule.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.

Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw’s Quantification Trilogy features three bold, mysterious, and mind-boggling films. Shown in Venice, Hamburg, and now at the Esker Foundation, the series examines a futuristic understanding of the human race. In each film, individuals who are what could be called “human+” or humans that have evolved beyond what the audience knows as humanity in the 21st Century engage in strange ritualistic behaviours that centre around movement and the imitation of the effects of psychedelics in order to reach another realm or stage of existence. All the films are set in the future; however, Shaw uses or mimics historical footage to create a compelling dichotomy between the themes in the films.



Jeremy Shaw, I Can See Forever, 2018, video

Each film posits movement as the means to reach alternative and transformative planes. The suggestion of how to lose oneself in any one movement, sight, or sound is a way forward in all three. Each ending or crescendo emotively draws out a spirit within the viewer, reaching our solar plexus and allowing us the opportunity to join in on this plane beyond a time/space continuum we can truly understand. Quickeners, Liminals, and I Can See Forever all feature visual effects that culminate in the characters ecstatically arriving at an alternate state. This is most clearly illustrated in I Can See Forever, which features a protagonist named Roderick Dale who is said to possess a fraction of what is called Machine DNA biology and has dedicated his life to dance. It is through this movement that he is able to, as he states, “see forever” and reach an alternate plane that is ecstatic, transcendental, and beyond corporeal. Through an ending of Muybridge-esque movement brought into a technological frame that seems inspired by Hito Steyerl, the viewer is completely drawn into this alternative world.


Jeremy Shaw: Quantification Trilogy continues until May 12.
Esker Foundation: https://eskerfoundation.com/
The gallery is 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 @maeve_hanna.

Intrigued by the prospect of an exhibition of neo-conceptual embroidery, I crossed the Ottawa River to see Rosika Desnoyers’ Partridges at Art-Image in La Maison de la culture de Gatineau. The title of the exhibition is taken from a late 18th Century embroidery by the British artist Mary Linwood, which is the main point of reference for the entire show. Two needlepoint copies of it by Desnoyers, one that is relatively faithful and one that is a black monochrome, are featured. Apart from another needlepoint work at the entrance, the remainder of the exhibition is comprised of black and white reproductions of pages from Pictorial Embroidery in England, Desnoyers’ critical history of needlepainting and Berlin work just published this month by Bloomsbury Visual Arts and available for consultation at the gallery. The exhibition can be understood more generally as a kind of expanded book launch. With discrete and concrete elements of the publication on display, Partridges offers an immersive experience of the text as well as a primer on the artist’s practice as it is linked to her research and scholarship.



Rosika Desnoyers. After Jan Vermeer, The Lacemaker (c.1669-1670), 2008, wool on canvas

The first piece you encounter in the exhibition is After Jan Vermeer, The Lacemaker, which is also the cover image for Desnoyers’ book. The work is comprised of a needlepoint copy of Vermeer’s painting that Desnoyers purchased and her own monochromatic needlepoint copy of the copy. The latter interprets and preserves the imperfections of the first with a missed stitch, thereby leaving sections of the canvas blank. The result is an abstract blue colour field with bare patches the render a systematic and impersonal homage to the hand of the maker. It is an economically compact work that compresses a complex history of the labour of image-making into one gesture. The content of the image (a young woman making lace) and its form (needlepoint) situates the work not only within a gendered practice but also a discredited one that has been denigrated to the status of craft hobby. Desnoyers’ work uncovers this history and connects it to the present.

The relative lack of materials in Desnoyers’ installation and its emphasis on scholarship places it squarely in the tradition of conceptual art. Thirteen pages from the book are reproduced at a standard but maximum size (a little less than three by four feet) on the same weight of paper commonly used in home offices. Introductory pages including the title, table of contents, and preface are supplemented with all of the pages from the book that feature images of work by Mary Linwood. Excerpts of the text also give a brief description of Linwood’s character and her ambiguous status as an artist, which in this context invite a comparison with Desnoyers. Additionally, the enlarged reproduction of Linwood’s Partridges in Fig. 1.12 of the book ends up being approximately the same size as the original, and in the exhibition it appears side by side with Desnoyers’ own needlepoint rendering of it. The two copies variously conjure up the absent original, which was itself a needlepoint imitation of a painting by Moses Haughten the elder.

The conceptual artist David Tomas (who has collaborated with Desnoyers on previous projects) has revised Joseph Kosuth’s maxim that all art after Marcel Duchamp is conceptual with the claim that all contemporary art is academic, and Desnoyers’ work is exemplary in this regard. Her artistic research has undeniably contributed to the production of knowledge. However, the exhibition as a whole addresses the very limits of the capacity for display methodologies to convey information, and this is done most compellingly where absences are made visible. For example, the black monochrome needlepoint reproduction of Partridges can only be fully appreciated at oblique angles, where the figure can be seen in relief. As the booklet for the exhibition heeds the viewer: “Approach so that you can appreciate the work of the artist.”


Rosika Desnoyers: Partridges continues until March 10.
Art-Image: http://www.gatineau.ca/artimage/
The gallery is accessible.


Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and independent curator who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, among other publications. He is Akimblog’s Ottawa correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @MichaelDavidge.