I heard raves about Life of a Craphead’s exhibition at Centre Clark before seeing it: “raw and funny”, “best art show in ages”, and, my favourite, “can’t stop crying and thinking everyone else can just stop making art now.” I’ll join the gush-chorus here. Entertaining Every Second offers brilliant, searing, and healing responses to anti-Asian racism in French colonial history, US military history, 20th Century British literature, and, uncomfortably close to home, Canadian art and its institutions.

Life of a Craphead (aka Amy Lam and Jon McCurley) position their work cautiously in relation to comedy. With backgrounds in performance, theatre, and writing, they pull off sharply critical work with sensitivity, wisdom, and the lightest of comedic touches. Punchlines for them are titles, prompts, or starting points for artistic research. The comedian’s imperative to reach audiences is first announced in the exhibition’s winking title taken from Korean-American artist Nam June Paik’s lament: “I am a poor man from a poor country so I have to be entertaining every second.” Aside from this sympathetic dialogue with Paik, most of the show’s interlocutors are targets of criticism.

The installation Ceilings with Clowns illustrates an expression for obstacles to Asian women’s advancement in the workplace. Three contorted clown sculptures are squeezed in between the gallery’s ceiling and a glass and bamboo one. The work responds to comments made by curators at an art fair in a small town in Ontario who felt that the pair’s proposal to make a “bamboo and glass ceiling” was “not that funny.” Lam and McCurley added clowns to satisfy the demand, and a cheeky didactic panel instructing us to stand under the work to “feel what it’s like to be an Asian woman.” A little like Carolee Schneeman’s decision to literally internalize a dismissive review of one of her films in Interior Scroll, the work incorporates the jury’s remarks while setting up a powerful metaphor for the struggles of intersectional feminists.



Life of a Craphead, Making Something Positive out of Chris Cran’s Painting “Self-Portrait with Combat Nymphos of Saigon” (1985), ongoing project, Beautiful Tote Bag (2018), Beautiful Casual Shoes (2019) (photo: Paul Litherland)

Lam and McCurley carry on their irreverent conversation with art-world authority in Making Something Positive out of Chris Cran’s Painting ‘Self-Portrait with Combat Nymphos of Saigon’ (1985). Once again, their play with signs is pointed. A vinyl print of the Canadian painter with a wooden gun and fedora amid half-naked Vietnamese women in a swampy war zone is cut into bits to make the shoes and tote bag on a nearby plinth. It’s hard to not read a connotation of race in the white spaces left by the cut-outs, and in the squeaky clean prêt-à-porter by-products of what McCurley describes as a hurtful painting that is likely the best-known one in Canada of Vietnamese women.

Whereas the above pieces show an impressive fluency with visual signs and a gift for troubling them, the writing in the exhibition ranges from hilarious and well-researched polemics to affecting personal testimony. A copy of British author Graham Greene’s novel about love and war in Vietnam, The Quiet American, languishes in the middle of the gallery with well-worn Post-It notes marking passages where the story’s female character Phuong carries out tasks for American and British men. Large text panels mock the book from across the room. Between little chili pepper icons of the kind seen in restaurant menus, summaries of Greene’s misogyny are interspersed with gorgeous, indignant, and probing writing meant to restore the depth of experience denied to Phuong in the book. Lam here writes as a “sister” to Greene’s silenced character, but also to countless literary and artistic stereotypes of “Oriental” women from Cran’s “combat nymphos” to Flaubert’s “Kuchuk Hanem.”



Life of a Craphead, Find the U.S. Soldier Who Killed Your Grandma (detail) (photo: Paul Litherland)

The exhibition’s masterpiece is surely Find the U.S. Soldier Who Killed Your Grandma, a memoir hung in mostly paired panels of drawings and text across three walls. It follows the pair’s intrepid search in Canada, the US, and Vietnam with clues gathered online, from family, by phone, and in national archives for the soldier who murdered McCurley’s grandmother and served only a few years for the crime. Conceived as an app for the Kitchener-Waterloo arts festival, the initial plan was to find the house of the soldier and take a photo in front of it. But as the search “went sideways,” the duo documented all its twists and turns, its chilling encounters with lawyers, heart-warming episodes involving family, and serendipitous discoveries in the press and in books. The traumatic impact of the story is mediated for readers by illustrations of the many documents, webpages, and social media profiles viewed on screens along the way. In a painstakingly copied page from the US Army daily Stars and Stripes about a “Private Sentenced to 5 Yrs. for Unplanned Murder of Girl,” the very ritual of recording research tools and materials in drawings comes across as therapeutic – a way of pausing mournfully on forgotten injustices of the war in Vietnam.

I’ll leave the conclusion of the story out of this review so as not to spoil it, and end instead with requests for the artists to turn this piece into a book (because I badly want a copy), and for anyone who can make it to Centre Clark to go see this treasure of a show.


Life of a Craphead: Entertaining Every Second continues until April 6.
Centre Clark: http://centreclark.com/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.

I feel nostalgic in Saskatchewan-based artist Amalie Atkins’ where the hour floats. Or it could be that I am being sentimental. Or maybe melodramatic. It’s tough to differentiate between them. Her solo exhibition at the Art Gallery at Evergreen includes large photographs and videos set in infinite prairie landscapes. There is a narrative, but it isn’t stitched in a linear way. Under an endless sky, women on roller skates in uniform red dresses, elderly twins in a soft caress, and a mother and daughter pinning long braided hair onto a clothesline act out a surreal plot that captures both the strange and beautiful of the everyday. This is how the hour – how time – floats for women of the prairie crop vastness in Atkin’s interconnected world.



Amalie Atkins, where the hour floats, 2019, installation view (photo: Rachel Topham)

There are three photographs of a group of Ukrainian dancers. In one, we see them walk up a gravel trail. In the next, they huddle together with each wrapping a flower-patterned scarf around her body. In the final image, red material is draped around the group with only their long braids and flower headpieces peeking out the top. Ukrainian storytelling, costuming, and discipline are wrapped up in these images. I am carried back to a town hall in Yorkton, SK where I performed rhythmic interpretations of inherited Ukrainian dance sentiments and symmetries. This could be the nostalgic part.

Another video is set on Atkin’s family farm. We see the artist’s elderly aunt shelling peas and beginning to layer her sister with mounds of aprons made by their mother. A hut-like sculpture in the centre of the gallery is constructed from the same aprons. There is an absurdity to these visuals, yet also a familiarity. The homesteader generation relied on a strong female presence involved with a particular quotidian flow while the husbands worked the fields. My understanding of women and feminism was shaped in this domestic sphere. And as I stand in front of this video, I recognize my grandmother and aunts’ shared characteristics from my own family’s Saskatchewan farms. I think this is the sentimental part.



Amalie Atkins, where the hour floats, 2019, installation view (photo: Rachel Topham)

Known for its lush landscape, corners of darkness also undulate the Prairies. Each of Atkins’ works have ominous and eerie undertones. These inklings are caught up in the photograph of a woman standing in a snowy blue field wearing a long black dress and large black listening horns. In her witch-like costume she postures towards the sky and tunes into the past and the future. Maybe she holds the secrets to the darker side of Saskatchewan’s whimsical folklore? Is it that only someone from there could truly understand this exhibition? This is probably the melodramatic part.

Eastern European traditions permeate Saskatchewan and impact residents whether they are descendants of this lineage or not. Ukrainian communities in particular animate towns and hamlets throughout the flat rural lands. Two major waves of Ukrainian immigration took place before World War II: the first at the end of the 19th Century and the second just before the Great Depression. A majority were agricultural settlers and these immigrants were forced into a harsh living. Atkins’ exhibition is a fragmented glimpse into the specificities of the visual culture – including nuances that are both historical and traditional – of 1900s Eastern Europe and the Canadian Prairies. Its visceral sensibilities respect the mystical and touch on the rural authenticity of that Prairie soil. Porcelain skies, golden acres, the horizon line. Textured spaciousness and articulated pigments. The surface glow. A swell of warmth enfolds me.

Note: The works in this exhibition have been combined into a series of films that will debut at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon from April 5 to June 2.


Amalie Atkins: where the hour floats continues until April 21.
Art Gallery at Evergreen: https://evergreenculturalcentre.ca/exhibit/
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.

Productive Discomfort at Xpace (presented in partnership with Myseum of Toronto) is the culmination of five workshops that curator and artist facilitator Lauren Cullen led this past fall. She invited seven artists (Susan Blight, Heidi Cho, Kaythi, Seiji, Anne Rucchetto, Jessica Watkin, and James Yeboah) to learn rug-hooking techniques. The workshops took place across the city in various spaces (in bars and coffee shops, on campus). Beyond exploring with technique, each artist was tasked with creating an “unwelcome mat.” This is the idea that first drew me into this exhibition. What if the first thing you encountered when visiting someone’s home was an object that made a different kind of declaration, one that unsettled and reminded you of the discomfort many spaces cause?



Heidi Cho, Recently, 2019, hooked rug (photo: Polina Teif)

All of the rugs on display explore a personal discomfort unique to each artist. Some are hung from the ceiling, others on walls. It is difficult to decide where to begin. A simple, monochromatic, text-based rug draws my attention first. This one is by Heidi Cho, whose interdisciplinary practice typically includes mediums such as silk-screening, animation, and drawing. Her rug explores vulnerabilities from her childhood and adult life, and functions both as an exhortation and questionnaire to herself and the viewer. Are you doing the inner child work? Remember to honour boundaries! Pleasure? Pleasure!



James Yeboah, Sankofa: The Pursuit of Ancestral Memory II, 2019, hooked rug (photo: Polina Teif)

Another rug hangs, almost obstructively, in the foreground of Cho’s. This one is by the emerging Toronto-based painter James Yeboah. In 2017, in his first solo exhibition, his paintings explored Black masculinity and its decolonization by making space for the vulnerability of Black boys and men. For Productive Discomfort his rug foregrounds his relationship to Ghanaian culture, weaving (hooking) the word AKWAABA with Kente cloth into his rug. Akwaaba is the Twi word for “welcome” and, as Yeboah indicates, his rug is made for and with the African diaspora in mind.

Reading through Cullen’s exhibition essay, I am struck by the activities the artists did as a group, the many locations of their workshops, and their collaboration. The curator writes of field trips and discussions that will make you want to start your own rug-hooking community club, but, most importantly, it will remind you of the importance of surrounding yourself with people who make you feel welcome.


Productive Discomfort continues until March 30.
Xpace Cultural Centre: http://www.xpace.info/
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.

Fingers laced together, my hands form a basket – a catchment – through which rain might weave and collect. To offer the basin of a hand freely, its contents extended towards another, is to give a gift. The grace apparent in Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal’s Mekinawewin, to give a gift is rooted in this circular gesture of exchange. It is an invitation into relationship and an introduction into the deep humility of belonging. Born in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, Cardinal has resided in Mohkínstsis (Calgary) for seven years. Embodied expressions of territory acknowledgment echo profoundly throughout the artist’s personal conduct and creative practice. Tracing her ancestral heritage back to both the Saddle Lake Cree Nation and the Ukrainian settler communities of Saskatchewan, Cardinal approached this generative project through a series of process-based workshops and a recent exhibition at the Untitled Art Society with the gentle deference of a guest on Treaty 7.



Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal, Mekinawewin, to give a gift, 2019 (courtesy: artist and Untitled Art Society; photo: Katy Whitt)

Emerging from time spent in discussion with Elders, Knowledge Holders, and members of the tribal nations of Treaties 6, 7 and 8, as well as members of the Métis Nation of Alberta, Cardinal’s exhibition presents a powerful and incisive view of this land and its histories dating from pre-contact through to the present. To give a gift is the result of several weeks effort shared among community groups sitting in kinship and acknowledgment of the wisdom and grief of generations. A timeline foregrounding an Indigenous history of Alberta materializes across rough sheets of paper shaped by these many hands – as much a result of stories told aloud as of the mixture of water and botanical pulp.

The coherence of paper is fragile; the skill of making it, a gift to be taught. With Mekinawewin, Cardinal’s motivations transcend the conveyance of purely historical or skill-based ways of knowing. A uniquely syncretic blend of papercraft and Indigenous epistemology advances a view of the sovereignty of nations existing in Alberta, having perpetually been excluded from the Eurocentric narratives which dominate it. For many this exhibition presents the gift of seeing something anew.


Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal: Mekinawewin, to give a gift was on display from January 12 to March 23.
Untitled Art Society: http://www.uascalgary.org/
The gallery is not accessible.


Jenna Swift is an independent writer and artist based in Calgary. Her past honours include a curatorial research internship at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in 2011 and the Canadian Art Foundation’s Writing Prize in 2013. She joined an illustrious cadre of peers as part the Critical Art Writing Ensemble during residencies organized by the Banff International Institute of Curatorial Inquiry in 2016 and 2018.

Everything is at once familiar and strange in Morgan Melenka’s MFA thesis exhibition delaminate. She has reproduced architectural ornamentation and flourishes such as fountains, arches, and bollards – the kind you find in every mall, airport, and town square – inside the Anna Leonowens Gallery, but here these common, everyday tropes of public architecture are recreated in a way that almost purely deals with surface and illusion. The result is an odd and humorous discordance with the concrete reality of the original forms. An archway on wheels is made of paper, not stone. A low mirrored table with a perfectly reflective chrome ball on its center dominates and mirrors the room, inviting us to reflect on its construction and illusive function. At either end are two large bollards or fence posts made with printed images of concrete on paper. They are curiously soft and unimposing compared to the cold hard originals. As with all the work in this show, these forms are created using improvised construction or printed material to mimic the surface of the originals. Oddly, it is in this cheap imitation that similarities between the original and the fake are strongest.



Morgan Melenka, delaminate, 2019, installation view

The key to understanding this exhibition might be in the title: delaminate. Laminates are very common building materials made in layers (like plywood) and the final layer is often a cheap material printed with the pattern and texture of something expensive (like hardwood or marble) to give the end product the look of something costly at a cheap price. The illusion is given away when the layers are peeled back, which is exactly what Melenka has done here. She has “delaminated” and exposed the inherent fakeness of most modern building materials used in our transient, quickly built, ephemeral public spaces. The way she has constructed these pieces shows us the ridiculous facade and the insincere, generic, ubiquitous, and nonspecific nature of architectural ornamentation in public and commercial spaces. It leads one to worry that a similarly disingenuous veneer might cover all aspects of modern North American life.


Morgan Melenka: delaminate continues until March 30.
The Anna Leonowens Gallery: http://theanna.nscad.ca/
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.