Kara Uzelman’s recent work has led me to accept an uncanny premise: objects hold secrets.
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Christine Negus is a visual artist from London, Ontario whose work is at once strange, jarring, humorous, and intense.
For as long as I can remember, my parents called me Coco. My middle name is Colette, after my late grandmother, and maybe the diminutive came from there. Years after, my friends started calling me Coco as well, and the nickname just stuck. I have never used it as a pseudonym in my work, but maybe one day if I do something totally crazy!*
Wendy Red Star and I have only met once in real life.
I came to know Wendy Red Star initially through her social media presence. Her Instagram feed is a collection of historical photographs of Crow life, documentation of her process with materials from Crow and powwow culture (elk teeth, Pendleton blankets, family beadwork), #forestbath walks she takes with her small dog Jasper in Oregon backcountry, documentation of her dresses, prints and photographs in museums and performances sometimes accompanied by her daughter, Beatrice.
In the past half-century of Canadian avant-garde cinema, the nation’s filmmakers have often used the camera apparatus and its paraphernalia as tools for visual construction. At a time when avantgarde cinema was elsewhere developing an overtly romantic sense of the eye of the operator, Canadian artists such as Michael Snow and David Rimmer were using the same tools to explore uncharted territories, in an adventure of perception built upon the mechanistic properties of the camera.
Cyprien Gaillard’s most recent 3D video installation Nightlife (2015) is a riveting visual and auditory experience. Moved by gusts of wind, the elongated branches of Hollywood Juniper trees sway in slow motion, dancing ecstatically as though rejoicing in their emergence.
According to @ArtHouseTrump, Wavelengths—the typically excellent experimental programs at the Toronto International Film Festival, were a mess this year. “TIFF couldn’t even get the latest Dorsky films! Pathetic! Make Wavelengths Great Again!”
Begin to Google “are we breathing …” and the most popular search finishes the statement with “the same air as Jesus.” Shared realities, coexistence, and collapsed time and history are some of the primary, existential inquiries of humankind. There’s an affirmation and fragility in knowing that we share our physical spaces, even on a molecular level, with people and events both past and present. Curator Ana Paula Cohen considers Yael Bartana’s practice through theoretical notions of cohabitation, aptly outlining Bartana’s non-linear and slippery depictions of time, space and the state of being.
The act of representation is a process of mediation, of formalizing ideological frameworks, of exercising power dynamics, and of producing relationships between subjects and objects. An apparatus for self-imaging, representation both permits and precludes the naming and seeing of ourselves and others in the public realm, often resulting in dissonance, differentiation and exclusion.
Leslie Supnet began creating animated films in 2008. Although her films have screened at festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival and Oberhausen, she is particularly fond of the camaraderie offered at artist-run spaces and micro-cinemas. After studying in Toronto, she has recently returned to her hometown of Winnipeg, a place that has been pivotal in the formation and expansion of her practice.
In the more than forty years since the artist and theorist Lucy Lippard announced the dematerialization of the art, it has become apparent, particularly to Lippard herself, that this proclamation may have been premature.