In the conversation titled “On Being a Nehiyaw Alien,” writer and curator Nawang Tsomo Kinkar and artist Cheynne Rain LeGrande discuss why LeGrande embraces this label, which captures the blend of terrestrial rootedness and celestial imagination in their work. Their exchange explores how family, language, style, and Fleetwood Mac come together within LeGrande’s unique interdisciplinary practice.
Articles
Photographer and filmmaker Farihah Shah draws on family histories to create visual “portals” between Guyana and Canada. Her artistic project, “Always About Land,” evokes a diasporic language that collapses time and space, illuminating how the enduring legacies of colonialism and resource extraction have shaped both locations.
In “The Queer is in the Details,” writer Christopher Lacroix profiles artist Douglas Watt, who creates miniaturized renderings of spaces central to Vancouver’s queer community. Lacroix examines how Watt’s reconstructions are shaped by equal parts camp and care, prioritizing a collective emotional ambience over strict architectural accuracy.
Tracing her family’s migration from Ukraine to the Canadian prairies and her own journey from Saskatchewan to Glasgow via Montreal, Dmyterko reflects on how these generational movements are captured in the symbolic motifs of her vibrant paintings.
Writer and scholar Greg J. Smith speaks with media artist Darsha Hewitt about how domestic life is shaped by contemporary technologies and what happens when those technologies become obsolete.
Translucent, overlapping forms echo architectural drawings, but their fragile outlines pulse with haunting beauty, charting the emotional landscape we associate with the idea of home.
Several of the works in this issue consider how the domestic is shaped not only by private life but also by global currents, family histories, and consumer goods, nudging at the conditions that shape how we live, where we live, and with whom we choose to share our lives.
In Emma Beyond Myth, a lively exchange between Laura St. Pierre and painter Nancy Lowry, the two artists revisit their time at the storied Emma Lake workshops. Trading hot takes with vibrant chemistry, they reflect on how those experiences have resurfaced as of late in Nancy’s recent exhibition Colour In Place at Remai Modern.
A feature titled Embodying Our Ancestors by Jennifer Smith looks to the work of three contemporary Métis artists: Robyn Adams, Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher, and Rhayne Vermette. What binds these practices together in Smith’s essay is not any obvious aesthetic likeness but rather an expansion of what Métis art can be, as Smith writes: “None of them are looking to create a clean-cut narrative of Métis culture, and–even better perhaps—they question if there really is one. But they are looking to our future while honouring those who came before us.”
Rose Bouthillier’s profile of Hazel Eckert, Never destroyed, or created, is punctuated with quotes from readings selected by the artist. This citational structure places Eckert’s enigmatic work in conversation with poets and theorists who, like her, explore how the circulation of images inscribes itself onto their very surface, and how the proliferation of digital imagery has reshaped our interior landscape.
A pensive undercurrent runs through Clare Samuel’s work, and it carries into her interview To Behold and To Appear, with writer Lodoe Laura. Their conversation moves through Samuel’s portraiture practice across film and photography, delving into the ethics of the gaze and the quiet attunement that gives her work its distinctive, contemplative power.