From the Archives: This is an online republishing of the original article, first published in the Fall 2012 issue of BlackFlash Magazine (29.1).
BlackFlash Magazine
BlackFlash Magazine’s annual fundraiser Vampire Beat is back! This years event will be hosted in the PAVED / AKA event space with additional locations generously sponsored by Village Guitar and The Underground Cafe right next door!
Figures falling apart into pixelated existence.
Broken down.
Disintegrated.
Ed Spence and Dana Claxton embrace this technological way of digesting or reading, absorbing or even understanding the information held within images. Divided from their original context, in a way, images reverted to analog form illustrate more of a division than a unification of knowledge.
Who are Sarah Anne Johnson’s images for? When Winnipeg photographer Sarah Anne Johnson’s most recent Toronto exhibition, “Wonderlust,” opened in the spring of 2014, she stated that her goal was to “explore the internal world of sexual intimacy. To show what it looks and feels like.” Johnson promised an exhibition of something private—personal, vulnerable, risky—an ambitious attempt to transmit a sense of this tenderness through the media of the photograph.
Isiah Medina is a moving image artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, whose movies poetically address the politics of everyday life. Medina defines his place within a Godardian tradition by engaging politically with mediated images and communication. His diaristic movies document his relationships with friends and family and address issues of violence, love, camaraderie, and play.
“Untitled (new visions)” curated by executive director Tarin Hughes, is the second collaboration between artists Barbara Hobot and Maggie Groat. Their objects in the AKA exhibition space are generally small-scale works, brightly colored in rainbow or natural hues.
“La longue nuit de Mégantic” is not merely the culmination of a year of travels to grieving Lac-Mégantic presenting the breadth of the loss, but also the latest installment of a serial exploring how societies overcome troubled pasts.
![Jackson 2bears, Mythologies of an [Un]dead Indian, 2013, video still. Reproduction courtesy the artist and the Ryerson Image Centre.](https://i0.wp.com/blackflash.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/bf_31_1_2bears.jpg?fit=997%2C376&ssl=1)
The critical approach in recent years to categorize contemporary Indigenous art and artists is of principle concern here; there is a danger of conflating aesthetic, cultural, and individual autonomy under the banner of partisanship. It seems to me, at least, that there is an underlying danger that when too many lines are drawn in the sand, there becomes no more room left to manoeuvre.