Yaniya Lee advocates for a critical approach grounded in material practice. Drawing on her recent work with textile artists in Edmonton, Lee makes a case for criticism that attends to how black artists work, focusing on their materials, methods, and processes, while calling for more diverse voices to engage with these practices.
Canadian Art
The screenshot interrupts the flow, capturing a fleeting thought within the machinery of creation. It is a time stamp, a photograph, or an idea jotted down in a notebook. The act of capturing a thought gives a fleeting moment a platform to become something.
“An Introverted dot Net is dreaming in bed: underground, on the earth, with the body, in another pocket of time—unearthing, digging in, digging deeper, soft resting—we are horizontalvertical with bodyawake, earsawake, tasteawake, smellawake, voiceawake, eyesawake, wideawake!”
“Le Grande’s video piece projected Alberta’s Lake Wabasca on the wall behind her as she danced with free-flowing and fluid gestures, her satin fringe glistening against the backdrop of the sky. In a night that felt like a fever dream, she shape-shifted from a bird to a mermaid to an early 2000s pop star. Months later, we spoke at length about her generational healing, language reclamation, and creative aspirations.”
“As a member of the Guyanese diaspora living in Canada, I hold a collection of stories from many storytellers in a web of communities that, though geographically separated, are bound together by acts of resistance as we define our own methods of documentation and preservation. The following project brings together images from four series shaped by this exploration.”
“Watt’s models and props suggest that queerness is not confined to a location. Instead, it is everywhere waiting to be discovered and activated in the places we expect it to be as much as the places we choose it to be. The pain, loss, love, and desire that flow through nightclubs and bath houses can be just as potent in a laundromat or pool.”
“The Emma Lake Workshops have a loaded history, and many prairie artists are ready to lay that chapter to rest. […] My curiosity was piqued, so I invited Nancy to sit down to demystify the enduring legacy of Emma Lake and how it continues to creep into her art practice.”
“The way these artists leave traces of our culture in their work continues to shape the ways I understand our histories, our present, and our futures. […] 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.”
“Studies have shown that each time you remember a past event, new neural connections are made that will change how you recall it next time. We remember our memories, which become copies of copies. This accumulation, where nothing is fixed among the flood of information, and any attempt to hold on mutates the very thing we try to grasp, finds form in Eckert’s work.”
“PPE (rituals) is a browser-based iteration of the speculative virtual world Plants Properties Equipment.”
“To know where we are going, we must first remember where we have been. This work is a way of addressing the silence and shame surrounding the experiences of violence of those close to me, of speaking out where they felt they couldn’t, and picking up on the traces of what was left unsaid.”