“A cool draft comes through each time a takeout order is picked up and there is always an open table for those who choose to stay. The soup of the day never changes and there is nutmeg in the meat sauce. The unevenly lit sign out front reads The [insert here] House. There is something for everyone.”
Canadian Art
“Kiki is Boult’s realized fantasy. Among other characteristics, she is an unreliable narrator, a heightened version of the artist’s subconscious, and a political fault-finder. Kiki is ultimately someone Boult hasn’t yet resolved and thus, an open canvas to be continuously explored.”
“We are drawn to our source material out of a mutual fascination, appreciation, and morbid curiosity. For both of us, the collages provide a space to simultaneously celebrate and satirize mainstream notions of taste and sophistication. We get to poke fun at the aesthetics of the past but also to pay tribute (albeit in a subversive, gaudy, and often humorous way).”
“In the beforetimes, you would never have worked like this: through two hypothetical fifteen- minute breaks and a lunch, with no concept of overtime, entirely alone. There was time to distract yourself with images—a plentiful supply in a seemingly endless scroll. The work seemed less urgent then; yesterday’s rest was a risk of different proportions.”
“Re-working traditional Islamic art forms and objects by employing a variety of media (ink drawing, painting, printmaking, digital print, laser cutting, and video projection), I attempt to reconsider the attachment of divineness and depth in art making. I want to highlight how the meticulous process of creating art—once celebrated in ancient Persia as a symbol of beauty, precision, and spirituality—has become obscured in today’s art world.”
“Labour is a well-explored topic in contemporary art—it is the subject of annual festivals, the dedicated focus of art centres, and the premise of exhibitions, performances, and documentary projects. But it is also a tricky topic. […] Increasingly, artists who deal with representing labour also have to navigate the dematerialization of work, and find ways to bring the often-invisible aspects of contemporary labour (from technology to resource exploitation to gendered and racialized work) out into the light.”
“Frei Njootli’s works become sites of contact for ongoing confrontations: friction between the abstract and concrete, Indigenous ways of being and settler-colonial power structures, and demonization and romanticization of Indigenous bodies.”
“Making art, reflecting, means caring more than is normally necessary while also ignoring more than is normally necessary. It means parsing through the constant arrival and disappearance of images and information, often without warning or context. It means we must decide to be calloused or catalysed.”
“We don’t know what we’re making until we make it. When I shared my poem with Christine Fellows and Chantel Mierau, two brilliant artists I was over the moon to collaborate with, the page dissolved and burst open all at once.”
“To look at the surface of things is not enough: engaging with the objects meticulously crafted by Jennifer Laflamme, the Toronto-based artist otherwise known as Mifi Mifi, is a necessarily sensuous, embodied act, an invitation to touch the surface of an object in order to be pulled directly into its intricate world.”
“How does the surface shape engage with the material world? How do some surfaces come to be considered permanent while others permeable? How does the idea of a surface translate to the digital realm? How did the surface become understood as a metaphor for a (lack of) profundity of knowledge? How is the surface implicated in the status of the image itself, as a support or as a medium?”