In conversation with Lodoe Laura, artist Annie Macdonell discusses her recent exhibition “The Beyond Within,” which delves into the history of psychedelic therapy. She explores her collaborative films with Maïder Fortuné and the historical ripples that help us read our fractured moment, sustaining an uncynical belief in art even as its institutions falter.
Contemporary art
In a profile of Edmonton-born, Berlin-based artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, writer Lauren Lavery examines how Shaw’s treatment of industrial materials lends insight into our evolving relationship with urban landscapes and technology.
Coming together for the first time in my tenure without a prompt, the following issue nonetheless feels as though it is circling something specific, even if that something is difficult to name.
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.
Each screenshot captures a moment of pause within the flow of making, a small act of noticing amid continuous motion.
How are our identities assembled, and what role do visual, historical, and ideological structures play in who we become? Diallo consistently raises questions that rebuff easy answers.
How do you work alongside a lover while still respecting their fundamental difference and ultimate opacity? How do you come together while also staying apart?
In his novel of the same name, science fiction author William Gibson once described pattern recognition as a “gift and a trap,” which is a generous way of saying we search for meaning even when it may or may not exist.
“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.”