Artist Sarah Cullen (ON) reflects on MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project, a residency and network for artist-parents and their children, designed to question dominant ideas about care work.
Contemporary art
“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.”
“While audio and video loop, and motifs around kinship, healing, music, and the rhythms of life recur across his practice, Ukaigwe’s work is anything but repetitive. […] Ukaigwe examines complex social structures through an empathetic lens that is both insatiably curious and persistently community-minded. Ukaigwe’s practice uplifts those around him while also sharing an intimate piece of himself.”
“Sheikh’s work reappropriates the aerial photograph by orienting his series spatially and cartographically. His photographs contribute to a four-dimensional understanding of the land and the struggle it holds by both situating his works temporally and documenting history as it is made visible on the land itself.”
“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.”
“As we play and grow, we may conclude that distinguishing between 2D, 3D, and virtual art forms is non-essential. Inside and outside my studio, the ever-shifting conversation between painting and visual culture unfolds.”
Purdah is a term that encapsulates the concept and practice of veiling and voluntary seclusion from society. The word “Purdah,” derived from Farsi, can also have the literal meaning of “curtains.” “Purdah: Veiled Realities” is a multimedia project that explores this concept through a personal journey, inspired by the rich cultural and feminist lineage of my Islamic heritage, where women in my ancestry have voluntarily embraced various forms of Purdah, such as the hijab, Balochi chadar, niqab, and burqa…
“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?”