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.
photography
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?
“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.”
“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.”
“Emerging first from intuition, then developed along with and through extensive research, much of Clare’s work interrogates the gaze and body politic. Ahead of her solo exhibition at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon in November 2025, I spoke to Clare about her process and impetus to create; her work, which has traced a relief of feminist histories; and her interest in the gendered experience of perception and being perceived.”
“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.”
A chance encounter at a thrift store sparked artist Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s (QC) project ‘Shirleys’. Inspired by vintage Kodak cards used to calibrate colour and skin tone, Ortiz-Apuy challenges the illusion of neutrality in lens-based technology.
“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.”
“Writing about art has become a way for me to explore my own identity and cultural heritage, to engage with complex ideas about representation, history, and creativity. […] Art has become a mirror, reflecting not just the world around me, but also my internal landscape—my memories, emotions, and thoughts.”
“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.”
“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.”