Writers club - Essays

 

Resistance Within the Resistance   February 27, 2020

Josh Marchesini

 

 

Dirty Play    November 13, 2019

Ariane Fairlie Sarah Mihara Creagen

What do botany, BDSM, and medical examinations have in common? On the surface, you would be forgiven for assuming nothing, but Sarah Mihara Creagen artfully threads an unlikely line of investigation through all three, engaging the various tools and apparatuses used by each group as starting points to discuss sex and sexuality, care, health, and consent. Creagen’s artwork explores these themes as they relate to her experiences with IBS, and her identity as a queer, white-passing cis woman with mixed-race Japanese ... {read more}

 

 

Creation is a Survival Mechanism   May 10, 2019

Dayna Danger Stacy Lee ReCollection Kahnawake Moe Clark Beric Manywounds Lindsay Nixon Adrienne Huard

 

by Adrienne Huard and Lindsay Nixon

 

Staggering conversations of our near-ending futures due to global warming circulate through mass media, as hipster arts folx use buzz words such as “Anthropocene,” which emerges into the daily vernacular. However, by counteracting the colonial-centric notion of the “Anthropocene,” and placing it in apocalyptic frameworks is necessary to understanding the level of eradication that the western modern world has ... {read more}

 

 

Out-of-Placeness and Self-Determination: The Past as a Resource in Mémoires & Portraits   March 23, 2019 to April 21, 2019

Candace Mooers

by Candace Mooers

“How precious it is to have memory,” writes bell hooks in Belonging: A Culture of Place. We know ourselves through the art and acts of remembering. Through various practices, we may revisit the past—people and places—in order to revise and renew our commitment to the present, to imagine a future where we can feel authentically rooted and connected, like we belong 1.

Artists Logan MacDonald, Kama La Mackerel, Pascha ... {read more}

 

 

All Land is Sacred   March 01, 2019 to March 10, 2019

Maria Antonia Trujillo

by Maria Antonia Trujillo

 

In the show SITUER / SITUATE artists were asked to reflect on a sense of place. Place both as a definable physical area and an action we take. Loss of place is common today with globalization, but also forced migration and the continued destruction of the natural environment propelled by corporate greed; continually displacing campesinos and Indigenous peoples globally.

I am here, in the relative safety of the city ... {read more}

 

 

Little Egypt: Nothing But a Button and a Bow [wo wo!]   January 23, 2019 to February 24, 2019

Sarah Nesbitt

by Sarah Nesbitt

“And here she comes, the little lady that does the dance to the Pyramids. The one, the only, little Egypt! There she is folks! She walks, she talks, she crawls upon her belly like a reptile; watch it now! That’s enough honey, don’t give away too much. You there young man, step right up, get yourself a ticket. There you go, you just bought yourself a trip to paradise. Who’s next?”

In the 1964 music video for “Little Egypt” Elvis buys a ticket to see Little ... {read more}

 

 

Virtual Gaze   November 03, 2018 to December 02, 2018

Tina Lam

by Tina Lam

As digital technologies sweep across the globe, it may be believed that a virtual space will open the way towards greater fluidity of expression for historically oppressed and marginalized people in a too often patriarchal and white dominated society. But do social media and virtual reality truly succeed as modes to seek freedom and gain a new voice for those who feel oppressed? Perhaps the hegemony of the white male extends even into the virtual world, controlling, directing, and constricting the ... {read more}

 

 

Keeping Painting Contemporary: Inserting New Perspectives in an "Old" Medium    September 14, 2018 to October 14, 2018

Ariane Fairlie

by Ariane Fairlie

In the mid-17th century the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture founded by the [French] King’s painters and sculptors established a genre hierarchy, all dominated by painting. In 2015, after the investiture of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his Minister of Canadian Heritage Mélanie Joly made “the digital” her hobbyhorse: the dissemination of Canadian content on digital platforms, the development of the digital arts industry. Compelled by evolution and progress, how can ... {read more}

 

 

World Cup!   May 18, 2018 to June 17, 2018

Amber Berson

by Amber Berson

The idea for this program has been kicking around for a while (pun most definitely intended). I’ve long been fascinated with the notion of sports fandom. What about watching sports makes people go a little crazy, get rowdy and, more importantly, become patriotic? I’ve seen the most passionate anti-border activist develop nationalistic preferences during the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, even while criticizing the fact these games contribute to structural imbalances at all levels of society, that they ... {read more}

 

 

Artist Publishing as Archival Practice: Ho Tam's Cover to Cover   February 09, 2018 to March 11, 2018

Candace Mooers

by Candace Mooers.

Self-publishing is about taking up space. It's about not asking permission from a committee of jurors or peer-reviewers or editors. It's about autonomy; it stems from wanting to engage with the world on one's own terms. Its ‘do-it-yourselfness’ is rooted in self-determination, and in not waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Ho Tam returns to articule, since his last show at the gallery in 1995, with an exhibition that focuses on his publishing practice. Combining photographs, ... {read more}

 

 

Documents as monuments: the transformative Indigenous temporalities of hochelaga rock   October 21, 2017 to November 19, 2017

Megan Mericle

“… history, in its traditional form, under¬took to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.” (1)

Tiohtià:ke, the Kanien’kéha/Mohawk word which means “where the people divide” and “broken in two,” describes the ... {read more}

 

 

Even this page is white 1   September 26, 2017

Nima Esmailpour

by Nima Esmailpour

Taken with a neutral facial expression, bullet points follow: Eyes open and clearly visible. Mouth closed, no smiling. How interesting that a passport photo can be a description of an “identity photo” to be captured on a plain white or light-coloured background? What does it mean to a racialized person seeking a status to be reminded that photos must reflect/represent natural skin tones2? What if we notice the delusion of neutrality attributed to the official ... {read more}

 

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