Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2020 i C Magazine

Heading to On Venus, Patrick Staff’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery, I crossed Hyde Park on foot. Rain poured from an open, sunlit sky. A real rainbow arched over Winter Wonderland, the holiday-themed amusement park that occupies the royal lands over December, where empty rollercoasters rattled along and strains of Frank Sinatra drifted across the grass, serenading no one. Birds swarmed overhead; the river teemed with animal life; and I entered the Serpentine via automatic doors that may as well have been an airlock, sealing off the arid, burning hostility of On Venus from the wet and fertile Earth. Staff had transformed the ordinarily picturesque building with a number of architectural interventions that made up the site-specific work Acid Rain (2019)—first, transparent coloured panels arranged over the building’s generous…

Things—whether extracted, manufactured or discarded—are a defining part of modern life. They are also a defining problem for modern art, one which Katie Bethune-Leamen’s most recent show at Susan Hobbs Gallery addresses with generous helpings of drollery, pleasure and play. Her approach is exemplified by her cornucopian list of works, in which the exhibition’s series of formally similar porcelain, bronze and mother-of-pearl sculptures are titled with reference to an evocative array of objects—an Aztec knife, a teething clamp, a honeydew Melona bar—as well as to their real or imagined relationships with human subjects, as in the group of 2019 works collectively titled Sculptures people might want to be friends with or put in their butts. As an artist, Bethune-Leamen uses her impressions of things—what they look like, how they feel,…

The first time I learned about linguistic empathy—the practice of listening to someone else in the absence of a shared language—I was attending Winnipegbased artist Hassaan Ashraf’s presentation at the 2018 Conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada, held at the University of Waterloo, and Ashok Mathur was reflecting. Ashraf was sharing his recent body of work, Saadi Saqafat (Our Culture), in which he produced Urdu transliterations of English texts addressing epistemic and systemic violence, in the attempt to illustrate the paradox of experiencing racism in the settler colonial state of Canada, while being complicit in it. From where I stood, I saw in this work a slow cancellation of both English and Urdu readers and everyone else as aimless recruits in the decolonial project. However, Mathur articulated a…

With arms crossed, a Métis curator contemplates Kent Monkman’s The Scream (2017) at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The history painting dramatizes Canada’s seizure of First Nations, Inuit and Métis children for incarceration and assimilation in church-run Indian Residential Schools. The tragedy roils in a sunlit yard between a modest rural house and the viewer. Two black-cassocked priests, a pair of wimpled nuns and seven men in scarlet tunics swarm a reserve to separate 10 children from their families, homes, language, spirituality, culture and dignity. One of the Mounties is armed with a rifle. Another, supervising from the porch, gestures to a trio of fleeing teens, but his comrades are preoccupied with easier game, smaller kids who variously run, buck or are paralyzed by terror. A bride of Christ takes possession…

How can we think about place more expansively, and against behaviours like imposition, dispossession and extraction? The guiding question that curators Candice Hopkins and Tairone Bastien posed in response resonated throughout the Toronto Biennial of Art’s 72-day inaugural exhibition: “What does it mean to be in relation?” Indigenous, Canadian and transnational artists took up this question in pluralistic ways across the multi-venue exhibition focused on Lake Ontario’s watershed. Rather than perpetuate an anthropocentric, grid-like understanding of the city, a constellation of sites anchored by the lake spanned westward from Etobicoke Creek, eastward to the Port Lands and all the way north to where Black Creek flows past the Art Gallery of York University. What surfaced in response was an unearthing of knowledges that have been submerged through colonial-capitalist expansion. In…

Post-it notes left by gallery-goers blanket a corner of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s third floor, enclosed by a modular office cubicle. One of them reads in a hesitant pencil scrawl: “I want to be the Ocean.” It’s part of an interactive component of an installation by Lisa Hilli called Sisterhood Lifeline (2018) that makes visible the subtle acts of protest and resistance by First Nations vahine (“women” in Tinata Tuna, the language of the Gunantuna) who have found themselves hemmed in by stultifying Eurocentric corporate work cultures. A series of voice-recorded testimonies and large-scale photographs of vahine in poses of protection and solidarity exceed the boundaries of the cubicle, which by contrast stands as a homogenous container of bodies, identities and ways of being. But what would it mean to…

The Jekyll and Hyde relationship between solitude and loneliness is a known feeling to most. There is Solitude, she who is comfortably alone, and then there is Loneliness, she who is sad because she is alone—distinct but yoked states of being. Recently, however, within this prolonged state of hyperconnectivity—where the opportunity for both physical and psychical aloneness is minimal—it seems that solitude is increasingly mistaken for loneliness, or, if not that, some apathetic intervening feeling. Standing in the empty corridor between the personal, handmade contributions of Anne Bourse and Julian Hou in the two-person exhibition Solitaire at Cassandra Cassandra, I wonder: within this condition of ready connection and constant pseudo-companionship, is solitude something that needs to be practised, manifested, displayed? After all, Solitaire is a game intended for one. It…

The singularity of an event geared specifically towards Black Canadian curators cannot be overstated. The inaugural Black Curators Forum, held October 25–27, 2019, in Toronto, was one of far-too-rare instances congregating Black arts professionals from across Canada, and aimed to foster networking, support, collaboration and mentorship among us. The three-day event included a reception and dinner at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, a day of workshops at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a private viewing of Denyse Thomasos’s paintings at the Olga Korper Gallery, a BIPOC-focused tour of Art Toronto and a talk by scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva. The workshops—which focused on the challenges of institutional access and equity, tools for career progression and strategies to consolidate alliances moving forward—served as a think-tank for peer-to-peer sharing and intergenerational…

The walls of the Nanaimo Art Gallery’s exhibition space were left bare during Krista Belle Stewart’s recent solo show, Truth to Material. The viewer’s attention was drawn instead to the large photographs that completely covered the gallery floor. Printed on vinyl, these images coated the concrete so tightly that many of its minute cracks and indents remained visible up close, evidence of an imperfect foundation below the flat representations on the surface. Two objects, an engraved silver arm band and a decorated deerskin dress, were displayed in glass vitrines. Along with a short video playing in a separate room, these components comprise an exhibition that portrays and explores the vexed relationships surrounding objects of cultural study, attraction and appropriation. Truth to Material documents Stewart’s encounter with a European subculture, known…

My experience with Workman Arts’s annual festival, Rendezvous with Madness (RWM), began at the opening reception. I arrived anxious, on account of anticipation and a generalized anxiety disorder, still shaking with palms sweating from the panic attack I’d experienced on the way over. Upon entering, I stole a nervous glance at my phone to see if my eyes were still puffy from the involuntary tears that had fallen mid-panic. I cringed at the incongruity of hiding evidence of my mental illness while attending the world’s largest, longest-running mad-positive arts festival—and yet, I took a minute to compose myself before joining the crowd. Shirking potential social interaction, I made my way down a quieter hallway. Here, I came across Alison Crouse’s Devastation Portraits (2019) and realized I was exactly where I…