Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021/22 i C Magazine

On February 18, 2021, a rover named Perseverance landed on Mars. Weeks later, NASA announced they had named the landing site after the late Octavia E. Butler, deeming her name a “perfect fit” for the mission since her protagonists “embody overcoming challenges.”1 Known for her contribution to Afrofuturism, Butler persistently addressed themes of racism, climate crisis, and capitalist exploitation of the working class in her books, starting in the ’70s, when science fiction largely shied away from social analysis of power. In the era of performative wokeness, NASA has appropriated Butler’s name to symbolically designate US territory on Mars, under the pretence of objective scientific interests. What can we make of this irony? Made possible directly through the Cold War, the US space program has always been endowed with a…

The myth of infrastructure’s purposeful invisibility is persistent. Google Maps and Google Earth selectively determine what is visible online, and corporate landscaping constructs natural sightlines to hide infrastructures of extraction, transportation, and waste from view. Still, it’s very possible to see where our garbage piles up, to understand where our energy comes from, and to know the toxic supply chains that produce our devices. Will Kwan’s “Terra Economicus” confronts this terrain through a selection of installations and photographs spanning the past decade. The work builds an unexpected but direct relationship between the politics of class and colonization in India, Canada, and Hong Kong through integrated critiques of the “wellness” movement, environmental racism, and the habits of a leisure class who retreat from polluted, hot cities to find solace in mountaintops…

In a tangle of poles supporting a scaffold of plywood slabs spiralling toward the gallery ceiling above my head, I spot a red string. Stretched from pole to pole, it carves a zigzagging path through the thicket of metal, delivering me into a circular opening. This is my experience of artist Carmen Papalia’s Provisional Structures 1 (2020) a towering construction of wood and metal scaffolding, sandbags, mirrors, and string. Papalia has reimagined an accessibility ramp as an armature with an enormous black speaker dome shrouding the circular seating area at its heart. The installation composes one part of the larger exhibition “Provisional Structures” curated by Nicolle Nugent featuring the work of Carmen Papalia in collaboration with Vo Vo and jes sachse. The MacKenzie has dedicated its largest gallery space to…

Jeanette Johns walks us over to the handloom in her studio at the Fonderie Darling, where for the past 15 months she has taught herself how to weave with the help of guidebooks, online tutorials, and local artisans. The horizontal wooden device sits adjacent to a large window, and we contemplate its arcane beauty under the sunrays in the sweltering summer heat as Johns explains her process in a short video produced by the contemporary art centre. The Montreal-based artist has applied her meticulous understanding of printmaking to pattern making with cloth and tapestry. “Of things as they happen to be,” her solo exhibition in the small gallery of the Fonderie Darling, displays the products of her research. Six woven pieces and one stamped inkon-paper series of prints hang across…

Whatever the nomenclature, one fact is ubiquitous: the personal data underworld “wants your bloodstream and your bed, your breakfast conversation, your commute, your run, your refrigerator, your parking space, your living room, your pancreas”1 to fuel new economies of extraction, hidden from public knowledge, almost unmappable. Individuals are constantly traced, tracked, and analyzed by the platforms they use, masked by the interface; concepts such as Shoshana Zuboff’s “shadow text”2 on hidden surveillance exploitation, Frank Pasquale’s “black box society”3 on the concealed financialization of society, and Benjamin H. Bratton’s “black stack”4 on new modes of governance and political realities formed through the digital, only theoretically outline the opacity of Big Tech’s operations. These concepts take form in Vladan Joler’s digital counter-map, New Extractivism (2020). Engaging with it implores the user to…

“Jan Wade: Soul Power” at the Vancouver Art Gallery displays mixed media, textiles, and sculptural works from the last 30 years of Jan Wade’s practice, as well as new pieces made for this exhibition. There are installation pieces that span many years, like Breathe (c. 2004–2020), a colourful abstract composition of embroidery on linen that runs the walls of an entire room. The scale of Breathe mirrors its durational process, each stitch indexing the movement of Wade’s hands over many years. Movement is also embedded in the work through the influence of various material cultures. The chain stitch Wade learned from her mother resonates with housetop and bricklayer patterns in Black quilting traditions of Gee’s Bend in the southern United States. The durational nature of Breathe and other works like…

As long ago as 1931, Polish-born American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase “the map is not the territory.”1 Inherent in this famous negation is a logic of representation that insists on the original in assessing the worth and legibility of the reproduction. As we know, the map is an authoritative record keeper, a coded, colonial tool to pursue a rational, scientific understanding of the natural and social world; Korzybski’s truism epitomizes the linear, functional perspective by which maps guide the user to a specific destination—or orientation. Reading a map requires navigating signs and symbols and thus depends on the endless repetition of norms and conventions, such as “beginning” and “end,” “real” and “copy,” “true” or “false,” “map” and “territory.” In contrast to this reading method, Queering the…

“Home, for much of the Arctic year, is a dazzling layer—equally harsh and fragile—that exists between stars and ice.” I wrote a version of this sentence last year for a text on Maureen Gruben’s then newly completed Aidainnaqduanni (2020), a documented sculptural installation on the frozen Beaufort Sea featuring polar bear rugs. The work, which is one of many we discuss below, offers a concise glimpse into a beautiful specificity of place. This is a perspective I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand, having been welcomed to Maureen’s home in Tuktoyaktuk in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the western Arctic regularly since 2016 after meeting on a ferry crossing from Tsawwassen to W̱ SÁNEĆ. It has been by far the richest art-writing experience of my life to write not about…

The subtitle for the group exhibition “Overburden” reads as “Geology, Extraction, and Metamorphosis in a Chaotic Age.” Yet, rather than descend into apathy and dread, the show retains a sense of hopefulness and social responsibility. Curated by Genevieve Robertson and Maggie Shirley, the exhibition was shown at the Oxygen Art Centre and the Kootenay Gallery of Art, bringing together 11 artists who question settler-colonial and capitalist perceptions of land as a source from which to profit. The title, “Overburden,” cites the word’s geological definition: the waste rock and soil that lies above an ore or mineral body. To challenge capitalist understandings of waste, many of the works featured in “Overburden” look for expansive meanings found in geologic layers. In What We Left Behind (2019), Gabriela Escobar Ari draws attention to…

Projected onto screens in a large window at the back of Museum London, Mohawk filmmaker and artist Shelley Niro’s exhibition “Thinking Of You” quietly speaks. The work is only presented at night, meaning those who want to view it must stand outside in the August heat, the quiet sounds of Deshkan Ziibi (Anishinaabemowin for “Antler River”) or the Thames River audible in the background. I assume that for most of the night there are few, if any, people to experience the project. Regardless, it keeps addressing all beings, including the river that is a prominent part of the landscape around the museum. Standing in this context, I wait for the sun to set, for the darkness, so that I can see the work more clearly. Two large screens hang in…

C Magazine would like to congratulate Sasha Cordingley on winning the 2021 C New Critics Award, and Kalina Nedelcheva on being named the runner-up. Now in its 12th consecutive year, this program gives C Magazine the opportunity to identify, support, and promote the work of promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. C sincerely thanks all those who applied, as well as the jurors of this year’s award: Miriam Jordan-Haladyn, Sophie Le-Phat Ho, and Maya Wilson-Sanchez. Measures were taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remained unknown to adjudicators. In the second half of 2020 I started a job at a global home furnishing store fulfilling people’s online orders. As I placed rice-paper lampshades and fake sheepskin carpets into my basket, another worker—a white, middle-aged man—came up to…