This sculpture by Greg Forrest was traded with Kelly Mark at some point, later assessed by her estate, and was now being gifted to me.¹ She had passed away a few months before, and her death by MAID brought a flurry of press coverage and memorials across my social media feed. Posthumous exhibitions were organized in Toronto, and recently Glow House: Tribute To Kelly Mark re-launched Mark’s ongoing conceptual project—which occupies and illuminates residential homes with synchronized CRT television sets—in cities across Canada, to mark the first anniversary of her death.

I didn’t feel like the person most deserving to receive this Guinness, nor am I the most qualified to write this essay. I knew Kelly briefly, through various projects that I’ll detail in this text. Mark’s body of work has been extensively written about, with recent contributions appearing in Momus and in essays by writers Daniella Sanader, Dave Dyment, and Robin Metcalfe. Having recently returned to Kjipuktuk/Halifax after living in the U.S. for over a decade, I’m feeling the ghosts of my artist-past in parallel to Mark’s history. We were both strongly influenced by our time at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), then supported in early career by regional institutions and in later years by Diaz Contemporary. I’m not trying to make this about me, but rather I want to use these shared touchpoints as a conceptual limit to this essay’s scope.

NSCAD MAFIA

As a young person, I came to Mark’s work (and Kelly’s persona) through various channels. Taking “Intro Sculpture” with Forrest in the late ‘90s, I became familiar with her lore: she had been at NSCAD and involved in the founding of the Khyber (Club and artist-run centre) before leaving Halifax for Toronto in 1995. Of course, NSCAD’s contribution to conceptual art is well-documented, and systems thinking was still running deeply through the pedagogy of Gerald Ferguson and Garry Kennedy at that time.² They gave us instructions on instructions: students were encouraged to develop rule-based frameworks and follow them to absurd ends with dematerialized, distributable, and often labour-intensive works.³ These strategies are employed throughout Mark’s catalogue, and I’ll note the influence that artist-teachers Jan Peacock and Michael Fernandes also must have had on her. Mark’s intuitive, bodily take on performance and her use of video were adopted at NSCAD, and the interdisciplinary methodology that the school encouraged is present across her career trajectory.

Mark’s early successes were in Halifax. She credits early works like 1000 Hemlock Hits (1994), shot in the Khyber’s Turret Room, as “the beginning of the continuation” of what her work would become: idea, repetition, performance.⁴ In the video, two people bash lengths of 6’ x 6’ lumber at one another like jousting knights, and in the resulting sculpture, one battered tie is leaned against the other’s bruised end. “Kelly Mark Works,” curated by Ingrid Jenkner at MSVU Art Gallery in 1995, was Mark’s first major solo exhibition and acquisition into an institutional permanent collection. It included assisted readymades like Knife Collection—an example of her penchant for projects that are ongoing and obsessive (and additionally involve the minor theft of butter knives from restaurants and dinner parties).⁵ Other works in the show, Mended Stool and Split Axes, both employ manual labour in their materials and sculptural action, mending objects that had been broken in order to be repaired. 

The terms Neo-conceptualist or “working class conceptualist” have been used to discuss Mark’s oeuvre. A common joke about conceptual art is that you can describe the work and get most of the way to understanding it. One might recall David Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), or consider the time it took On Kawara to send that vast volume of mail for Postcards: I Got Up (1968-79). Mark’s well-known negotiation for a minimum per-hour wage over the CARFAC solo rate (and the punchline that she would ultimately make more money from the former) is one such example of the idea itself circulating as the work. In both work and in life, Mark took advantage of what curator Helen Molesworth refers to as the “Duchampian rumour,” where the legend of an event travels as far (if not further) than the physical art object or person. However, Mark also knew that description was not always enough; some works demand durational attention in both their making and their reception. Obsessive fixation could be considered a medium of Mark’s, and as a viewer, dedicating one’s attention to it brings us into her world, where Everything is Interesting. 

Evidence points to Jenkner being the first curator to negotiate with Mark on the Minimum Wage deal, as part of bringing “Stupid Heaven” to MSVU in 2008.⁶ I encountered the show then, which drew from the previous decade of Mark’s output. I Really Should… (2002), a single-channel audio piece, compulsively lists 1000 things the artist ought to do, from the daily humdrum of getting a watch strap fixed, to overwhelming financial pressures of filing taxes or paying off student loans, poignant aspirations to keep in touch, and promises to eat better and quit smoking, all delivered in the same matter-of-fact tone. Listening to it, this terrifying spectre of to-dos produced a physical anxiety in my body and confirmed strategies of artmaking I was attracted to. 1 2 3 4 5 (2000), a black-on-white tally-mark-patterned wallpaper, alluded to a prison-cell-style of tracking the days.⁷ As a young artist feeling trapped in the relative isolation of Nova Scotia, I too was counting the days and yearning for some way to escape. 

The banal forcefulness of nothing happening in the video 33 Minute Stare (1996) felt defiantly boring, and boring art was not something that we NSCAD students were supposed to be making any more of!⁸ Mark employs her body or voice, but less as a capital-P “Performance Artist” and more as the readymade of a deadpan actor or set extra. I see her as standing in as (or for) the subject of the work. There’s not much emotion in 33 Minute Stare: “few character traits explicitly featured…no vulnerabilities are exposed, no confessions are made”.⁹ In the 2003 multi-channel installation titled HICCUP, Mark repeats the same choreography during her daily coffee break as a “ballet of the ordinary,” suffusing an artfulness into a ritual that is not encountered as art to someone just passing by. In Staff & Security (2003-ongoing), the artist wears the uniform of an embroidered hat and jacket, offering what Mark claimed was “a false sense of security.” When acting as Staff, she states: “I tend to show up late. I usually leave early… I have issues with authority…I drink on the job…But I’m always working.”¹⁰ In these performances, affect is shielded behind a cloak of invisibility: quotidian activities branded as an art practice, rendered with cool distance and a wry sense of humour. 

OVER DRINKS 

Forrest’s 30 Glasses of Guinness was, in part, inspired by NSCAD’s mingling of students, faculty, gallery folks, and visiting artists socializing over drinks. While drinking culture might be a well-trodden tourist trope that sells Nova Scotia’s colonial history of rumrunners, places like the Khyber (of which Kelly was a founding member) became the bar for a weirdo community, where emerging and established artists hung out together through the nineties and aughts. During that period, in Toronto, Kelly was also known for legendary gatherings at her place on Niagara Street, which I experienced only once. That night, she blasted Wayne Wonder’s hit song No Letting Go, and whenever I hear it, she enters my consciousness like a spirit from the other side. 

The late theorist Mark Fisher helped me understand Derrida’s hauntology as grief for a future promised but not delivered.¹¹ As workers themselves, the majority of artists are economically close to precarity yet subject to the billionaire class whose money shapes speculative real estate and the international art market. Kelly rightly predicted she might lose her downtown Toronto space to CONDOS(!) just as similar gentrifying pressures were being felt in Halifax (and which have only increased dramatically since then). In 2010, responding to the Khyber bar’s closure, arts-funding austerity measures, and artist-studio renovictions around town, curator Stefan Hancherow and I hosted a one-week exhibition and performance titled “The King & I” at Anna Leonowens Gallery. Part group exhibition, part fully operational happy hour, the simulated nightly bar was modeled after local dives, and tended to by Stefan and me. The walls showcased a “décor” of works by artists affiliated with NSCAD to create a DIY haunt, a space to goof off.¹² We featured Mark’s single-channel video Sniff (2002), in which Kelly’s cat Roonie is offered utensils, tools, and other bric-a-brac from around the house. Throughout the unedited 7-minute shot, the cat dutifully remains on their perch, sniffing nearly every item offered, including an open Corona beer. The cat refuses only a few things: money, a drain plug, a Zippo lighter, and Windex, and really goes for the Sweet ‘n Low artificial sweetener packet, an old book, and, in the closing scene, maybe gets a little bit high on a catnip plant. 

Smoking too recurs across Mark’s work, smuggling in her favoured themes of labour, vice, and everyday rituals. In the aforementioned HICCUP, and in Smoke Break (2004), Mark performs loitering. In the latter, taking the smoke break from the job IS the job, a 9-to-5 with union breaks and one-hour lunch. In her later video Smoke Buddies (2017), two unfurling smoke trails silently perform a mesmerizing dance in blue light and portrait ratio. And rather poignantly, Memento Mori (2017) is a bronze edition that depicts a used ashtray at 1:1 scale. This is another example of an artwork that might blend in as “not art” at a glance, stealthily placed in a collector’s home. 

EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

I was hired in 2013 to curate Halifax’s Nocturne Festival: a one-night, Nuit Blanche-type of exhibition. Among my ideas was to invite Kelly to show the Glow House, a work I had heard so much about. She replied:

“I’m kinda interested…
Glow House is not a possibility however (i’m not really into doing it again but more importantly availability of old CRT televisions is rare these days)
But lets talk on the phone, i might have another idea…
I’ll be up all night tonight if you wanna call or early in the morning before i head to bed”

I’m quoting this directly from her email to demonstrate her changing interests, the specificity of her tech requirements (CRT monitors), and her distinctive style: up all night and with limited availability. There’s a refusal to be totally amenable, but still a willingness to talk, offering a promise to be up for something else and using the opportunity to make something new.

In lieu of Glow House, Mark proposed a public spoken-word performance featuring two people reading a script back and forth. The script consisted of a collection of 200 phrases and idioms Kelly had been collecting, each alternating phrase leading with “everything” (spoken by a woman) and “nothing” (a man). Performed by Mark and artist Steve Higgins that October, Everything and Nothing would continue to be performed until 2019, later becoming the basis for 108 Leyton Ave (2014), in which Mark plays both mirrored parts, sitting across from herself at a table, with a drink and a smoke, the time on the clock suspended in the background.

Woman: everything a hero is not
Man: nothing a drink can’t fix
Woman: everything a woman needs
Man: nothing a man won’t do
Woman: everything bad happens for a reason
Man: nothing bad lasts forever

GHOST HOUSE

The original Glow House was shown in 2001 in Winnipeg, curated by the late Cliff Eyland and Les Newman, artists with deep ties to NSCAD and the early Khyber. Made with CRT television sets, it was synchronized by whatever was on TV to achieve a flashing, eerie effect. From outside, the house appears to be gutted, or haunted by the pulsating light. When it was eventually shown in Halifax in 2017, Mark still required those anachronistic CRT monitors, but according to some, she was largely absent from the labour of their procurement and installation, opting instead to be at the casino. The lugging and cabling shall be outsourced to young assistants! This was the kind of “Working Hard, Hardly Working” knife-edge she practiced.¹³ People often discuss her work as work, an expression of labour—and it is. She treated her studio as the factory, clocking in and clocking out, and used her time obsessively to repeat actions like counting grains of salt or rubbing graphite into wood or Letraset onto paper, or drawing until the pen ran out, and thus, her labour is often imbued into the physicality of the thing itself. But she also created avenues to avoid work at all costs: refusing the job, taking the smoke break, pointing toward an overlooked thing, watching too much TV, allowing the absurdity of life to guide the practice.

In 2026, I was asked to participate in the reboot of Glow House and convert my home into the artificially lit installation. Initially, I hesitated, worried that she wasn’t here to oversee it. To do it correctly requires one to source and lug those old monitors and hundreds of feet of coaxial cable. Even if I wanted to, the equipment is no longer easy to find, and analogue broadcasting is obsolete. This piece had begun from a simple observation and execution with materials easily at hand: ubiquitous TV light illuminating domestic spaces via mass-media broadcast could sync an experience across neighbourhoods or time zones and, therefore, could be employed to dramatically light a space. Today, the same effect could be reasonably achieved with any number of configurations of HDMI splitters, projectors, plasma screens, wifi, or even Zoom. Alongside artist Nathan Townes-Anderson and the tribute’s curatorial team, we workshopped using what we could easily acquire. To achieve the titular glow, we streamed CBC coverage of the Olympic Games for optimum flash. That had to be good enough. 

In Robin Metcalfe’s essay written for the occasion, he notes that he kept calling it Ghost House.¹⁴ On the first anniversary of her death, we joined others across the country to create our own ghost location. Was it her piece? Not exactly. It was a memorial gesture, improvised and emotionally accurate, though I don’t know whether Kelly would have liked it. Probably not. Nevertheless, on a cold, windy Saturday night in February, we welcomed visitors inside for drinks and stories. It was relayed that Mark had advised that the best things to broadcast to get the most dramatic flashing effect were Saturday morning cartoons—or pornography. Greg’s glass sat centre stage in the flickering glow of our living room, smiling away.

TICK-TOCK 

In Dave Dyment’s memorial piece written for CBC Arts, he describes a zeitgeist situation where he and Mark were simultaneously working on the same concept: an epic structuralist video of clock faces sourced from found footage, edited into a real-time 24-hour sequence.¹⁵ Rather than compete, they joined forces, only to concede the idea to Christian Marclay’s wildly famous The Clock. It’s a shame that Mark and Dyment’s 10,000 hours of unseen editing became effectively irrelevant just because Marclay, assisted by the literal White Cube and a team of assistants, got there first. Watching Mark’s TV mashup REM (2007) feels similar to experiencing the Hollywood-style cuts of The Clock. Quick edited snippets show men running up and down sets of stairs, through alleyways, in and out of doors, and around endless corners. It is a video labyrinth of movie-magic action: men doing fighting stuff, war stuff, Armageddon stuff. Always men, though. It’s Just One God Damn Thing After Another.¹⁶

Ideas float around like apparitions. The zeitgeist, a collective unconscious. Yet the art world (and capitalism) cling to the myth of the individual genius. Similar ideas arrive contemporaneously, but in a winner-takes-all market, some people are luckier, better resourced, or closer to power. After living in New York for the last ten years, I see more clearly how money and clout are disproportionately allocated to certain artists, while others remain nationally cherished and internationally obscure. I was in New York when Kelly died. The Americans I knew had not heard of her; in the Canadian art scene, there was an outpouring of recognition and grief.

In the era of AI, reels, and TikTok, I don’t want to take boredom for granted. In Mark’s work, we see her stubbornly make more boring art, and we can try to spend more boring time with it. Her embodied presence in her performances has a way of reminding the viewer that they are alive. As I dig through her work, I’m reminded of one reason I’m drawn to look closely at art: its ability to act as a time-travel machine, a portal to a person or time no longer available to us. I’ve honestly felt a bit haunted by Kelly. Maybe it’s the smiling Guinness glass, stained by her cigarette smoke, grinning at me now as I write this. I can’t help but wonder if this object contains traces of Smoke Buddies patinated into the surface. It’s become my Memento Mori. 

You Exist. You Exit. 

POST SCRIPT

Originating with a three-week presentation of Glow House at Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria) curated by Kegan McFadden, Glow House: Tribute to Kelly Mark was presented by Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge), University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), One Night Stand (Winnipeg), Hamilton Artists Inc. (Hamilton), Goodwater Gallery (Toronto), Struts Gallery (Sackville), and residences in Montreal and Halifax. Text by Robin Metcalfe. Tribute was made possible by Anthony Cooper, Dave Dyment, Stefan Hancherow, Sanaa Humayun, Ivan Jurakic, Dean Baldwin Lew, jake moore, Su Ying Strang, Adam Whitford, Collin Zipp, and myself.

This essay would not exist without friend and collaborator Stefan Hancherow, who sent the card along with the Glass of Guinness, and invited me to participate in Glow House: Tribute to Kelly Mark. Thanks to Blair Fornwald for providing access to MSVU Art Gallery’s archival records and to Sarah Pereux at Olga Korper Gallery for providing images. Rumours corroborated by Greg Forrest, Melanie Colosimo, Peter Dykhuis, and by the essays and interviews credited, including Kelly Mark’s indexical website. Gratitude to my husband Nathan Townes-Anderson, who provided co-production of Glow House, documentation, photography, and editorial notes with care.

Kelly Mark (b. 1967, d. 2025) was a conceptual artist who lived and worked in Toronto. She was known for isolating moments of the everyday in ways that were unpretentious and unglamorous but full of warmth, ritual, and wit. Time, duration, measurement, and process are essential focal points in Mark’s multidisciplinary practice. Time’s governance of our reality, especially its undeniable grasp over working-class experiences, is a central concern in her oeuvre. Mark’s practice is embodied in a variety of media such as sculpture, video, installation, drawing, photography, sound, multiples, performance & public interventions.

Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, including The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), The Darling Foundry (Montréal), Musee d’Art Contemporain (Montréal); MSVU Art Gallery (Halifax), Bass Museum (Miami), University of Houston (Texas), Real Art Ways (Hartford), The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Ikon Gallery (UK), Dundee Contemporary Arts (Scotland), The Physics Room (NZ), Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art (Belgium). Mark represented Canada at the Liverpool Biennale in 2006 and the Sydney Biennale in 1998. She was also a recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in 2002. Notable public collections include The National Gallery of Canada, The Canada Council Art Bank, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Global Affairs Canada. She is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

The Estate of Kelly Mark is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.

Eleanor King is an artist and educator whose interdisciplinary practice includes painting, video, sound, and sculptural installation. Often responsive and collaborative, her works are inspired by physical, social, and economic landscapes, frequently using language to reflect our rapidly changing world. Concerned with the impact capital has on our lands and politics, their work often focuses on the impact human-built infrastructure has on the environment. This research highlights justice issues we collectively face through a decolonial lens, and uses beauty and melody as methods to retain joy and hope.

Eleanor lives in Nova Scotia / Mi’kma’ki and New York / Lenapehoking. Her work has been shown in North America, UK and Europe, with notable installations at MoCA Toronto, Spring/Break Art Show (New York), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), and others. Eleanor has been artist-in-residence at A.I.R. Gallery, MacDowell, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, The Banff Centre, and Glenfiddich; and supported through the Sobey Art Award, The Canada Council for the Arts, and Arts Nova Scotia. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine and Art in America, and is held in public and private collections.Notable public collections include Global Affairs Canada, The Confederation Centre Art Gallery, AGNS, and the Nova Scotia Art Bank. She is a Fulbright Fellow with a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from State University of New York at Purchase College. 

BRUSH.jpeg illustrates how organic systems and their technological derivatives gradually transform through repetition, reiteration, and accumulation. Across the series, imagery of the feminine spirit, fruiting textures, and abstracted reproductive organs evoke a softly evolving digital reality. Fluid forms are as bare as the code that generates them. Recurring representations of the yoni, the eternal womb, embody BRUSH.jpeg’s interface as a medium for creation, interweaving bodily symbolism with digital processes.

At its core, BRUSH.jpeg critiques the homogenizing quest of digital platforms towards optimization. While these spaces grow more automated, prioritizing frictionless design and concealing the labour that builds them, BRUSH.jpeg instead positions itself as a conceptual framework that resists and exposes its digital making. Convenience is sacrificed for what is regained in tension. Drawings are created using a mouse, with no undo available, through a system that amplifies lag, pixelation, and compression. Rather than correcting the glitches that emerge, BRUSH.jpeg treats them as evidence of presence and persistence, reclaiming the gestural hand within a computational system.

This reclamation becomes especially relevant against the proliferation of AI-generated content and its erasure of artistic labour and authorship. In direct response, the project presents a form of digital art rooted in transparency. Where generative AI conceals its references in imitation, BRUSH.jpeg exposes the mechanics of sampling outright. Images are not erased into invisible datasets, but remain intact as textural digital residue. As forms emerge from glitched layers of generated source material, the resulting compositions exist in tension between preservation and modification.

To learn more about BRUSH.jpeg, visit the project here. The drawing interface is publicly available, as well as its underlying script for further modification and mutation. All images from this project were sourced from Unsplash, an online repository of images uploaded directly by their artists for free use. When randomly generating images from the Unsplash API, BRUSH.jpeg concurrently builds a credit list that links back to the artist’s profile.

This project is supported by EQ Bank as part of an ongoing partnership that highlights Canadian digital art practices, featuring commissioned works showcased in print and through expanded digital formats.

Kahani is a dimension-bending tech artist whose artworks invent new, immersive experiences within hybrid spaces. Guided by her Indian heritage, Kahani draws parallels between the cosmic philosophy of Hinduism and the glitch in exploring notions of digital spiritualism, and embodiment. Her work considers the glitch as a purposeful gesture that can push our digital experiences away from their current structures and functions into experimental and transformative models for being. 

Kahani is the 2025 recipient of EQ Bank’s Emerging Digital Artist Award in the 3D Installation category for her work Virtual Shiva. She has participated in several group exhibitions, and workshops across Canada, covering topics of embodied extended reality, video game installations, digital archiving, and creative coding. 

In thinking about time, it seems apt to situate the following conversation through an opportunity I had to work with Walker some years later in the fall of 2016. For their inaugural show, DNA Artspace invited artist-pairs to collaboratively respond to the word “plexus” using a piece of graph paper. After some email exchanges, she elected to work with the gridlines themselves, while I would construct a support mechanism to facilitate display. As part of her process, Walker scanned, printed, and then rescanned the graph paper, repeating this action until the empty space of every gridline square diminished. Through this accumulation of slight misregistrations, the lines of the page transformed into dense gradations of a denim-like blue, so that the surface started to resemble a textile. 

This process mirrors where we find ourselves now, in the format of this conversation. I work towards a scaffolding, while she returns to the grid. Thinking about Walker’s practice, both through this past collaboration and more broadly, the space of the grid feels persistent. As a subject, the grid is embedded within a longstanding art-historical lineage. In Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay “Grids,” she contends that “By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric.”¹⁷ For Krauss, the grid is both a self-contained autonomous symbol of Modernism but also something that points outward, referencing a world external to the frame. This quote speaks directly to Walker’s handling of grids—as fragmented, unbounded forms that slip and shift. Furthermore, Krauss’ metaphorical invocation of fabric unexpectedly aligns with the material logic of Walker’s textile-based practice. And so, while the grid feels like an appropriate place to begin, it also extends out into a discussion of the garment industry, gender politics and labour, as well as the need for materially sustainable practices.  

Liza Eurich (LE): You return to the motif of the grid throughout your practice. These representations evoke both the utilitarian language of stationery, but also the contemplative abstractions of Agnes Martin. Is your affinity for the grid aligned with the everyday, in dialogue with art historical lineages, or part of a different trajectory altogether? 

Joy Walker (JW): Initially, while studying textiles at OCAD, I was trained to use the grid as an underlying structure in designing prints for fabrics. All (commercially) printed patterns rely on the grid for alignment and spacing of motifs across the fabric. For me, this training was strangely satisfying, and I couldn’t help but relate it to a kind of emotional grounding therapy: a way of creating order out of chaos. Also, I don’t think we can overlook the fact that grid systems—the warp and weft of a woven fabric literally create a grid—have existed since ancient times. I think my continued fascination with the grid as it relates to textiles aligns with my interest in systems, repetition, pattern, labour, and time.

One of the many aspects that draws me to Agnes Martin’s work is the subtle imperfection present in her hand-drawn grids. They possess a distinctly textile-like quality, appearing to embody the deliberate slowness and repetitive manual gestures inherent to hand weaving. 

LE: I hadn’t considered Martin’s grids in relation to textiles before, but now this seems so apparent. Labour also feels central to your practice. With this connection in mind, I’m wondering about your past experiences using the grid as a tool in design and textile production. Could you speak more about working within these industries and how this shaped your approach to the grid as a subject?

JW: I grew up in a family steeped in garment manufacturing—my maternal grandfather manufactured women’s coats and suits, while my father and uncle designed and produced outerwear across menswear, womenswear, and childrenswear. In that atmosphere, I developed an early sensitivity to the tactile and visual language of textiles.

What first drew me in was the transformation inherent in the manufacturing process: the way a flat piece of fabric could be structured, shaped, and guided into something entirely new. In fashion design, the grid functions as an underlying system of order. It provides stability, predictability and control. However, working against the grid can produce more experimental and unusual forms. It can reshape how clothing relates to the body (think of fashion designers like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, and their unconventional silhouettes). Although my current practice diverges significantly from traditional garment-making, it is directly informed by that lineage.

LE: Experimentation and divergence feel central. I’m drawn to the way your grids often seem to be misbehaving. They undo their own logic in a sense; they are interrupted, distorted, intentionally askew. What space do these slippages open up?

JW: I laughed when I read your question; I enjoyed the reference to the misbehaving aspect of interrupting a grid. I tend to notice these (grid) disruptions when I’m out walking and noticing asymmetries in the environment, like shadows falling unevenly across structured surfaces, misaligned bricks, and reflections in windows that distort lines.

So, for me, interrupting the geometry is a breaking of order and stability, and an investigation of what can happen visually when asymmetry disrupts the underlying structure. For example, in Untitled (Nude Descending a Staircase after Duchamp) from 2019, a digital Jacquard woven fabric created during a residency, the grid becomes the subject of the work, rather than serving as an invisible framework for constructing a repeat pattern for a textile. In creating this work, I wasn’t thinking about Duchamp’s 1912 painting, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2; I was playing against the rigid geometry of the grid. By cutting into it and introducing curves and circles, there suddenly seemed to be a bodily presence interrupting the lines that destabilized the static structure. Duchamp’s painting immediately came to mind as an after-the-fact frame of reference. His painting was widely considered radical at the time because it broke with the tradition of a static figure posed in space, replacing stillness with movement. 

LE: This is such an uncanny connection. Often the studio space—especially when associations appear unexpectedly mid-process—makes it feel like the work is speaking back to us. And again, once something enters the public sphere, it inevitably gathers new associations beyond an artist’s original intention. In this sense, meaning accrues through processes of exchange and reciprocity.

In some of your works, referentiality is explicit. Particularly in your naming of pieces like Untitled (Margiela Apron Dress 1999) and Untitled (Issey Miyake pants pattern). How do you see this process operating in your practice? Is it about acknowledging the labour of others, or does it point to something else? 

JW: The works you mentioned above were, in many ways, an attempt to enter into dialogue with two fashion designers I’ve long admired: Martin Margiela and Issey Miyake. It was less about the labour involved in the garments themselves and more about creating a response that shifted their garments into another realm.

By using primed canvas—a material deeply embedded in the history of artistic practice—and flattening what would normally wrap around the body, the clothing becomes a two-dimensional object hanging on the wall. I was interested in that transformation: how something functional and bodily could be recontextualized as image, surface, and form. Incidentally, I had been gifted the Margiela apron dress many years ago and had long viewed it as more of a minimalist painting than a piece of clothing, so in my 2024 exhibition “A Line Becomes a Thread” I found a way to embody that idea, using the exact dimensions of the dress. 

LE: Have you been gifted other garments that are waiting to be transformed? Is it important that they were given to you, or would you also consider seeking out something specific?

JW: I was given a Yohji Yamamoto shirt that ultimately became part of the exhibition mentioned above, and I’m currently considering transforming several other garments as well. The fact that they were gifted to me isn’t necessarily central to the work; I’ve also intentionally sought out specific pieces by other designers through vintage shops.

LE: Your work often seems to start with a finished object, like a garment, either as a reference or as the actual material that forms the basis for a new piece. 

Works like Untitled (Collar) [2024] or Untitled (Red Stripe) [2024] seem to embody this latter approach. In these, each retains recognizable components from their past life: the collar of a dress shirt, part of a sleeve, and buttons in both. Through this shift from closet to gallery, or from body to wall, these dislocated forms become estranged from their original purpose. This seems to point to questions of form vs. function, but I’m equally interested in how you use fragmentation as a starting point.

JW: I don’t see visual art and functionality as opposing forces. By removing these garment parts—collars and sleeves—from purely functional roles and placing them in a sculptural or conceptual context, I’m inviting viewers to reconsider them. Using fragmentation and recontextualization, familiar clothing components transform into autonomous objects. The detached collar and the sleeves connected by a collar (in Red Stripe) act as both remnants and signifiers, evoking a missing body while disrupting expectations of functionality and wholeness. At the same time, a collar attached to a wall becomes useless and slightly absurd, which reflects the playful quality I embrace in my work. 

LE: Absurdity feels like an important counterpoint.  In visual art, textiles have often been framed through the lens of craft or domestic labour, but your approach resists these categories. Instead, it’s conceptual, playful, dysfunctional—absurd. It exists in conversation with art historical figures like Martin and Duchamp, but also the aforementioned designers, Margiela and Miyake. Do you see your work operating between both spheres? 

JW: Yes and no. I’m interested in working both within and against those histories. Historically, textiles have long been associated with domestic labour, women’s work, decoration and utility, and those associations still shape how fibre-based practices are perceived. For a long period, I resisted using textiles because of that baggage—the medium often felt dismissed as craft rather than contemporary art.

What drew me back was realizing that those assumptions could become material to work with. I use fabric in ways that are intentionally playful or dysfunctional because I want to interrupt the expectation that textile should behave in a useful or decorative way. At the same time, I don’t think my work exists completely outside those traditional narratives. It still carries the history of labour, gender, and care embedded in textile practices. I’m interested in creating tension between those inherited meanings and more conceptual or illogical gestures, where familiar materials stop functioning as expected. 

LE: What prompted you to reconsider, to start integrating textiles into your practice?

JW: In 2019, I was granted a residency at the TextielLab in the Netherlands, where I had the opportunity to begin to integrate textiles back into my art practice using digital jacquard technology. Part of my motivation for wanting to produce a large-scale woven fabric was to pay tribute to the women of the Bauhaus—the groundbreaking German art school that united art, craft, and technology from 1919 to 1933—who were directed into weaving because they were barred from joining the painting studios on the basis of gender.

In the book Bauhaus Women by Ulrike Müller, Müller includes a note about Anni Albers that indicates Anni’s apprehension regarding her training at the Bauhaus, as she was relegated to the weaving studio instead of the painting studio, as she had intended. “In the third semester she turned up in the ‘Women’s Department,’ the weaving workshop, and felt out of place. She considered weaving too ‘womanish’ and began weaving without any great enthusiasm as this choice “caused the least comment.”¹⁸ My aim for the project at the TextielLab was to incorporate brushstrokes into woven fabric to acknowledge and refute this gender bias. 

I feel it’s important to add that, although many women at the Bauhaus were steered into the weaving workshop because textile work was considered a feminine craft rather than a fine art, they ultimately transformed the medium into one of the school’s most innovative artistic practices. Artists like Anni Albers established that weaving could embody the same experimentation, abstraction, and conceptual rigour as painting or sculpture.

LE: It sounds like this residency was the perfect catalyst. I’m also curious about how this moment—access to different equipment and technologies, proximity to Bauhaus’ legacy—continues to inform your practice. 

JW: Coincidentally (and without my prior knowledge), during my residency at TextielLab, the TextielMuseum (which is next door to the lab) was opening an exhibition by women who trained at the Bauhaus school. I was excited to see the works by well-known textile weavers like Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, but even more so to discover works by a less renowned but equally accomplished weaver, Otti Berger. What was most intriguing to me was Berger’s interest in textile innovation: she was the first female member of the Bauhaus to patent new fabrics and to experiment with textile methodologies and materials—a core component of my ongoing teaching practice.

LE:  This chance encounter with Berger’s practice seems to support your teaching in such a specific way. How are you thinking through textile experimentation in your pedagogy, or within broader social issues like sustainability?

JW: This is relevant to me as I have taught Fabric Science and Textile Laboratory within a college fashion program for many years, and am very aware of how the textile industry is grounded within global systems of labour, consumption and environmental impact.

I’m interested in how material processes can both reflect and challenge those structures.

I think of sustainability as a kind of mending practice rather than a fixed solution. Mending acknowledges the damage and gives us the opportunity to repair but not return to its original state. For me, sustainable practice is less about achieving purity and more about developing attentiveness by reworking existing materials, extending the life of garments, and remaining conscious of the systems each material passes through.

LE: Your analogy between mending and sustainability really resonates with me. So often, nostalgia for an idealized past obscures present issues and strategies for effecting meaningful change. With mending, there is acknowledgement but also a sense of feasibility within the scale of the gesture. Do practices of reuse or repair also enter into your studio work? 

JW: During my 2022 residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie, in their print and publishing lab, I created new works using discarded paper and test prints from previous projects left behind in the print shop. I had entered the residency with a completely different plan, but when I saw the accumulation of existing resources, it became clear that the work could emerge directly from the materials already available in the studio.

This experience led me to reevaluate the accumulation of materials in my studio, at home, and at the college where I teach. Materials that would have ordinarily been thrown away became the basis of the work. In Untitled (Remnants) [2024], I used leftover piano wire and began to “thread” cast-off textile fragments, employing the wire as a kind of needle. Through this slow, accumulative process, the emphasis is placed on the smaller textile remnants, reframing them as the essential elements that collectively generate the surface and structure of fabric.

LE: Was the leftover piano wire from a previous project, or something you collected for another purpose—a material affinity? 

JW: I had originally planned to use the piano wire for another project, but after a lot of time spent trying to wrangle it into shape, I realized I needed something more rigid, less bouncy. 

In general, I am (unfortunately or fortunately) always collecting found materials to be considered for future works. The hallway in my studio building in downtown Toronto is a catch-all for all kinds of discarded materials, there for the taking. 

LE: I’m interested in this catch-all situation. Are there any materials you’ve scooped up recently that you anticipate leading to a new work? Or rather, are you holding onto any accumulations you’re excited about? 

JW: Most recently, I’ve been amassing old clothing buttons for use in an upcoming project. Initially, my thought was to use my own collection, but when I realized I didn’t have enough, the project expanded through an open call on social media. 

I was not only struck by how many people responded but by how many memories and associations became attached to these small, inexpensive fasteners. People would tell me their stories about where a button came from, who owned it, or why it was saved. In one instance, I was invited to rummage through a large collection of buttons from an estate sale. What stood out to me was the way the buttons had been carefully organized by colour, size, and type, seeming like miniature artefacts. 

So, what began with the simple act of collecting buttons has grown into an exploration of memory and community. The final direction of the artwork is still uncertain, but the process of discovering where these connections lead has become an essential part of the work itself.

Joy Walker is an artist and educator specializing in textile science. She has produced artist projects during residencies at the TextielLab in Tilburg, Netherlands, 2019 and in 2019 and 2022 at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands. Her works are held in several public collections.  She is represented by MKG127 in Toronto.

Liza Eurich is an artist, writer and curator. She co-founded and organizes the online publication Moire, as well as the project space Support. Represented by MKG127 in Toronto, her work has been exhibited at Stride, Open Studio, G Gallery, Neutral Ground, Plug In ICA, McIntosh Gallery and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. She currently resides in London, Ontario.

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This issue is about homecoming and impermanence; it’s also about the relationship between the part and the whole and, as ever, the centre and the periphery. There is a newfound premium on moving against the logic of optimization. There are mementos and memento mori. There is the vertigo of coming back to a once-familiar place and finding it estranged. There is a folk-art mask that purges wheat. There is cannibalism. There are puppets.

In conversation with artist Joy Walker, writer Liza Eurich coins the phrase “grids misbehaving,”  an apt and economical description of Walker’s practice, which deconstructs garments to reveal their underlying structures and forges new forms that are at once elegant and slightly absurd.

Taking things apart to discover what else they might become is a reoccurring impulse in this issue. Kahani Ploessl’s hybrid artist project BRUSH.jpg presents a custom-built interface that uses images sourced from the internet as a brush for digital drawing. Developed with an open-source ethos, the spread pairs a selection of drawings with online access to the tool itself, inviting readers to experiment firsthand.

Elsewhere, the issue takes an elemental turn. Writer Katie Lawson speaks with Manif d’art 12 curator Didier Morelli about the recent edition of The Quebec Biennale and its forthcoming publication, discussing how the theme of “Splitting Ice / Briser la glace” unfolds across disparate venues and artistic practices with an eye to site specificity and “nordicity.” In her profile of painter Chantal Khoury, writer Maegan Beck looks to water as a lens for reading the artist’s dreamlike, gauzy paintings, which populate her latest exhibition “Monuments” at Bradley Ertaskiran.

Inspired by his recent move back to the prairies, Simon Fuh’s series of drawings Cowboy Poet depicts surreal scenes of expressionless figures joyriding and hanging out. The accompanying text by Alana Traficante finds tenderness in these sometimes disturbing scenes, a “shared absurdity [that] holds people together in the space of unfolding fictions.” In a similar spirit of return, my profile of artist Althea Thauberger follows the often-itinerant artist back to her birthplace of Saskatchewan in her Remai Modern exhibition “Der Kleieklotzer (The Bran Puker).” There, she takes her own family history as a point of departure to explore how wheat farming has been instrumental to the colonial project of Canada.

Artist Hannah Doucet speaks with writer Shalaka Jadhav about the memento mori embedded in the still life tradition and her exhibition “Show me where it hurts” in the Buhler Gallery at St. Boniface Hospital, which brings her practice to the terrain of pediatric healthcare while recalling her own childhood experience as a cancer patient. Finally, artist Eleanor King receives a memento from the estate of Kelly Mark. Her subsequent essay reflects on Mark’s practice and relationship to the East Coast art scene. After hosting a reboot of Glow House in her own home, King muses, “Was it her piece? Not exactly. It was a memorial gesture, improvised and emotionally accurate, though I don’t know whether Kelly would have liked it. Probably not.”

This project is supported by EQ Bank as part of an ongoing partnership that highlights Canadian digital art practices, featuring commissioned works showcased in print and through expanded digital formats. 

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Moni Omubor (b. 1998, Lagos, Nigeria) is a visual artist and designer based in Lethbridge, Alberta. She works with computer generated 3D graphics in consortium with photography to explore the interconnectedness between black diasporic realities and postcolonial Nigerian identity. At the centre of her new media practice is the exploration of speculative fiction and virtual worldbuilding to not only question or document these realities but to also actively reconstruct them by learning from the records of where we’ve been, examining the absurdities of where we are and pulling from the possibilities of where we might go. She holds a B.Sc. in Architecture, an MFA in New Media from the University of Lethbridge and is a member of the Lethbridge based black art collective, We’re Here Too.

Annie’s interest in psychedelics was as a metaphor for the expansion of consciousness beyond the contemporary powers which rule daily life. Throughout our conversation, “The Beyond Within” ended up becoming a point of entry into much larger questions driving her work—about capitalism and imagination, rupture and continuity, belief and disillusionment, and the stubborn, unruly persistence of art itself. 

We spoke about her newest film, One Equal Light (2025), her collaborations with filmmaker Maïder Fortuné, and the feminist working group which she helped form, EMILIA-AMALIA. Threaded throughout was an insistence on art’s continued relevance, even—especially—amid institutional failure and political crisis. As we spoke about censorship, donor power, and the widening gap between artists and the structures that claim to support them, the question of belief kept resurfacing. What does it mean to remain unjaded when the conditions for making and showing work feel increasingly compromised? How do collective practices help sustain that belief when individual resolve falters? In discussing these overlapping registers, Annie offers openings: moments where the expected briefly loosens its grip, and other ways of imagining art, relation and being begin to emerge.

Lodoe Laura (LL): “The Beyond Within” is an exhibition—mounted at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, SFU Galleries, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, and Illingworth Kerr Gallery—centered around the psychedelic experience. Can you introduce us to this project? What sparked your interest in psychedelics?

Annie MacDonell (AM): “The Beyond Within” is an exhibition of recent solo work and collaborative films made with Maïder Fortuné. The show was curated by Crystal Mowry and Leila Timmins.  As you said, each of the works has some sort of psychedelic tie-in. The two films in the show (Communicating Vessels and OUTHERE [for Lee Lozano]) both feature acid trips, albeit in very different forms. And the main installation work in the show is specifically about the history of psychedelics as research and therapy. 

When I was making that installation work, I was always thinking about psychedelics as a metaphor for something else. I wanted to talk about the hold that capitalism has over our imaginations, and by extension, our sense of what is possible, and I thought that psychedelics might be a way to do that. The intersection of the two things came from an article I read in which patients described their therapeutic psychedelic trips. Almost everyone in it talked about sudden feelings of connectedness to the world, to the planet, to people they love and people they’ve never met, to the past and future of humanity. It occurred to me that these feelings they were describing were the exact opposite of how capitalism needs us to experience the world. This was interesting to me, and so I started to research what exactly psychedelics do to the brain. There’s a specific part of the brain that’s shut down on psychedelics, a neural network called the Default Mode Network, which is also sometimes referred to as the seat of the ego. It seems that when we shut down the ego, we shut down our sense of ourselves as disconnected individuals, and then a whole range of other ideas, emotions and images become accessible. My interest in psychedelics was actually a sort of trippy thought experiment into what human experience could be if we could dissolve the boundaries of the self, even just for long enough to imagine a different way of being in relation to the world and each other.   

LL: In the exhibition, you include pages from psychedelic trial reports produced at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan in the 1950s, where researchers tried to document the perceptual effects of LSD, using guided sessions as alternatives to prolonged psychiatric hospitalization. What emerged for you from reading and working with these archival materials?

AM: I wanted to ground the show in the earliest experiments in psychedelics, which began in the fifties in Saskatchewan. Those pages come from a manual titled LSO-25 Protocols, which was produced at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in 1952. It documents patient experiences through long interviews and drawings, and it also lays out best practices for the doctors, who were still trying to figure out how to guide the patients through these experiences. What’s interesting about this manual is that it documents a version of psychedelic experience that precedes the one we know so well from the late 1960s. The drugs have not yet entered either the Western mainstream or the counterculture. There is no consensus around whether they are good or bad, no existing language to describe the experience, no politics or policies associated with them. Reading the documents, you sense that both the doctors and patients are moving into an unknown territory. 

The best part of the manual is the beautiful line drawings made by the patients as they struggle to describe their visual hallucinations. They show all kinds of mundane things made wonderful: a cat’s mouth overflowing with teeth, a rug turning into quicksand, a ceiling that drips jewels, and a nurse with 3 faces. I love the porousness between reality and dream in these images and the way they crack the known world open to other possibilities. But I especially love their simplicity and artlessness, and how they have nothing to do with the tie-dye and dancing bears that we normally associate with psychedelics. In the installation, I reproduce the manual pages at poster scale, marking them up with pink marker to highlight certain passages. I also animated the line drawings in the installation’s videos, and used excerpts of the patient transcriptions in the videos’ voice-overs. 

LL: Yes, I love the patient’s drawings too–they’re these simple line figures and forms which leave so much space between the experience and its representation. Another video work from “The Beyond Within” that addresses the psychedelic experience is OUTHERE (for Lee Lozano). The video takes as a point of departure a 1971 lecture that American artist Lee Lozano gave at NSCAD art college, called “The Halifax 3 State Experiment,” which Lozano delivers in three states–sober, stoned on weed, and high on LSD. But then you and your collaborator, Maïder Fortuné, go beyond this event, taking a deeper look at Lozano’s work and life. You even have a birth chart made for her. I’m curious what compelled you so much about this person and her practice.

AM: We are always interested in the figures who exist in the margins, people who can’t or won’t function within the prescribed rules, especially when they are artists. The character “E” in Communicating Vessels plays that role, and Lee Lozano definitely belongs to that category as well. Lozano was an artist who abandoned her painting practice in the late 1960s and began a series of social, sexual and substance-based experiments that she carefully documented in her private notebooks. Occasionally, she exhibited the notes as works on paper in the gallery, but mostly she just lived the experiences and kept the records. She was doing all of this at a time when art was being turned inside out by conceptual art, performance art and video art, all of which had big influences on her. It was a time when everything and anything could be reframed as an artwork, and Lozano took that shift dead seriously. This talk she gave at NSCAD is a perfect example. Instead of the usual artist’s talk, she delivered a wild, open-ended, day-long event that tested the patience of the audience and the rules of the school. But “The Halifax 3 State Experiment” also had all the hallmarks of a conceptual artwork. It had an announced structure, it was iterative, and it was shaped by an idea, rather than a subject. That combination of total rigour and a sort of belligerent refusal to follow the rules was perfectly representative of who she was as a person. In the film, we take the talk as a point of departure, and then, through writing, performance, and an interview with an astrologer, we try to unpack who she was as an artist. She really was a wild and unpredictable figure, but she was also someone who was one hundred percent dedicated to her practice and to the process of
making art. 

One of the things that Maïder and I share is a completely uncynical belief in the potential of art. It’s a hard position to maintain, and we are often disappointed by the art world itself. But all of that has nothing to do with the actual work of making art, or the experience of encountering the best artworks as a viewer. In a secular world, it’s one of the last meaningful social experiences, and one of the few ways to access the sublime or a feeling of transcendence or transformation. Religions have their heretics and saints who remind others of what belief makes possible. In a secular art world, it’s the outsider geniuses and deliberate misfits that help us understand what is possible when you push all the garbage aside. 

LL: Do you feel comfortable naming some of the disappointments you’ve confronted while navigating the art world? How do you maintain your uncynical belief in the power of art despite these encounters? 

AM: Oh wow. That’s a big question. I mean, there are a lot of problems in the art world, and most of them are easy to brush away when you’re busy with what you’re making and surrounded by good people. But there are also the bigger, systemic issues, which have become much more apparent since Gaza. 

The systemic problems inside the art world are exactly the same as the problems outside of it, which is that there’s a huge gap between the people with power and the rest of us. In art, the big donors, the collectors and board members, the gallery CEOs, they’re all very far removed from the artists and art workers at the bottom of the food chain. To them, the art world is just a big, fancy machine that serves to achieve other purposes altogether. It’s always been like that, but the political division over the genocide in Gaza has made this reality painfully clear. The outrageous firings, the open censorship, the loss of shows and funding for those who don’t comply— it’s been chilling and disheartening, especially if you’re someone who thought of the art world as a place of progressive politics, transgression, free expression. We know now that’s not what it is. 

So why continue to believe in art? I don’t know. Because we keep at it, I guess. Because we can’t stop making it, seeking it out, talking about it, even as all the structures are pulled out from under us. Because no matter what they do, art will keep bubbling up, like a beautiful and uncontrollable thing they can never eradicate. 

LL: Yes. I’ve felt the chasm between the ethics and ideas of the artists, and the realities of the administrations and institutions of display, and fell into despair at its depths a few times. And I know I’m not alone. You’re a part of the feminist working group EMILIA-AMALIA, which recently held an Open Hearing event subtitled “Dreaming in Dark Times,” which opened a space for people involved in the Toronto arts sector and its ecosystems to contribute their struggles, triumphs and imaginings. What did you learn from this exercise?

AM: We held “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” in March of 2024, just a few months after Trump’s re-election, when things were feeling very dark. EMILIA-AMALIA invited the Toronto art community to get together and talk about where we were at and what needed to be done to build a better future for arts workers. The structure was based on an event put on by the Art Workers Coalition in New York in 1969. It was really just a basic town hall format: anyone could speak, everyone had four minutes, no questions or rebuttals. And it worked really well. Almost 200 people showed up, and we spent an afternoon and evening hearing each other out. 

What we learned is that arts workers are really not feeling good right now. People are tired and disillusioned. They’re worried about their own futures, about the future of their communities, and about the survival of the big and small institutions that have sustained us up until now, however imperfectly. But the event was also a reminder that a lot of us still care for each other and for the things that art permits us to do together. We didn’t come away with any clear steps forward or easy solutions. There were too many different experiences and opinions to lead to that. But I think at that moment, people needed to be together in a space, hearing each other speak in order to take measure of where we were at. Everything’s happening so fast right now that sometimes all you can hope to do is momentarily focus your attention to get your head around it. Open Hearing allowed us to do that.

LL: This collectivity seems important to your practice. You often work collaboratively with Maïder Fortuné. How did this partnership develop? Can you talk about your process and interest in working together?

AM: Maïder and I went to grad school together in the early 2000s and became very good friends through that experience. We had come out of very different arts educations, and we clicked immediately because we had so many things to share and exchange. It was only about ten years into our friendship that we started making work together. We began collaborating at a time when we were both interested in exploring more narrative forms of filmmaking, and I think it was less intimidating to move in that direction together. We share a lot of the same influences and ideas, and we know each other so well. We grew up as artists together, basically. So our collaboration is an extension of that history and friendship. Sometimes this makes things complicated, but it’s also been incredibly sustaining and productive for both of us. Even now, I think working together permits us to take risks and try things we might not do on our own. 

LL: Talk to me about your turn towards writing and working with the moving image. Was this a conscious shift?

AM: Film and video have always been a big part of my practice. Even when I was studying photography as an undergrad, I was shooting 16mm film from the very beginning. Maïder made a move from theatre and performance to video during our time at Le Fresnoy together, and she has primarily been making video since then. The transition we made together actually had more to do with writing. We were both making moving-image work that was primarily visual and mostly non-narrative, works that were usually shown as installation in the gallery. It was only when we started working together that we began to write scripts, imagine characters and think about narrative in a more intentional way. 

LL: One Equal Light, your most recent film project with Maïder, extends your ongoing interests in outsider figures and the sublime as a rupture within everyday experience. Could you discuss the genesis and conceptual framework behind the work?

AM: In December, we finished One Equal Light, which is the first part in a bigger film project that we’ve been working on for a couple of years. One Equal Light is an introduction or prologue to the rest. It’s about the 2024 solar eclipse, ghosts, death, birth, and the English poet and preacher John Donne. Donne is another one of those odd outsider figures. He was a shape-shifting poet genius who lived an unpredictable life in a time of major political turmoil. He’s the main ghost that haunts the film, but there are others as well. 

The next part of the film, which we are working on now, deals more explicitly with the messy intersection of artists and politics by way of reenactments of the original 1969 Open Hearing event, which happened in New York. But One Equal Light sets the stage for those future parts by showing a world spinning off its axis momentarily in 2024. The eclipse is a way to demonstrate, like you said, the way that the sublime can rupture the everyday. An eclipse is a very specific kind of rupture, one that people experience as profound and magical, but also unnerving. Coming to terms with the experience of rupture seems very important right now. So much is changing all at once. So many of our ways of living, our social structures and systems are falling away, and other new and unknown things are coming up to take their place. It’s a time of endings and beginnings, which also means it’s a time of ghosts and monsters. It’s almost too much to get your head around in your day-to-day life, but with One Equal Light, we’re trying to represent something about the daily seismic shifts of contemporary life. 

LL: How do these ideas–rupture, continuity, historical echo–shape the formal decisions you make in your work?

AM: Those three things are incredibly important to the formal decisions I make, especially in the film works. What has always excited me about film is its capacity to incorporate both rupture and continuity. Films are these beautiful, hyper-flexible containers that can accommodate all kinds of material—moving images, still images, sound, voice, text, music. But for all its flexibility, the container also has its linear shape. Films move forward through time. They have to have their beginnings, middles, and ends. And because viewers also bring expectations of narrative development or continuity to them, they become an excellent form in which to set off dynamic breaks. 

Rupture might be especially important to One Equal Light. It uses fast cuts and densely layered images to reproduce the feeling of being alive right now. It is filled with ghosts and historical echoes, but it’s also very contemporary in its accelerated rhythms and the density of the information it puts out there. 

LL: As you trace these seismic shifts of contemporary life, you repeatedly turn to historical moments and figures as reference points—the Open Hearing, solar eclipses, Lee Lozano, psychedelic trials, John Donne. What does this backward-looking gaze open up for you? Do the shifts unfolding now feel distinct from those that came before? 

AM: In some ways, what’s happening in the present is distinct from the past. The speed and scale of the current shifts are, I think, unprecedented. But they are also repeating known patterns shaped by the exact same racism, imperialism, and greed that formed the historical foundation of capitalism. 

When I am looking to the past in my work, it’s always from a desire to find answers about the present. The present can sometimes be hard for me to read. I’m always trying, but sometimes it’s too close or too immediate, or it’s moving too fast to be fully legible. The distance we have from the past allows us to assess it and learn from it, and that can be useful in turn for understanding the present. 

When we first began to work as EMILIA-AMALIA, we used to speak about “the undetonated potential of the past,” by which we meant that we were interested in unearthing potentially explosive events, or figures, or artworks from the past in order to set off new events in the present. I think that desire runs throughout all my work: To find the powerful or mind-altering or generative things from the past and use them to create ruptures in the present. But always at the root of this is the desire to make new and better futures possible.

Lodoe Laura’s writing has been featured in BlackFlash, C Magazine, Esse arts + opinions, IMPULSE, Peripheral Reviewand Public Parking. She spent several years working in archives, galleries, museums and artist-run spaces. Lodoe currently lives in Toronto’s west end, where she teaches classes focused on embodied movement and practices acupuncture. 

Annie MacDonell is a visual artist working in film, photography and installation. Recent shows include “Interior Life” at 272 Gallery in Toronto, and “Shadow Vision,” with Maïder Fortuné, at Dazibao in Montreal. “One Equal Light,” her new film made with Maïder Fortuné, will premiere at Cinema du Réel in Paris in March 2026 and their other collaborative films will be screened at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in April 2026. She lives in Toronto with her family, and teaches at TMU’s School of Image Arts. 

For her 2021 exhibition “Blackity,” curator and art historian Joana Joachim gathered the materials and ephemera of black Canadian cultural production from across the ten thousand documents housed in the Artexte Information Centre fonds. Nestled in downtown Montreal, the centre has a modest exhibition space surrounded by boardrooms, offices, worktables and an enormous row of hand-crank rolling shelves. These shelves hold entire collections of magazines, active and defunct (think FUSE Magazine or Parachute), artist-run centre administration documents and artist files, as well as books, pamphlets, media and other ephemera related to Canadian art from 1965 to the present. “This exhibition begins to trace a temporal cartography of Black Canadian art history,” Joachim declared in her curatorial statement. Along with the presented documents, she translated her findings into a data visualization on the gallery walls. The striated, floor-to-ceiling lines charted the ebbs and flows of attention to, and the presence of, these practices over the decades. 

During the time Joachim was building her exhibition at Artexte, I was a researcher in residence there, also looking for documentation of black Canadian cultural practices in the collection. I concluded two things during this period: (1) art writing is indispensable to creating a healthy art history, and (2) there already exists enough documentation, however diffuse and unattended to, to create a black Canadian art history. Buseje Bailey: Reasons We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While: a Black Art History Project was the chapbook I made based on my research at Artexte.¹⁹ My aim was to reproduce some of the critical discourse that had formed around the work of a black woman artist whose prolific career in the ‘80s and ‘90s had been promptly written out of art history. I placed reprinted interviews and essays by and about Bailey’s work from the Artexte fonds with new reflections and conversations with the artist. “I’m looking for Buseje Bailey,” artist Sandra Brewster wrote in a 2016 letter to Theaster Gates. Commenting on being taught a feminist approach to art history, she notes, “there did not seem to be any acknowledgement of Black artists and artists of colour practicing within the same time periods as their white counterparts.”²⁰ Gathering the existing documentation into a chapbook was my way of suggesting that this kind of art writing and critical engagement are the matter from which we can form a collective memory of black Canadian art.

For some time now, I have been dedicated to writing about black Canadian art, and as I have done this—seeing exhibitions, doing archival research, and talking to artists and art workers—I have learned that art writing, in particular the practice of writing about black Canadian art, is a complicated business. A cyclical vacillation, instigated by funding bodies and reinforced by the art world’s gatekeepers, has led to a hyper attention to identity and representation being taken up with urgency, dropped, and then again renewed by those same arts institutions. To remain legible, artists are encouraged to make work that aligns with representation mandates. This often overdetermines how artists approach making, and how Canadian critics and curators present and write about black art practices. 

The irony is that this emphasis on identity was itself once a hard-won corrective, until it calcified into an expectation imposed on any artist who was not white. How do you justify the significance and technical merit of your identity work? was replaced by Why aren’t you making identity work?

For black Canadians, the question of identity is complicated, though for a long time, a simple narrative of escape to freedom through the underground railroad was the only history we were allowed. As a nation founded on settler colonialism and sustained through strategic immigration, the African diasporic people who have ended up here since the arrival of the first European settlers have been diverse. There is no single black identity or black history in Canada, even while black Canada has been shown by curators, critics, and theorists such as Andrea Fatona, Peter Hudson, Katherine Mckittrick, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Rinaldo Walcott to be a distinct experience within the black diaspora. This poses a problem for ‘black Canadian art,’ if one expects those practices and the writing around them to focus on a simple story about identity. Black Canadian art has a long and intricate history across the country, and it exceeds the bounds of a singular narrative.

Part Two

Last fall, I visited Edmonton for the first time. I stayed north of the river, midtown, in a neighbourhood where multi-lane roadways criss-crossed residential streets, and which, when I mentioned it, everyone said was great, and very central. The tree-lined streets reminded me of the suburbs where we would visit family when I was a kid. I learned that Edmonton is rapidly developing, thanks to money brought in by work further north in the oil fields. I was there to give a keynote at MacEwan University and attend the opening of the group exhibition of local artists Elsa Robinson, Raneece Buddan, AJA Louden, and Garfield Morgan, curated by Carolyn Jervis at the Mitchell Art Gallery. Jervais had brought me on at the start of the project to spend time with the artists and write about their work. 

Over the year leading up to the exhibition, I met with the artists regularly, bringing in guests and texts that helped us think through their practices. I suggested we read Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, which had helped me find a sense of belonging as a black girl from Quebec. We talked about Brand’s door of no return as both a metaphor and a real place that connects all people in the African diaspora by our proximity or distance to it. A feeling of familiarity, of home, exists in the unrootedness of diaspora. Though it was their home, the artists shared, they felt a difficult sense of belonging to Edmonton. The book helped to identify and name this difficulty, and also revealed its relation to elsewhere (an ongoing effect of empire) that gives it definition. Brand’s Map, we agreed, gave us permission as black people in Canada not to prove our origins, nor to defend our belonging. 

I invited curator Alyssa Fearon to talk to us about her recent exhibition “Black Prairies,” for which she paired glass plate negatives of early homesteading life in Manitoba’s Swan River Valley (taken by photographer William “Billy” Beale between 1915 and 1925) with images from the Frank B. Jamerson fonds documenting early black migrants to Amber Valley, Alberta and works by contemporary black artists based in the prairies. Together, these documents and artworks tell a story about the longstanding presence of black people in the prairies. Still, even within this region, the local experience is different from other parts of the area. Artist, curator, programmer, and organizer Christina Battle explained how Edmonton is distinct from the rest of the prairies. The treaties overlap, but Edmonton is in Aspen parkland, a very different geography than places further east in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, or even Calgary, just a few hours away, near the Rocky Mountain foothills. It feels like an isolated place: there aren’t many opportunities for exhibiting locally, and artists rarely show outside of the city. The more I learn, the more I understand Jervais’ reasoning for bringing me in to get to know the four artists’ work and write about the exhibition. I also see why Elsa, who was the artist initially approached by Jervais to show at the Mitchell Art Gallery, had wanted to open up the opportunity and invite other artists in. 

Part Three

Elsa, Raneece, AJA, and Garfield eventually called their exhibition “New Routes: threads across space and time” (2025). During our conversation about Brand’s book, the artists emphasized the importance of charting an Afro-imaginary, of developing a cognitive schema for the experience of being black. In many ways, the exhibition, for which they collaborated on a new installation and each contributed several artworks, delivered on this aim. Their visual storytelling was charged with Afrofuturism, as well as African symbols, folktales, and spirituality, all of which seemed to reach towards an Africanist past or future. At first, I struggled to write about the show because these themes kept me returning to identity: I could not divorce the stories the artists were telling in their work from the significance of their experiences of blackness. Maybe because I was unfamiliar with Edmonton, I was having a hard time situating their work within a Canadian context. The black Canadian art I am most familiar with draws attention to and troubles the tensions and contradictions within official versions of Canadian history and identity. Deanna Bowen’s Invisible Empires (2013), 1911 Anti Creek-Negro Petition (2013) and Black Drones in the Hive (2023), Charles Campbell’s Breath Archives (2025), Stan Douglas’s Hogan’s Alley (2013), Sylvia D. Hamilton’s Here We Are Here (2013-2017), Camille Turner’s Miss Canadiana (2001-2019) and “Otherworld” (2025), to name a few. These weren’t the only artists or practices I was interested in (and many of them often make work outside this thematic), but, as I described, projects like these fit snugly into discussions of what black Canadian art is and could be. 

One of the guests who met with the group and me was textile artist Stina Baudin. During our session together, she advised that artists were never under obligation. She told us: “As artists, it’s kind of our job to refuse.” At her suggestion, we read Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, and this led to a discussion about glitch, technology, and refusal. Elsa told us it had taken years for her to understand the complexities of racism in Edmonton: “We are always being interpolated,” she said. “And then we get conscious of how to maneuver.” The glitch that Russell offers in her book is an aesthetics of refusal, particularly made by black artists. Baudin concluded the session with a question: “What is the importance of the specific materials you seek out to realize your ideas?” 

Thinking again about “New Routes” and my difficulty writing about the exhibition, something shifted for me. It was subtle but significant: I realized the artists were telling their stories about African ancestry (or future relations) through their materials. Instead of focusing on history or identity, I could look to how they used textiles to think through their ideas. AJA tufted afrofuturist scenes full of symbols that looked like gonzo still lifes. Garfield used the texture and colour patterns of traditional African fabrics to create portraits. Raneece, with her embroidery, and Elsa, with her costumes, did slow, precise, and deliberate technical work based on African myth and spirituality. They all explored materials in terms of identity. I had initially gotten hung up on the identity part, but actually, the fact that they were all working in textile was the common thread that allowed me to situate their work more broadly. This perspective helped me locate their work within a national and transitional context. 

With textiles as my entry point, I began thinking about black art through medium rather than identity, which led me to the quilting practices of early black settlers in Alberta. I took the technology as a starting point and grounded my essay in the material practice of textile. I read about quilts made by black people in the prairies that echoed the work of the Gee’s Bend quilters in the southern United States. What was once considered humble “craft” was later pulled into the realm of fine art and exhibited in museums, their symbols, colours, and techniques closely analyzed. Turning back to Canada, I located quilt-making practices by black communities across the country. Curator David Woods recently mounted a touring exhibition of such quilts from Halifax and the East Coast, while Southern Ontario has its own local black quilting history. This history of quilting practices from different eras and communities across the country reflected the storytelling methods that each of the Edmonton artists used in the 2025 exhibition. I looked at this artistic practice—quilting—as building an aesthetic. The Edmonton artists in “New Roots” applied different understandings of black cultural, spiritual, and material histories to how they shape matter. Textile technology as a perspective allowed me to read and analyze their work within multiple contexts, across borders, temporalities, and cultures. 

Part Four

Since last year, I have been working with curator Nya Lewis on her upcoming project, an edited collection of essays and artworks from what she is calling the Black Pacific, after a 1996 essay by Peter Hudson entitled “Disappearing Histories of the Black Pacific: Contemporary Black Art in Vancouver.” As I read through the contributions on unique black coastal aesthetics, I noticed an echo of the constellation Joachim outlined in her exhibition: the network of connections routed between these different material practices, in theme and in method, is abundant. For a long time, black curators have done much of the heavy lifting that has allowed for the presentation of black art in institutional spaces in Canada. Before critics can write about them, black curators often undertake the research, fundraising, and organizing that make exhibitions possible. Without these efforts, a lot of black art would go unseen. It is time for writers to pick up the baton and create rich discourses around local black art practices across the country. It is our role to mindfully and rigorously attend to the differences and specificities of black culture. As we analyze how black artists make work and what materials they use, their methods will become the aperture through which we discuss their ideas.

Yaniya Lee is a writer, researcher, and teacher whose work draws on narratives of liberation to develop new methodologies for art criticism, art history, and archival practice. Recent projects include Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024), a collection of her writing, and the Black Canadian Art History Scholarship Database (blackartstudy.ca), a searchable catalogue of theses and dissertations on Black art in Canada.

In light of these questions, it remains a challenge to hold such expectations of procuring meaning from material alone. However, the sculptural practice of Berlin-based Canadian artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw rises to reignite a passion for materiality. Often taking the form of enlarged maquettes, his sculptures depict peculiar machinery or undefinable instruments from another time. My first introduction to his work was his solo exhibition, “Vinegar Stone & the Language of Flowers,” at Towards in Toronto in 2017, in the subterranean gallery space they shared with Franz Kaka on Wade Avenue in the Junction. I remember being struck by the ambitiousness of the installation and its intricacy; Shaw’s proficiency was instantly apparent. 

The exhibition was immersive, featuring sculptures seemingly unearthed from a medieval civilization that had been restored for viewing: three small framed boxes patinated with age lined the back wall. Meanwhile, a classic pharmacy cross beckoned between the divided gallery spaces, its opposite side illustrating a human figure twisted in an unnatural position against a flocked dark green background. The centre of the gallery was occupied by a naive wheelbarrow made from an old laundry sink and a crude arrangement of dowels tied with twine, which formed handles and a front wheel. Offerings of dried flowers and an arrangement of coins speckled a pool of vinegar in the sink’s interior, like alms for an unknown deity. I remember feeling that the overarching energy of the exhibition was somewhat sour. The threat of rot and decay loomed like a shadow over each work, sometimes symbolically (with the inclusion of motifs such as clock faces) but also in the fermented palette of patinated ochres, moldy browns, and murky greens. As though exhumed from a soggy medieval world of lore, the exhibition balanced this ripeness with the artist’s well-honed proficiency in casting and assembling, provoking the viewer to act as an archeologist in resolving the true forms or sources of the found materials. Even in his newer works, it is in these decisions that I find Shaw’s practice so poignant for understanding the evolving abstraction of material and technology in these times.

Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, on Treaty 6 territory, Shaw spent time in Vancouver, first studying at Emily Carr University, before moving to Europe to complete an MFA at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. He’s been living and working in Berlin for about ten years. The artist’s time across varied landscapes has left traces of local materials, geographies, and infrastructures, which have, in turn, permeated his practice. In an artist talk at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2023, he introduced his work by describing his curiosity around city borders and the transient edges between urban infrastructures and the natural landscape—the nebulous terrain of junctures and psychogeographies.²² For Shaw, these liminal spaces often exist on the periphery of city limits, where plots of land, whether publicly or privately owned, collect both material and conceptual debris. Sites such as train and shipyards, construction sites, abandoned buildings awaiting development permits, and even diasporic immigrant neighbourhoods like Chinatowns have all left their mark on his work. 

Shaw’s sculptures take the form required to communicate his personal encounters and experiences within various sites. Working three-dimensionally, his sculptures occasionally assume the form of a diorama, in which wall-mounted maquettes present a multi-dimensional view into simultaneously archaic and futuristic environments. In his solo exhibition “Loose Leaves,” which opened in late 2023 at Towards, the gallery walls are lined with intricately designed dioramas and slate-grey menus embossed with the daily specials from Hong Kong-style cafés across the Lower Mainland. Each piece is intricately carved and assembled from MDF and wood. In Gloucester Composite (2023), the artist transforms a food truck into the back alleyway of an urban restaurant, foregrounding the commercial dumpster, which, when painted a flat light grey, suddenly resembles a computer microchip. Other works, such as Maxim’s Composite (2023), fuse a deconstructed laptop keyboard with the storefront of a restaurant, featuring Chinese characters on the technological grey sign embossed above a series of dirty windows. In SkyTrain I and II (2023), two rectangular panels playfully depict a passenger commuter train looping around the edges of their frames. By dissecting and recomposing the built environments of Vancouver’s Chinatown with remnants of technological devices, the artist deftly combines our contemporary desire to traverse and explore neighbourhoods virtually with the inimitable and often untranslatable qualities that are the result of decades of brick and mortar cultural perseverance. 

Speaking with the artist on the phone over the past few months, I was interested to hear that his latest body of work–“Instrument Cluster,” a solo exhibition presented last summer at Galeria Wschód in Warsaw–was inspired by the open-pit oil sands mine and bitumen upgrading site called Mildred Lake, located about 40 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. The land is privately owned by an oil-refining company called Syncrude, which is a jointly-owned partnership of four companies. The project’s website describes the site as providing “a replacement supply of bitumen for upgrading when the current North Mine approaches the end of its oil sands deposit.”²³ Since the area is closed to the public, the artist used aerial satellite footage of the landscape as reference, discovering dense configurations of strange machinic forms and figures, formations that inspired the sculptures in this new exhibition. 

Utilizing a subdued and earthy palette, the sculptures—both wall-mounted and arranged like architectural maquettes on a low central platform—feature dusty ochres, metal greys, and rusty terracottas, combining to form a miniature orchestra of machines. Mainly made from MDF, wood, cardboard, plastic, and newsprint, the sculptures come together by way of wood glue, joint compounds, and wood filler, and are coloured with aqueous pigments and varnish. This process produces a semi-transparent and satiny finish that obscures the surfaces’ material identity, making it hard to discern wood from metal or paper. Compelling in their defiance of obvious material origins, the sculptures resemble heavy machinery, tools, and analogue instruments of ineffable purpose. 

Towers (2025) resembles a fantastical refining machine or perhaps a section of the subterranean reservoir used by an ancient civilization, while the shape of Giants (2025) resembles what could be an antiquated dump truck. The initial intrigue of these works arises from their uncanny familiarity, but perhaps their most enduring quality lies in the mystery of their making. Shaw describes his process as both tedious and repetitive, beginning once he has conceived the forms, which result from a combination of material scraps, found objects, and reference images drawn from the sites he’s interested in working with. Once the form is defined, he begins construction, cutting, sanding, and gluing materials together, which are then refined and transformed into a singular entity. Sometimes this involves a mould-making and casting process, and other times, as in X-T4 / GR1s 35 – hybrid (2025), it requires meticulous assembly of many cut pieces to form an absurdly long analogue/digital hybrid camera affixed to the wall. Always frozen in stasis, the tools of the artist’s arsenal render themselves unhelpful allies to the viewer’s insatiable curiosity to determine their purpose. 

Like an amalgamation of technology in a dream, Shaw expertly conflates the often overlooked forms of machines and instruments of everyday life, with a special affinity for the analogue, industrial, and otherwise mundane infrastructure and debris that permeate our contemporary and cluttered world. Viewing his work is a journey through time: from the often archaic peculiarities of his objects to the ways they transform our understanding of the materials, inviting us to engage with their final forms. Understanding the artist’s environmental inspirations reveals that perhaps his most perennially returned-to forms are openings–doorways, clock faces, viewfinders, windows, or archways. These liminal spaces, however, are defined by tensions and dichotomies: a strategy Shaw uses to compress time, making his objects feel both ancient and present.

Mediated by cultural projections, human encounters, and physical forces such as friction, decay, and material entropy, Shaw’s sculptures propel the viewer into action, prompting us to piece together their makings like an archeologist. As static as they first appear, their ingenuity ignites our human desire to project narrative onto the insentient, secretly hoping their mechanical origins will be revealed and their true functions finally discovered. In this way, his work performs a kind of contemporary alchemy, transubstantiating the semi-forgotten debris and formal structures of heavy industry into maquettes to be rediscovered and reanimated anew. Like the relics of a long-lost civilization buried beneath eons of matter, Shaw’s artworks patiently await their time to be shaped and activated by entropy and the willing observer. Through them, he manufactures desire from the ruins of our contemporary detritus and the spaces of our post-industrial peripheries.

Lauren Lavery is a writer, artist, and editor. She is the Associate Director at Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver and the Editor of Peripheral Review, an independent, non-profit platform for documenting and expanding the emerging and under-represented Canadian art scene. She has published art writing for Contemporary Art Review LA, The Capilano Review, ReIssue, BlackFlash, Cornelia Magazine, Public Parking, Peripheral Review, LUMA Quarterly, and in exhibition texts. Her artwork has been exhibited across Canada.   Lavery holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University’'’s School for the Contemporary Arts, and is currently based in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Nations.

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw (b. 1987, Edmonton, Treaty 6 Territory) lives and works in Berlin and Edmonton. Shaw completed his MFA at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2016), his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver (2013) and participated in the Berlin Program for Artists (2021). Selected solo and two person exhibitions include Wschód Warsaw (2025, 2021); Towards, Toronto (2024, 2017); Frieze Focus, London (2024); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2023); BPA// Raum, Berlin (2022); Liste, Basel (2021); and Ashley, Berlin (2018).

Selected group exhibitions include Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2025), Kunstverein Gastgarten, Hamburg (2025); Wschód, Warsaw (2023); Studio for Artistic Research, Düsseldorf (2022); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021); Union Pacific, London (2020); The Loon, Toronto (2019); and Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2018).

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BlackFlash Magazine is offering a professional development opportunity for an emerging practitioner in the arts and culture sector through the Canada Summer Jobs program. This position provides hands-on experience in the production and circulation of a contemporary art publication, while supporting the organization’s Director/Publisher and overall operations. This is an ideal role for someone interested in arts administration, publishing, communications, and nonprofit work.

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