Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2018 från C Magazine

The Ear of Society, a foam rubber ear fashioned by art collective Chto Delat?, is big enough for a grown woman to curl up inside for a moment’s rest, or perhaps to die. It beats like a heart, held up by human hands. Voices catch and stammer as they speak, shout and even scream into it. But while it might provide a comfortable mattress, The Ear of Society offers no real respite, no answer in return to all those who plead with it, no helpline. The people’s protest needs a new form of address, and Chto Delat? – whose video The Excluded in a Moment of Danger (2014) dramatizes all of this – turn instead to “paradoxical breathing,” designed by opera singer Alexandra Strelnikova in 1945 to assist both singers…

The anchor points of Catherine Telford-Keogh’s Source Supplements are four round objects, sheets of glass and Plexiglas covering the contents of grey and speckled containers in the shape of chunky, plastic dive-bar ashtrays. Sitting on the gallery floor, they’re immediately intriguing, while Plexi boxes hang on the wall like windows. Katie Lyle’s text for the exhibition calls the floor works “islands,” but when I walk over and look down into them, they resemble pools to me. The things they contain (Unico® Stuffed Manzanilla Olives, Maynards Swedish Berries, White Wood Letters by Artminds®, 9” pigmented FlexFoam-iT!® iii, lego® found objects and 3D-printed cookies – six of the almost 20 that make up The telephone melted into a pond of blue goo in Jasmine’s clammy palm after a caller’s obscene message) seem…

On the floor are three oversized cedar dice resting on a colourful blanket surrounded by people. The smooth, polished edges of each die invite touch. You feel the weight, perhaps lighter than you expected. Breathe the faint cedar aroma. Feel the grooves that define letters, words. The first die reads “I am,” “We are” and “They are,” each repeated on two sides. The second die reads “fairly,” “somewhat,” “deeply,” “so,” “really” and “not.” Five sides of the third die read “sorry,” and “tired of this” on the sixth side. A moderator explains that the dice will be rolled in sequence, and the participant will then read the words aloud as they come up. The third die completes the sentence and expresses an apology, or lack thereof. There is tension. Does…

After gently pouring tea into each of our cups, Phyllis Lambert pushes a plate of delicate accompaniments arranged for our meeting in my direction. A shortbread cookie seems mess-free, so I take a few bites even though it is fairly small in size. I don’t have time to nibble, I tell myself, and put down the last bite of the sweet. Sitting in the conference room on the top floor of the Shaughnessy House at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, I reach into my tote bag to pull out a copy of the exhibition catalogue for Passion Over Reason: Tom Thomson & Joyce Wieland recently presented at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Inspecting the exhibition’s didactic panels during my visit, I had discovered that many works in Passion Over Reason…

At the beginning of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, William Gates and Arthur Agee, two promising young basketball players from poor Chicago neighbourhoods, dream of what they’ll buy once they’re drafted into the nba: a house for Mom, a Cadillac for Dad – an exit, in short, from the cycle of poverty, addiction and systemic racism that’s defined their lives so far. As Gates explains, “Basketball is my ticket out of the ghetto.” The boys have just finished middle school and are soon recruited by St. Joseph’s, an upscale suburban high school, to fulfill the glory dreams of an abusive white coach. Agee gets cut after his freshman year and his family can’t afford a rise in tuition, so he transfers back to his neighbourhood school. Gates is kept on,…

A floating foil balloon in the shape of an angel fish was gently moved by our arrival. More helium sea creatures drifted lazily through the dark gallery and its episodic beams of light. A few dozen folding chairs were scattered in front of a massive projection and sheets of colourful printer paper peppered the floor. In the centre of the room was a floor-to-ceiling glass case containing an array of technologies that frankly seemed too elaborate for what appeared to be happening: the projection of various films, one at a time. Also present were: a grand piano, a rotary phone, a stereoscopic projection of an analog clock, plus the Yeast and the Host the titular characters in this work by an artist for whom exhibition is the medium. THE YEAST…

Strangergames If we agree on a broad definition of games as rule-bound, goal-directed activities that involve choice, then we can conclude that their ends and means are two key elements. What is at play when games are the proposed format of an artwork labelled as performance art? And how can we define its means and ends in the context of art production and reception, and of the agency of the viewing subject, i.e. the participant? What follows is an art historical account of Michael Portnoy’s supposed infiltration of the art world when he allegedly landed from the worlds of dance and experimental comedy in 2000 with Strangergames, his “choreographed salon” at New York’s MoMA PS1. His performances here established an explicit engagement with games and systems of play as their…

Brooklyn-based artist Brie Ruais recently participated in a residency in a Nevada desert where she lived and worked in isolation for two weeks. This experience provides the context for her recent solo exhibition at Cooper Cole, Attempting to Hold the Landscape 2016–2017. The desert seems to ask: How far could you make it? How long? Could you survive here, with us, or will you have to destroy us, clear us away and fill us in? Most desert-dwelling animals live in holes they make or find in the earth (a cave, a dug-out shelter, a secret hiding place). And while many humans also live in homes made of earth (brick, ceramic tile, adobe), very few of us live in homes of our own making or occupy spaces that were truly made…

What would provoke a painter to dabble in perfumery? In 2010, Megan Hepburn received the Joseph Plaskett Award for excellence in painting, and in 2015 she was shortlisted for the rbc Painting Competition. Her abstract oil paintings employ vibrant colours that add subtle movement and drama to otherwise dark and arrested palettes. The works lead you to humid environments in shades of green, and dimly lit, sophisticated spaces with purple, red and deep warm tones. When Hepburn and a number of other painters were surveyed for a feature on Canadian painting in Editorial Magazine, the first thing they were asked was to describe the landscapes in the places they grew up. Hepburn’s reply was still life, Impressionism, bored teenager and maybe a bit of Emily Carr too: I grew up…

Letting your creations fly At the forefront of my own creative pipeline, interactive fiction games serve as a vehicle for the presentation of a story. They make up the skeleton that holds all the components together and dictate how that story will grow and develop. If I think too closely about what “makes” something a game while developing one, it’s like setting an undefinable finish line for a project. One can contemplate and contextualize, something I do a lot myself, but at the end of the day I try to leave this question, what makes or what doesn’t make a game, for the post-mortem of a project in order to allow a creation to live, breathe and then die. Building a sustainable future for games Having been involved with the…