Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2019 från C Magazine

How can a riot be memorialized? Specifically, in the case of the Stonewall riots—the legendary five days of rioting in 1969 that launched the gay liberation movement in New York—how did the act of fighting back against cops enforcing the criminalization of being queer and trans so quickly become a corporate-sponsored parade in which the police participate? Why does the Gay Liberation monument (1980), a George Segal commission for the 10th anniversary of the riots, depict four figures quietly socializing in Christopher Park instead of scores of drag queens throwing high heels and ripping parking meters out of the ground? In the leadup to this year’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, artist Chris E. Vargas chose, in his residency and exhibition at the New Museum, to focus on…

The original bench, on Main Street in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, was made from driftwood and tree stumps. Someone from the neighbourhood had planted a little garden there and the bench was right next to it. Starting in 2008, artists Charlene Vickers and Neil Eustache would go hang out on the bench every week. They would spend a long time sitting around and looking at people going by. Special guests were invited to join them or sometimes people would just drop in. Maybe there would be coffee or snacks or someone would bring music or a radio. They would watch for people who looked interesting, or look to see if there were other First Nations or Indians going up and down the street. They would try to spot all the…

Pejvak (PJVK) is the ongoing collaboration between Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Through their multivalent, intuitive approach to research and living, they find themselves in a convergence and entanglement with like-minded collaborators, histories and various geographies. Rouzbeh Akhbari (Tehran, Iran, 1992) is an artist working in video installation and film. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of political economy, critical architecture and planning. Through a delicate examination of the violences and intimacies that occur at the boundaries of lived experience and constructed histories, Akhbari uncovers the minutiae of power that organizes and regiments the world around us. Felix Kalmenson (St. Petersburg, Russia, 1987) is an artist whose practice navigates installation, video and performance. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter…

Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver January 18 – March 24, 2019 “But John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition […] So I will let it alone and talk about the house.”– Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) These are familiar little things. Unfolding like a banquet of discriminating tastes, I savour the trifles in silver, fastening ties sweetly knotted, trims dressed in wooden pearls. On first entering the room, the sculptures appear in carnivorous arrangement, a tangled density in which shapes assume and consume other shapes. But as I advance, step after step, the pieces settle into goodhumoured positions and remain handsomely spaced at an agreeable distance. Anne Low’s solo exhibition, Chair for a woman, features six meticulously crafted sculptures that could…

Scrap Metal, Toronto October 11, 2018 – March 30, 2019 By the time I reached the final room of the gallery, my mind had begun to bob away with the visual tides of the videos before me, yet my body persisted to interrupt. It nagged me with reminders of its existence through fidgety hands and hastened breath; in lifting my finger to check my pulse, I confirmed that it was noticeably high. Though I had tried to move beyond it, I had not fully recovered from the threat of moments prior—or rather, from what I had perceived as such. It is rare to confront a threat or fear in art, but this is exactly how I would catalogue my experience of Tbilisi-born Vajiko Chachkhiani’s They Kept Shadows Quiet. This sense…

I was very young when I heard about the death of Neil Stonechild, but I remember the story well and I remember how it unravelled for years after. I did not know Neil, but we were both from Treaty 6 territory. We were only a few years apart in age and living in urban centres, with roots in rural First Nations within the territory. There is no doubt in my core that we encountered the same systemic and structural barriers imposed upon Indigenous people that, with age, I have had the opportunity to name and frame. He did not have that opportunity. Almost 30 years later, in March 2019, I read an article on the CBC website1 reporting the vandalism of Freeze: Stonechild Memorial (2019), a sculptural installation by Rebecca…

Arguably, the most well-known undertaking of HIV memorialization is the NAMES Project's AIDS Memorial Quilt, imagined by activist Cleve Jones. First presented to the public in 1987, 1,920 handmade quilt panels covered a space larger than a football field on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Each panel was a tribute to a friend, lover, parent or stranger who had died with HIV. In 2012, for the XIX International AIDS Conference, hosted in D.C., the Quilt was shown again in its entirety, for the first time in 16 years. Too large by that point to be displayed all in one place, with over 47,000 panels dedicated to more than 90,000 individuals, the quilt “blanketed the capital”—as promotional material at the time declared—laid out over the National Mall, as well as…

Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver October 18 – November 17, 2018 Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that studies the relationship between heat and other forms of energy. As a field of study, it emerged in tandem with the development of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution and the zenith of European imperialism. In Steven Cottingham’s exhibition Heat, Death, the first principle of thermodynamic theory—that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed—becomes a metaphor for reflecting on the developments of these historical moments and their lasting reverberations into the present. Whereas a decade ago, one might plausibly have argued that climate change was primarily a technocratic problem resolvable through tweaks to existing practices—tougher fuel efficiency standards, say, or more recycling plants—today such approaches feel inadequate. We are…

Festival of Cinematic and Audio Visual Experimentation (CAVE), Minneapolis January 5, 2019 A monument is a kind of story. It tells the narrative of a place, a time and a people, and it does so from a very particular perspective, just like history books. And just as the veracity of history books suffers from their having been written by those in power, monuments are built by ruling forces. In the innovative two-channel video piece Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer 1 & 2 (2018) Sky Hopinka reaches back into a specific facet of Native American history in order to deconstruct it and ultimately offer a more complex version. The oldest masonry fort in the US, San Marcos, also known as Fort Marion, was built in 1685 by the Spanish, and changed…

In July 2016, I, along with thousands of smartphone users across Canada, became captivated by an appbased game called Pokémon Go, built upon Google mapping and location-service technology. Users must venture to specific locations in order to progress to new levels. Public spaces are designated locations where users can “level up,” which means landmarks, monuments, memorials and sites of historical significance become destinations for players on a regular basis. I lived in Halifax at the time of the game’s release and can attest to the short distances I had to walk between monuments—the city is rife with them. I often looked around and wondered if other players in the vicinity were taking any opportunity to engage with and learn from these objects. By August, this question began to be addressed…

I met up with Amy Lam and Jon McCurley for a casse-croûte breakfast at Canada Hot Dog in Montreal's Rosemont neighbourhood following the opening of their exhibition Entertaining Every Second at Centre Clark and a few weeks before the unveiling of their two-part billboard project $100 Bill With South Asian Scientist Added Back In (2019) with Dazibao. Having rarely shown or performed in Montreal, Lam and McCurley arrived with an exhibition tuned to a fine pitch, following presentations in Calgary at Truck Gallery and in Saskatoon at AKA artist-run. Addressing Western imperialism in Asia—Vietnam in particular—and systemic anti-Asian racism within the Canadian art milieu, the exhibition at Centre Clark marks a turning point in their more-than-a-decade-long practice, notably occupied by the long production period for their feature film, Bugs (2015),…

Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017 (2017) is a two-channel video installation by Stephanie Comilang that collapses documentary and science fiction to tell a story about Philippine migration to Germany. The work is narrated in Tagalog by the film’s unseen protagonist, Paradise, who speaks from our future. Her past is one of reincarnations. She has lived as the lauded Filipino nationalist José Rizal, who migrated to Germany temporarily in the 1880s—a statue of whom was erected in the small town of Wilhelmsfeld in 1978—and the Berlin-based archivist and Filipina migrant Lourdes Lareza Müller, who relocated to Germany in 1968, both of whose lives are fictionalized here. José and Lourdes were two of very few Filipinos living in the country in their respective times. Paradise lives in a space and…

Untitled Art Society, Calgary January 12 – March 23, 2019 I participated in Mekinawewin, to give a gift (2019) by Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal during a sudden snowstorm. As thick flakes fell outside the window of Untitled Art Society, Cardinal welcomed me into the space. A timeline surrounded us on the walls, broken into three sections: “Dog Days,” “Horse Days” and “Days of Industry.” In the centre of the room, tables were arranged for paper-making, with plastic containers of pulp and water, wooden frames to form the paper and flat panels for drying. Dried pieces of blank paper, marked by the hands of participants, had been placed onto the timeline by Cardinal beneath broad headings that trace the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada. On the window, Cardinal had included translations…