Innehållsförteckning för Autumn 2020 från C Magazine

In this collaborative artist project, Faye HeavyShield and Lauren Crazybull have created new work through intergenerational conversation, exchange, and kinship. Calling out and responding to each other in turn, the resulting works reflect the many ways in which all things are connected: berries, ancestors, Prairie grass, time, stories, relations, ceremony. All part of a wildly complex and beautiful form of gathering, the form of gathering that is life, itself. Faye HeavyShield: I work with the idea of temporality and how time can shift. Time can’t be tied, and neither can our connections to our environment and our history—these things remain a part of us. Niitsitapi have always gathered food, for sustenance, for medicine, and for ceremony. In this pandemic, even though some things are not as physically possible as before,…

Many Canadian art institutions assert their desire to be considered gathering spaces for diverse communities while claiming tenets of inclusion and openness. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, most, if not all, were forced to close their doors to the public and find other ways of engaging with their audiences. The term “accessibility” has been circulated widely in order to encompass an alternative to the conventional institutional experience. While many organizations’ responsive new methods of engagement proved meaningful, they also served to eclipse demands for access that had been made consistently by disability arts communities for years. These ostensibly innovative methods of engagement include increased digital access to collections, livestream artist talks, virtual tours, and the digitization of publications, to name a few. In other words, the same practices…

I first visited Iniskim Umaapi, the Majorville Medicine Wheel, in 2017. I had recently dropped out of graduate school and moved back home from Vancouver, homesick for the wide open Prairie. Moonlighting as a chauffeur for the day, I borrowed my sister’s Pontiac Montana and picked up a group of Niitsitapi youth and their caseworkers and my mom in Standoff, AB. Thanks to my infallible, GPS-like sense of direction we got lost twice, only. The site isn’t particularly difficult to find; we headed east on the highway from Lethbridge, then hit some gravel stretches and, finally, winding dirt roads carved in crown land. The ruts did a number on the Montana’s suspension but like a true rez car, she proved her strength. There, at its base, we met archaeologist and…

“If light does come from within does that make us walking movie projectors? Are we casting form onto a dark screen?” — David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 1991 A mechanical heartbeat is heard in the gallery space, the methodical click-pause-click of a timed slide projector. A Super 8 video projection casts a slice of electric-blue light that spills from wall to floor. The monotone voice of the artist, David Wojnarowicz, is punctuating a film soundtrack of clumsy keyboard chords and canned, synthetic drumbeats. These immediate audiovisual signals are not overwhelming. Instead they draw you in, as if to forewarn, through a multitude of frequencies, that you are about to enter a space indexed by a depth of interior worlds. David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978–1992,…

In September 2019 a nearly 50-year-old man collapsed on the floor of the Amazon warehouse where he worked, just outside Columbus, OH. The Guardian reported that he lay there for 20 minutes in cardiac arrest before receiving medical attention. Other employees were instructed to continue working as usual, methodically placing items in boxes as timers counted down the minutes at each station. In Hito Steyerl’s installation Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016), part of her Art Gallery of Ontario survey This is the future, a robot is shaky on its legs, and quickly seems to suffer some misalignment, eventually collapsing on the floor. Another is pelted with boxes while walking. They are being tested for their capacity to withstand adversity. The robots are workers too: in this case envoys-in-training for…

Câhcacêp: a Cree word that means a little bit of everything. When elders speak with us, even when telling specific stories, it is also about everything. In this conversation, Jerry Saddleback and Jo-Ann Saddleback tell us about Câhcacêp Art & Tea House, the space they recently opened in Edmonton wherein they host exhibitions, bow-making workshops, Cree language classes, and more. Here, they generously share their thinking about how to cultivate gathering spaces that are meaningful, educational, self-determined, and grounding for a wide variety of participants, focusing on the activities in and around this new space that’s been in the making for several decades. The Saddlebacks elegantly illuminate the importance of intentionality in all aspects of life, including artistic practice, and how the pandemic generatively reframes, renews, and refreshes intent in…

The Mandarin word shìchăng translates into “wet market”—a term that entered Western vocabularies with reports of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the theory that the virus was passed on to humans by an animal sold in a Wuhan, China wet market. Media misrepresentations of the markets have been prolific, drawing readers to join xenophobic calls for their global eradication, perpetuating a long history of associating racialized bodies with disease. In most neighbourhoods there is a wet market located within walking distance. These markets—which exist on six of the seven continents and go by many names—are natural meeting places. In afternoons, school children, parents, and elders transition together out of daytime activities into family and social time as they prepare for the evening meal. Local markets reflect and affirm the cultures…

What else can I describe to help create a more complete picture?1 There are approximately 11 seconds of silence before her voice begins, a silence that is loud and grainy when the volume is maxed out on my laptop—punctuated with a few disembodied clicks and what I imagine to be a slow intake of the speaker’s breath. Then, that particular unfolding, wet sound of a mouth as it prepares for speech: “a convex, minutely puckered surface could be called a vertical sea,” she says. Throughout her sentence she leaves small beats after certain words—convex, surface, could be called—pauses for emphasis and an additional breath. The title for Aislinn Thomas’s video is pulled from Guelph-based poet Anna Bowen’s first attempt to describe what she is seeing: to translate her visual field…

Since I’ve moved back to Vancouver, what’s struck me most is the amount of construction. There are the buildings fenced off and boarded up with plywood, the rezoning notices posted like billboards. There are the piles of broken-up buildings—bricks and blocks, glass and wood and dust, amid earth-shaking noise and other debris. There are the scruffy sheets of plywood adrift across huge pits in the ground where some lowrise buildings once stood. In Banff, the salvaged wood in Rita McKeough’s exhibition darkness is as deep as the darkness is might have come from these sites, or from other, rural sites feeding them metals, sand, fuel, and lumber. Many worn and varied pieces of wood were cobbled together, repurposing leftovers from the Banff Centre’s woodshop to form an imagined underground animal…

Randell Adjei’s wide, toothy grin fills the screen. “Hello, hello everybody! If you don’t know, my name’s Randell—” He interrupts his own introduction with a constant string of enthusiastic interjections. “Hello Emily! How y’all doin? Allison! I see you Maya G! Stretch is in the building!” With eyes shut, one could easily imagine he was up on a stage while a stream of exuberant spectators filled the room, all regulars he knew intimately, of course. In reality, it’s a one-way conversation, limited by the restrictive social parameters of Instagram live-streaming. The people tuning in, introduced by a quick flash of their Instagram handles, are not in the room with Adjei, but his warmth permeates through the glitchy, technological disconnect. As the director of community arts collective Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere…

A marriage of ingredients and instructions, recipes seek to standardize. They translate how hands fold and pinch and how temperatures heat and cool. Cooking’s mother tongue is a physical one and recipes translate these acts into words. They sort through the messy and often improvisational practices of turning plants and animals into food. They’re time based and relational. Written in second person, a recipe is a script. To follow is to trust, sometimes blindly. Other times, a cook wanders off course. And sometimes, a recipe even requests such wandering, as artworks often do. Either way, a recipe’s author pulls and pushes our bodies like each limb is attached to a string. Playing these strings, its author has intimate control. Knead this, taste that. Pork adobo and Coca-Cola in Guelph. Maruya—battered…

Walking into the Native Art Department International (NADI) Bureau of Aesthetics, I am immediately greeted by the rhythmic sound of jingles. They are coming from There is No Then and Now; Only Is and Is Not (2018), a projection of Bronx-based artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem dancing in an empty theatre in his powwow regalia. At the end of each loop, his statement reads across a black screen, “I feel like everyone has had a hand in defining Native people, except ourselves.” When Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan began planning for the first Canadian solo exhibition of their long-term collaborative project, they could not have imagined that just as it was set to open, the world would shut down. How bizarre it feels to be in a gallery right now; its…

C Magazine would like to congratulate Kate Whiteway on winning the 2020 C New Critics Award, and Olivia Klevorn on being named the runner-up. Now in its 11th consecutive year, this program gives C Magazine the opportunity to identify, support, and promote the work of promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. C would like to sincerely thank all those who applied, as well as the jurors of this year’s award: Jaclyn Bruneau, Amy Kazymerchyk, and Monika Kin Gagnon. Measures were taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remained unknown to adjudicators. In early April, Para Site, the contemporary art centre in Hong Kong, hosted a livestreamed presentation with curators Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero reflecting on their 2013 exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts,…