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Federation of Canadian Artists 1

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Varley 1

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Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

In C Magazine’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

Review

Bettina Pérez Martínez (she/they) is a curator, writer, and researcher living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her work focuses on Caribbean identity and relationalism, Puerto Rican history and its current politics, decoloniality, diaspora, ecology, and climate change in the Caribbean region. She is a 2022–2024 Bridging the Divides Fellow, a Mellon Foundation initiative, and their work has been published in _esse_, _CENTRO Journal_, _Beyond the Gallery_, and _Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico: Disaster, Vulnerability & Resiliency_.

“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” originates from a phrase used by Justice Edward Douglass White in 1901 during the _Dowes v. Bidwell_ Supreme Court case. The case would delineate the political status of the newly acquired territories by the United States, following the Spanish-American war of 1898, and how they would exist in relation to the United States. The phrase described the archipelago of Puerto Rico as at once foreign for constitutional purposes, while remaining under the sovereignty of the United States. As Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo present in their speculative documentary _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ (2021), this ambiguous colonial relation to the United States continues to negatively impact the reality of Puerto Ricans. 

As the viewer enters the gallery, a corridor appears, built from reflective silver and gold emergency blankets that recall materials used for spacecraft technology. The corridor leads to a vast room, where _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ is presented as a four-channel projected film. The scale of the projection results in an all-encompassing physical experience, forcing the viewer to direct their attention from screen to screen, actively shifting their sense of space. This feeling of spatial disorientation mirrors the film’s interwoven personal narratives of displacement in the necropolitical context of colonialism, and an ongoing climate crisis in Puerto Rico. 

The film begins with footage from a NASA space launch in Florida, with two adjacent screens presenting scenes from inside a plane. Overlaid onto the image of the plane’s interior is an interview with Lizbeth, who recently moved to Florida. Lizbeth describes being forced to leave Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. Alongside thousands of Puerto Ricans that desperately sought to leave the archipelago following the destruction left by hurricanes Maria and Irma in September 2017, Lizbeth acknowledges the impossibility of returning to the Puerto Rico they left, that Puerto Rico will never exist again. It is estimated that 250,000 people have left the archipelago as a direct result of Hurricane Maria and the storm’s aftermath. 

Following these catastrophic storms, the United States provided little help, avoiding accountability via Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated territory. The intimate personal reflections narrated in _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ offer a more humanized portrayal of the ongoing socio-political, economic, and environmental crises experienced by Puerto Ricans. As Puerto Rican author and sociologist Guillermo Rebollo Gil writes in "As It Regards the Ones We've Lost" (2016), “the world in the colony is so tiny and beautiful and heartbreaking, it fits in a dance floor.” 

The image of the dance floor also carries a deeper, painful significance in _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_. In 2016, Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL, during a salsa night at the gay club, where he killed 49 people, and wounded 53 more; 90 percent of the victims were Latinx and half of that percentage were of Puerto Rican descent. In their text “Slow Dancing with Strangers” (2023), Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo express that _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ paid tribute to this tragedy that deeply affected local queer, trans, and Latinx communities, by centring the dance floor as a metaphor for a site of community and resistance. It’s an especially important metaphor given the ongoing state violence that continues to target Florida’s queer and trans individuals. In 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis passed various anti-LGBTQ2IA+ bills that ban trans medical care, remove sexual orientation and gender identity from school curricula, and allow doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ2IA+ patients. 

Throughout the filming process, the artists extended the metaphor of the dance floor by portraying the diasporic subjects of the film as dancers orienting themselves on a new floor: that of Central Florida. Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo document a karaoke bar where subjects sing famous Puerto Rican boleros while surrounded by visual elements reminiscent of home, such as images from the Puerto Rican countryside, and advertisements for the local beer, Medalla. The film also presents other gathering spaces, such as a supermarket with various Puerto Rican staples, and a food court with decorations recreating the colonial architecture in Old San Juan. As these approximations are presented, one of the film’s interviewees, Teresa, calls Florida “a simulacrum.” Diasporic communities displaced from their former homes in Puerto Rico by ongoing colonial violence recreate familiar cultural, social, and historical markers in the colonized lands of Central Florida. As the climate crisis continues to impact the Caribbean, more people will become displaced and be forced to migrate. In exploring the multiple losses experienced by Puerto Rican diasporic subjects, Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo’s visual language rejects the conventions of disaster porn, and instead presents communal gatherings and intimate moments of collective joy under impossible circumstances. The artists portray the liminal and disorienting experience of various Puerto Rican diasporic subjects creating new approximations of home, wherever home may be. 

Writer

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“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” ran from 8 February to 30 March 2024 at Dazibao, Montreal.


“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” — Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Alaina Perez is an artist, writer, researcher, and MFA student in the Individualized Program at Concordia University. She is a member
of the Tahltan Nation and was raised in Vancouver, BC, on unceded Sḵwxwú7mesh, Sto:lo, and s ̱ əlilwətaɬ and xwməθkwəy̓əm territory.

The seventh iteration of the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone/Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) spans seven exhibitions across Quebec, all centred on the eponymous theme of “Creation Stories.” In the exhibition hosted at Art Mûr, the work of 33 artists was curated by Lori Beavis, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Jake Kimble, and Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé, each of whom approached the exhibition from the four cardinal Directions of Spirit. 

Entering the gallery space, I encounter seven poraits featuring women across different generations. One of these images, Cora Kavyaktok’s Cora DeVos, _Family Portrait_, 2022 (2022), is a richly lit digital print that illuminates the smiling faces of three women from three different generations. Their gazes fill the space with a sense of care that makes me feel welcome, as if my presence does not carry the sense of voyeurism I often feel when looking deeply at portraits of women I do not know.

In Sandra Racine’s _Basket_ (2024) series, three baskets are crafted from the most intricate synthesis of form and colour: black ash bark, sweetgrass, and dye all come together in an astonishing tactile composition. Flowers made of black ash bark lie gently upon the surface of the baskets, placed as if they may float away in a strong breeze. Despite the sharp curls of bark that jut outward in every direction, the baskets look inviting to touch. I had a difficult time staying within the permitted station of the viewer. Baskets are made to be touched. They were touched for countless hours during the time of their creation, and I wonder when they will get to be touched again. Racine’s _Basket_ series prompted me to consider how creation itself is a dialectical form of Indigenous relationality. Twisting between the contours of desire and realization, creation is like a memory of a touch that was not felt on our own skin, or a memory of a language that did not even pass through our own lips. It is a language that is older than words, than time itself.

I make my way to the second floor of Art Mûr and find myself in an atmosphere filled with dreamlike sound. I soon learn that this ethereal music is emitted from Cheyenne Rain LeGrande’s ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ _Mullyanne Nîmito_ (2022), a video projection of the artist draped in a radiant fringed shawl constructed of pull tabs. The artist stands strongly in a pair of striking platform moccasins at the edge of a body of water. The song trickles like water in the air, setting a calm tone for the entire floor as it follows me into a large room. I am drawn to the far left corner, where a hide is placed on the floor with the fur side down. Etched onto its skin is an impression of a map, and the words “Home Some of it that I remember.” A small paper house stands upright on the hide, which is placed below a shelf that holds a series of four red walkie-talkies. This installation by seth cardinal dodginghorse, titled _last night I had a dream I was home again_, is a mnemonic re-enactment of the artist’s experience of forced displacement from their ancestral homelands in 2014 due to the construction of the Calgary Ring Road. In my initial encounter with dodginghorse’s piece, I was struck by the contrast between the artist’s playful approach to mapping a familiar place, and the extractivist context of Land surveying invoked by the walkie-talkies. Unlike the imperialist cartographic grid system used to measure, monitor, and control people and Land, dodginghorse’s map is etched onto the irregularly shaped hide. This is a map that cannot be divided into a collection of squares seamlessly integrated into imperialist informational systems. The topography of hide defies the grid—its skin only lends itself to the systems and practices of creation, memory, and storytelling that exist within families and their relations to homelands. 

“Creation Stories” intricately folds together experiences of creation as a relational topography, with textures formed along familial and community lines. Taken together, the works in the exhibition reach far and beyond the telling of any singular genesis—these are stories that have continued since time immemorial, stories of creation that will never end, so long as there are artists who carry the desire to realize new worlds.

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“Creation Stories” featured artwork by Eruoma Awashish, Kaylyn Baker, Haley Bassett, Jordan Bennett, Alison Bremner, Christian Chapman, Craig Commanda, Renée Condo, seth cardinal dodginghorse, Tarralik Duffy, Marcy Friesen, tīná gúyáńí, Jay Havens, Cora Kavyaktok, Uumati Kisoun-Inuarak, Corey Larocque, Cheyenne Rain LeGrande, Maria-Margaretta, Calvin Morberg, Meagan Musseau, Lisa Myers, Melaw Nakehk’o, Luke Parnell, Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, Shane Perley-Dutcher, Melissa Peter-Paul, Jobena Petonoquot, Sandra Racine, Natasha Sacobie, Heather Shillinglaw, Jason Sikoak, Michelle Sound, and Alan Syliboy, and ran from 4 May to 22 June 2024 at Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone/Contemporary Native Art Biennial, Art Mûr, Montreal.

“Creation Stories” at the 7th Contemporary Native Art Biennial

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_Dog and Priest_’s presentation in Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction on 20 November will put Canada’s most important artist in dialogue with titans of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art through to the avant-garde movements of today.

Alex Colville’s _Dog and Priest_ to sell at Sotheby’s New York this November 

Siki N. Soberetonari is a writer and artist living in Toronto, Canada. Her work can be found in _Pitch Black Magazine_ and the _Coming Home_ anthology. Siki is a storyteller at the Toronto Biennial of Art. 

Curated by Nehal El-Hadi, Elicser Elliott’s solo exhibition of paintings features vivid colours, portraying longing memories of the people and architecture of his hometown in Saint Vincent. In _Ramon_ (2024), a man carries a bungalow around his torso like a crossbody bag, and walks away from clear skies and green vegetation. Both hands hold the strap of his bag close to his chest; perhaps he is unsure of this journey? Can he continue to carry this home close to his chest, or will he need to put it down when he arrives at his destination? Elliott’s depiction of Saint Vincent is congruent with the kind of architectural design found across former British colonies. His paintings are replete with dense vegetation and palm trees, streets lined with tar and wooden electric poles, two-storey houses with freshly cut lawns and concrete paved paths juxtaposed with shanty homes built with corrugated zinc and wood, and bungalows with glass louvres and drums to catch rainwater. 

Two paintings face each other on opposite sides of the gallery. The first is _Jo_ (2024), a painting of a giant-sized young girl in a white dress. She sits on top of a shack with her head drooped, carrying a fishing rod. On the opposite side of the room is _Waiting way too long_ (2024), which depicts another seated figure, this time a man, with drooped shoulders amid blurred green surroundings. The paintings share an undeniable resemblance, from both figures’ sagging posture through to the palpable sense of longing invoked by their sulking. Steeped in nostalgic longing, Elliott’s evocative depictions of small gestures across the paintings—a hand clasping a bag, hunched shoulders, and turned backs—ring with the affective life of diaspora migrating to and from Saint Vincent.

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"Neglected Nostalgia" ran from 20 June to 27 July 2024 at BAND Gallery, Toronto.

_C Magazine solicits online review pitches for publication in C Online on an ongoing basis. We welcome reviews from across Canada and internationally, and are especially keen on reviews that engage with art outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. C Magazine offers competitive compensation to our writers. Email your review pitches to pitches@cmagazine.com._

“Neglected Nostalgia” — Elicser Elliott 

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Only half a decade has passed since the early days of generative AI: the days of multimodal systems outputting six-finger hands, AI sound producing nothing but lo-fi gibberish, and not-so-large language models predicting a character, rather than a word or more, at a time. Though seemingly retro by now, it was these glitches and their aesthetics of misrepresenting the world, rather than accurately predicting it, that opened both technological and social cracks for artistic explorations. Now hidden behind neat interfaces and more “accurate” predictions of the world, AI has arguably been “tamed”... or so they want to make us believe. 

It is a sunny afternoon in early November when artist-researcher Beth Coleman invites me for the inaugural exhibition, symposium, and book launch of her work _Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds_ (2023). Coming in from Montreal, where I am pursuing my doctorate in science and technology studies, it feels like a pilgrimage to arrive at the coach house that is home to the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology. Founded in 1963, the centre is where famed philosopher Marshall McLuhan brought his groundbreaking thinking around media, communications, and technology not only to his students, but to the world. At the beginning of the centre’s written constitution, McLuhan writes that “the object of the Centre is to pursue by a wide variety of approaches an investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies.” [^1] And psychic it is, what I encounter once entering the ground floor of the coach house on that sunny afternoon. 

There, framed, on the far wall, a painting. A distorted grimace. Slenderman-like but with an Afro? A person, maybe. Familiar, yet alien. Features perceptible and, at the same time, distinctly exceeding the expected. What we want to see. What we are trained to see, coerced into looking for. In this moment, trying to decipher what I am looking at, it is not the depicted subjectivities that I relate to in this piece titled _Alice Freeman Engineer_ (2023). It is rather the StyleGAN aesthetic that I am holding on to the most. 

GANs, short for generative adversarial networks, are a particular class of AI systems used to generate a variety of different media ranging from text, to sound, to images, and beyond. The project _This Person Does Not Exist_ famously demonstrates the power of GANs to create photorealistic images—created by software engineer Phillip Wang, the website generates a portrait of a non-existent person on each reload. [^2] Seemingly retro by now, early versions of StyleGAN carry a particular aesthetic. Low in resolution with a sort of washed-out quality to them, outputs were veiled in something akin to Photoshop’s soft-focus filter. Depicted features were lacking clear lines, making the borders of subjects and objects appear to melt into each other and with the background. 

Encountering the materialized StyleGAN aesthetic in a physical painting hanging on the wall of McLuhan’s coach house, I am reminded of the collective artistic research laboratories I cocurated in late 2019 and early 2020. Hosted together with the digital arts and electronic music festival MUTEK in Tokyo and Montreal, we brought together interdisciplinary groups of artists, researchers, and technologists to jointly explore the uses and misuses of early generative AI systems in and through artistic practice. Sparked by the lo-fi StyleGAN aesthetic, the memories of working with artists such as Isabella Salas and Lucas LaRochelle draw me in. 
And this drawing in is necessary. The flip side to the rather approachable soft-focus textures and lo-fi aesthetic is the alienness of StyleGAN’s depicted subjectivities. Unlike today’s Midjourney or DALLE, early StyleGAN systems were notoriously bad at making “accurate” predictions of the world. Rather, they presented distorted versions of reality, particularly uncanny when trying to generate humans and lifelike features. Hands with any number of fingers. Floating limbs appearing out of nowhere. Washed-out and distorted faces injecting an atmosphere of ghostly haunting into generated images. 
In the 19th century, German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum coined the term “pareidolia” to describe the human tendency to perceive objects, patterns, and meanings from sensorial inputs where there might be none. [^3] The most common example is people seeing human-like features, especially faces, in the most random places. The somewhat familiar lifelike subjectivities depicted in Coleman’s images trick us into looking for recognizable human features. This initial impulse is followed by a quick disappointment that things are not what they appear to be. The mutation of the familiar into something else is really where the alienness and uncanniness of these images arise. 
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s _Xenogenesis_ book series, Coleman creates a generative AI system that embraces the soft yet uncanny StyleGAN aesthetic in exploring the alien. [^4] In _Xenogenesis_, the main character, Lilith, a Nigerian American woman originally from California, is abducted by extraterrestrials after Earth’s environmental apocalypse. Only by eugenic cross-breeding with the Oankali, the story’s alien species, can Lilith ensure the survival and arguably the evolution of not only herself but humanity at large. It is this cross-breeding that Coleman explores in a series of visual experiments titled Alice. Alice in all her facets is a product of mixing (or shall I say algorithmic cross-breeding) of the Black feminine and “... something else,” as Coleman describes in the exhibition’s accompanying book publication: “animal, alien, what we might call decidedly _non_-human.” [^5] 

It is here, then, where I return to the opening paragraph. _Reality Was Whatever Happened_ resists reduction and futile attempts to “tame” AI. In a way, “taming” these systems becomes the latest colonial rendition of sorting people and things into predefined boxes aimed to accurately reproduce a certain categorical version of the world. This is ultimately where binary utopian/dystopian fantasies propagated in popular discourses surrounding AI emerge from. If we manage algorithmically driven sorting properly, it will lead us to utopia. If not, we receive the dystopian flip side of the same coin. This is really the fundamental question that is currently at stake in binary discourses surrounding AI, art, and creative practice. 

In contrast, by embracing the glitchiness and arguable inaccuracy of generative AI systems, Coleman opens pathways to “other possible worlds,” the wilder places they might lead us to. By doing so, _Reality Was Whatever Happened_ embraces Coleman’s earlier call in the text “Technology of the Surround” to imagine an AI “that can be free—if not to imagine then to generate—speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not.” [^6] Through releasing and following AIs into wilder territories, Coleman’s work troubles the narrative and technological borders of current modes of AI-driven content production. Rather than obsessing with binary futures—the obsession with generative AI either replacing or enhancing human creativity—an Octavia Butler AI explores the multiplicities of alternative worlds, spaces as places, which feral AIs might come to generate. What these territories come to be won’t be known until we reach them—until, as Indigenous technoscience scholar Michelle Murphy wonders, we “produce a world where undecided futures are brought into the present.” [^7] Reality will be whatever has happened. 


[^1]: “Vision + People,” Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, https://cultureandtech.utoronto.ca/vision-people
[^2]: This Person Does Not Exist, https://thispersondoes-notexist.com
[^3]: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch- gerichtliche Medicin, vol. 23 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1866), https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb10087039?pa ge=,1
[^4]: “Xenogenesis Series,” Octavia E. Butler, https://www.octaviabutler.com/xenogenesis-series 
[^5]: Beth Coleman, Reality Was Whatever Happened (Berlin: K.Verlag, 2023), 14.
[^6]: Beth Coleman, “Technology of the Surround,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience 7, no.2 (2021), https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/35973
[^7]: Michelle Murphy, “Speculating on the Future in Postcolonial Social Sciences,” Histories of the Future, Princeton University, 2015, http://histscifi.com/essays/murphy/future-postcolonial-social-sciences 

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Maurice Jones discusses Beth Coleman’s project _Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds_ (2023), which follows AI into wilder territories beyond binary utopian/dystopian terms.

One Thing: AI Be Wilding: Beth Coleman's Octavia Butler AI

Aman Sandhu is an artist and writer working between Montreal and Glasgow. His installations often include drawing, moving image, sculpture, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that come into view through improvisation.

Sahar Te is an artist and writer whose practice exists at the intersection of text, installation, and time-based media. Her interest in media, politics, literature, theatre, and acoustics inform her work. Te’s engagements span language and poetics, aesthetics and semiotics, social dynamics and inter-species, and oral histories.

Our Third Sun

Emma-Kate Guimond is a performance artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has published essays in _Espace art actuel_ (2023) and _Inter, art actuel_ (2024), and works as a creative ally for the theatre company Joe Jack et John. Her recent exhibition and short film _The Plot_ (2024) was presented at Centre CLARK in Montreal.

Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt

Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit artist and educator, born in Michi Saagiig Territory, Toronto, ON. Davis investigates land-based and archival research, with calls to action, healing, and works authenticized by lived and intergenerational experience. Davis utilizes movement, visuals, and sound/media in their practice. For over 30 years, Davis has advocated for equitable, IBPOGM art and liberated futures.

Cara Tierney (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who lives/works on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. A settler of Scottish-Irish-Italian descent, their work investigates the way meaning is structured in, around, and through the body. They are oriented toward building more equitable and sustainable futures.

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

Adrien Crossman is a queer and non-binary white settler artist and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in so-called Hamilton, ON. They are interested in the affective qualities of queerness: how queerness can be felt through specific aesthetics and sensibilities. Crossman cofounded and co-runs the online arts publication off centre and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee's Philosophically Pornographic Practice

Andrea Dávila is a researcher, writer, and museum professional interested in the cultural and disciplinary intersections within art history, focusing on the visual dialogues and continuities within contemporary Latin American art. She graduated from Barnard College, and has held curatorial internships at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in _ARTS.BLACK_, _Art in America_, _Frieze_, _BOMB_, _The Believer_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _C Magazine_, _Studio Magazine_, and other publications. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Terra Foundation Research Fellow for _Threewalls_, a Chicago-based arts organization. Her book, _Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art_ will be published by _The Feminist Press_ in March 2024.


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

Alexa Bunnell is an emerging artist, writer, and fermenter based in Mohkinstsís.

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

Born in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and currently living in Tkaronto, traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda award-winning poetry collection _Wanting in Arabic_, and of _Lyric Sexology Vol. 1_. Her writing is widely published in journals and anthologies, and translations of her work have appeared in French, Greek, and Arabic. She has co-edited special issues of _TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly_, on cultural production, and of _Arc Poetry Magazine_, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary writers. She is also an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and Editor at the _Journal of Critical Race Inquiry_.

Composition: give up your own

eunice bélidor is a curator, researcher, and writer born and based in Montreal. Her current curatorial research focuses on letter writing as creating affective archives; she is interested in the intersection of epistolary writing with care, feminism, anti-capitalism, and racial issues.

What is the Safe Word?

Liliona Quarmyne is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, and organizer based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Mi’kmaq people. From Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents. She performs and creates both as a solo artist and with various companies, facilitates community programming, and is an experienced curator and artistic director. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.


_proxy_ by Mo Glitch: Text

Salena Barry is a writer from Toronto, Canada, who is currently based in London, UK. She was a 2021 Frieze New Writer and a 2022 Jerwood Writer in Residence. She has written for institutions including Delfina Foundation and Site Gallery as well as for publications including _Frieze, ArtReview,_ and _Emergent Magazine._

Weaving Through the Binary: Qualeasha Wood's Textile Inheritances

Jasmine Gui is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist, arts programmer, and PhD student based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She works in paper, ceramics, tea, and experimental book formats through the inter-arts and publishing space Teh Studio. 


Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea

D. St-Amour (they/she) is a writer, book-maker, and recovering arts worker. Since 2011, St-Amour has held curatorial, administrative, and research positions at a range of institutions, including the AGO, the Walter Phillips Gallery, Art Metropole, and Galerie SBC. St-Amour regularly writes about artists’ books and publishing practices through the lens of visual arts and media history, and is slowly publishing a series of queer sci-fi and speculative fiction books through their slow-press project, specific. place (with co-editor S F Ho). Recently, St-Amour completed an MA in Art History/Visual Cultures at York University, and is currently an MLIS candidate at Western University in London. 


Anni Araújo Spadafora (she/ her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her work spans performance, music and sound, and textiles. She regularly studies at the Marshfield School of Weaving (Vermont). Recent project and performance sites include Extrapool (Nijmegen, NL), Milieux Institute (Montreal), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is also a founding member of the band New Fries, who have released music with Telephone Explosion Records (Toronto) and Soul Jazz Records (London, UK). New Fries has toured across Canada and internationally and opened for The Pop Group, Neil Hagerty, The Ex, and Xiu Xiu (among others).


Marking Time Spent Absurdly

Amanda Shore is a white-settler arts worker, critic, and curator based in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS). 


Love Made Object

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working toward equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling making, writing, curating, collaborating, and performing. lambert is currently a PhD Researcher at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, in Artistic Practice in Visual, Applied, and Spatial Arts. Their research focuses on mapping collaborative movements with craft through a developed methodology of cruising. They have published, curated, exhibited, and been collected internationally. 


_Exploratory Touch_ by Trevor Novak: Text

Holly Chang is an artist, curator, researcher, and writer living in Toronto who has recently completed her MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York University. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation mixed-race identity. She maintains cultural ties with her cross-cultural identity and draws on her hybrid background for inspiration. 


The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar

Suzanne Morrissette is an artist, curator, and scholar from Winnipeg. Her father’s parents were Michif- and Cree-speaking Métis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire Loyalists and Mennonites expelled from Russia. 


Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Trained as an urban planner, they took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies and currently practice as an independent curator, writer, and service designer. Shalaka curates projects for Textile, a hyperlocal project on the Haldimand Tract, and is a Visiting Curator at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery. They currently hold roles at OCAD University and, more recently, at the Blackwood. 


Tilling: The Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice: In Conversation with Luther Konadu

Hannah Hanski (b. 1985) is a Canadian neo-folk artist blending textile and digital media. With a deep belief in the power of narrative, she pursued her studies in Folklore and completed her MFA at Carnegie Mellon in 2017. She currently resides in a church in rural Nova Scotia with her dog, Moshe.


Cat Bluemke (b. 1993) makes art about work and play. She graduated with an MFA in Design for Emerging Technologies at SAIC, and is currently Digital Exhibitions Consultant at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Recently, her practice has spanned augmented reality, game design, performance, and risographic prints.



Jonathan Carroll (b. 1990) is an artist and programmer creating games, software, and performances. His work unfolds as a dynamic collaboration between artists, audiences, and their interactive digital interfaces. He lives in rural Nova Scotia where he creates digital-art tools.

From Algorithms to Aesthetics: Unlocking the Mind of CritBot.AI, Pioneering Critic

Stevie Ada Klaark is an interdisciplinary artist, adjunct professor, and writer. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Their work appears in _Paprika!_ (Yale University), _Chicago Review_, and _Mn Artists _(Walker Art Center). Klaark lives on unceded Anishinaabe lands in Michigan. 



Untangling Beauty from the Elite

Erin Reznick is a curator, producer, and publisher whose research tends to the assembly of community, specifically in social spaces that negotiate public and private domains. She is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto. She was the Co-Editor in Chief of _Phile Magazine_. 


You Only Live Twice

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. Her writing has appeared in _BlackFlash Magazine_, _C Magazine_, _The Uniter_, _CV2_, _Prairie Fire_, and _PaperWait_.

Petal by Petal: Feminine Desire as a Conduit for Home

Coco Zhou is a writer and cultural worker living on an estuary where river meets sea, on the unceded territories of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

“A Political, Ethical, Existence Practice”: In Conversation with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva

Mercedes Webb / ma̱lidi / məlidi (they/she) is a writer, art historian, and artist with mixed ancestry; Kunn janaas, Mama̱liliḵa̱la, Fort Williams First Nation, Italian, and Welsh. Language reclamation, currently Kwak̓wala, figures prominently in their practice. Central to their practice is perennially learning non-authoritative, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-ableist ways of being.


Kaylee Maciejko is a settler of Swedish, Polish, and Scottish heritage, and an artist and arts administrator based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. 


masus wəλəɫəʔos? we hear the brook

Meech Boakye (BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto) is an artist and writer currently based in “Portland, OR.” Their practice is rooted in relationships with flora, fungal, and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in a community.


spirit-flesh-soul-icon

Matt Nish-Lapidus’ practice probes the myth that computers should be useful rather than beautiful through examining contemporary technoculture and its histories and impacts. His work results in diverse outputs including publications, recordings, installations, performances, software, and objects. You can find Matt under various aliases and collaborations including emenel, New Tendancies, and, < blink >.

Joyful, Poetic Microworlds

Presented by C Magazine and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA)](https://icca.art/)

We’re excited to launch the 3rd annual Indigenous Art Writing Award, an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform three standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

Indigenous writers are invited to submit a single non-fiction text about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, and/or phenomenon therein. Suggested length for submissions is between 1000-2000 words.

The winner will receive $1500 CAD; editorial support to prepare their article for publication in a future issue of _C Magazine_; and a two-year subscription. Each of the two runners-up will receive $1000 CAD; an open invitation to develop a pitch for a different text to be published in _C Magazine_; and a two-year subscription. All participants can request feedback on their submitted work, and will receive a one-year subscription.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should primarily be in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we ask for translations. The award will be adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. 

There is one submission per applicant. Please note that submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere. Complete the [submission form](https://forms.gle/wBGeNxC3R4vxRAke9) by **November 22, 2024.**

Please write to [editor@cmagazine.com](mailto:editor@cmagazine.com) if you require any accommodation during the application process. Note that measures will be taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators. More information about the kind of writing _C Magazine_ publishes can be found on our [Submissions page.](https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions)


###### We are pleased to welcome Mikinaak Migwans and Justine "Tini" Stilborn as the jurors for the 2024 Indigenous Art Writing Award. 

**Mikinaak Migwans** (he/they) Mikinaak Migwans is a member of Wiikwemikoong Unceded Territory, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, and Curator of Indigenous Art in the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Their research focuses on the politics of place-making from the land to the museum, with special emphasis on textile arts in Anishinaabe territory. Migwans has worked with the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts & Culture at Carleton University, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation in M'Chigeeng First Nation, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

**Justine "Tini" Stilborn** (she/her) Justine "Tini" Stilborn is a Regina-based artist, designer, and Brand & Marketing Advisor at OneHoop Indigenous Advisory Services, as well as the Communication & Digital Program Manager for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective. With a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Regina, her work often explores identity through consumerism and global culture, inspired by pop culture, comics, and animation. Her projects include public art in Saskatoon and Regina, as well as a solo exhibition at the Fifth Parallel Gallery. She also serves on the CARFAC SASK and CARFAC National Boards.

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Call for the 3rd Annual Indigenous Art Writing Award

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The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. The award is presented by _C Magazine_ and the [Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones ](link)(ICCA).

Indigenous writers in the first decade of their career are invited to submit a single text up to 2,000 words in length about an artist, project, exhibition, performance, event, initiative, theme, and/or phenomenon therein.

Applicants must identify as an Indigenous person. There are no geographical restrictions, although we strongly encourage those based in Canada to apply. Submissions should be primarily in English, but may include non-English words or phrases. For submissions entirely in another language, we require translations. It is free to make a submission. Please note for the purposes of this award, submissions must not be previously published or slated for future publication elsewhere.

The award is adjudicated by ICCA staff, _C Magazine_ editors, and an external juror. The winner receives a cash award and editorial support to prepare their article for publication in _C Magazine_, and the runner receives a cash award. All participants receive a subscription to _C Magazine_.

The 2022 winner was awarded the Momus Emerging Critics Residency, supported in part by [Momus](https://momus.ca/), together with the presenting partners.

Submission

Indigenous Art Writing Award

Program

Applications are currently closed, stay tuned!

Program Information

Lois Taylor Biggs' feature [_Archives, Bones, and Polaroids_](https://cmagazine.com/articles/archives-bones-and-polaroids) is published in C151 "Greif" (Spring 2022). 

The winner of our inaugural Indigenous Art Writing Award, co-presented with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, focuses on the late artist Kimowan Metchewais, who sought to build a personal photo archive toward his “imagining of a post-[Edward] Curtis world, without ‘ethnographic baggage.’”     

2022 Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner

Presented by _C Magazine_ and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones. The Indigenous Art Writing Award is an initiative created to support, compensate, and platform standout individuals who are advancing critical and creative thought about Indigenous contemporary art. 

In partnership with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones, we are now accepting applications for the 2nd annual Indigenous Art Writing Award.




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