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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

Owen Kosmala is a writer, artist, and curator born in Portland, United States, and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. He is passionate about DIY scenes, specifically their overlap and influence within North American fine art.

Sam Lipp challenges notions of property ownership and authority through the appropriation of digital assets. Lipp explores camp as an aesthetic and as an occupation of space. He displays four paintings and one video work at his debut Canadian solo show at Bonny Poons/Conditions gallery. Each oil painting depicts Parisian mug shots from the 1890s, licensed by Getty Images, overlapped with spray-painted watermarks and corresponding serial numbers. The Getty watermarks exaggerate the overarching themes of the exhibition, emphasizing the paintings’ origins as licensed digital property, now occupied by the artist. Each subject is anonymous, with the paintings revealing only the age, occupation, and crimes that the subjects were accused of committing. Lipp conveys this information bluntly through the titles of his paintings, two of which include _29 years. Day Laborer. Anarchist. Vagabond._ (2024) and _19 years. Sculptor. Criminal association._ (2024). This use of impersonal language in relation to incarceration highlights the relationship between authority, imprisonment, and property. By occupying licensed digital properties, Lipp challenges how structures of power disregard human life, while also highlighting a state of exception outside of the law: the grey area of copyright infringement that the artist occupies.

_Copyrights of Man_ (2024) plays repeatedly on the floor of a bedroom attached to the gallery space. Placed next to an unmade mattress on the floor, the video is displayed on a CRT TV connected to two pairs of headphones. Clips of crucifixion scenes from the _Passion of the Christ_ (2004) are overlaid with audio from Lady Gaga’s “Do What U Want” (2013). It almost looks like Christ is lip-syncing to Gaga’s upbeat sarcastic music, resulting in a juxtaposition that is, if anything, aesthetically camp. Overall, the exaggerated contrast of the two copyrighted digital assets Lipp repurposes is emblematic of how “Camp as Paradigm” incites an apprehension in viewers regarding property relations.

Writer

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"Camp as Paradigm" ran from 26 September to 16 November 2024 at Bonny Poon/Conditions, 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._

“Camp as Paradigm” — Sam Lipp

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Please consider making a gift to support the print and digital publication of _C Magazine_, our mentorship programs, awards, and public programming. No amount is too small. Contribute $50 or more to _C_’s Annual Fund and get a free subscription. 


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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. 

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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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> “Don’t ever be surprised 
> to see a rose shoulder up 
> among the ruins of the house: 
> This is how we survived.” 
 
—Mosab Abu Toha 

The thorny caper shrub grows its green berries in parched sand dunes. The branch of an almond tree, heavy with fuzzy fruit, emerges from a stone wall. The hairy heliotrope, with its delicate yellow-throated flowers, has roots well-known for crumbling monuments. Interdisciplinary artist Rehab Nazzal often photographs watchtowers, fences, and check-points across the West Bank, but it is her images of the heliotrope, the almond, and the caper shrub—testaments to the tenacity of the land and the permeability of borders—which are on display at The Next Contemporary in Toronto. “As I Find My Place,” curated by Farnoosh Talaee and Jude Abu Zaineh, presents a tapestry of work by ten artists of West Asian, South Asian, and North African descent. The effect is a chorus demonstrative of the collective power of the region’s diaspora.

Nazzal’s still images rhyme across the gallery space with filmmaker Larissa Sansour’s ode to mloukhieh, the fragrant Palestinian stew made with jute leaves. In _Soup Over Bethlehem_ (2006), the artist’s own family sits around a table eating mloukhieh on a rooftop terrace in the West Bank city. Sansour’s film is black and white except for the food. Grains of rice are yellow beneath the thick stew, and the lemon squeezed over it shines yellow, too. Bowls and spoons are passed lovingly between hands, and the conversation moves naturally from ingredients to borders. The most direct route between Bethlehem and Jericho, another West Bank city where the jute plant grows best, now requires crossing Israeli border controls. The family members trade check-point stories and laugh at the language of occupation. One joke follows, “I’m so occupied these days!” with the bitter punch line, “Aren’t we all?” 

Talaee and Abu Zaineh have constellated works, which share a visual language in pairs, like old friends finding each other in a crowd. Basil AlZeri’s _Magic Potions, Medicine, Love and Disease_ (2023) and Maya Perry’s _A Cymbal for Protection_ (2023) form one such duo in works on paper. In AlZeri’s, a fountain sprouts from a vase in two directions, spreading across multiple paper panels. A serpent curves around the water’s flow, dense paint lending its body a columnar and even metallic solidity, though the animal’s blood flows red from a gash in its belly. Ghoulish human faces look out, eyes bulging from the pages they are painted on. The gruesome entwining of figures recalls Philip Guston’s late-’70s paintings _Monument and Red Cloth_, where tangled limbs are piled high in the post-war images. Perry’s patchwork of pastels on paper has a softer, almost silky, quality. Nine large pages hold the overlapping outlines of 12 moths, in bruise-tinged yellows, browns, and blues. These are beautiful so-called pests, contained in too tight a space. I can almost hear the drone of their wings beating against the pages.

An entangled mutuality and an awareness of distance reverberate across many of the works. Nuveen Barwari typically works with textiles. There is beaded fabric in her pieces at The Next Contemporary, but this fabric is stretched flat and painted in a thick wash of white. The beads beneath the paint form abstract topographic patterns—a landscape turned monochrome, even opaque, as time and space have worn down the contours of memory. asmaa al-issa’s hydrosol tiles are colourless, with shapes recalling meticulous maps. These are impressions taken from etchings drawn by the artist in clay. At the gallery, they are placed at floor level, inviting viewers to crouch down low to see whole worlds, explosive with life, in miniature. 

The lines in Ibrahim Abusitta’s paintings glow in unabashed colour. Abusitta layers black with purples, oranges, pinks, and blues and carves into these, in a scratch-and-sketch style. The outline of a face, a dove, a palm tree, a drone, the sea, or the moon illuminate the images from within, shedding light that has a strong otherworldly quality. I am reminded of Abusitta’s visual essay “Silence of the Birds” (2023), on the impact of his own family’s displacement from Palestine: “To be born in exile is to feel an isolation of the self. The diaspora lives between two worlds while belonging to neither. We carry our histories on our shoulders.” This carrying is a creative and visionary act performed in variation by each artist in “As I Find My Place.” 

The exhibition’s title is taken from a longer text by the artist Hiba Abdallah. The text is printed in full on the first gallery wall the viewer meets: “AS I SEEK THE TRUTH / AS I DREAM ANOTHER WAY / AS I FIND MY PLACE / AS I RELEASE THE PAIN / AS I CONTINUE TO MARCH / AS I RISK IT ALL.” Abdallah’s first-person, present-tense repetition has the ring of a mantra. Its structure suggests an absent opening clause, or a missing root. Repeating “AS I,” the lines carry an implied simultaneity, but with what? With whom? And where, exactly? The premise is absent, or rather, the premise is a longing (to be close? to be home?) that persists. At the entrance of the gallery, _The Great Refusal_ (2016), by Saks Afridi, takes the shape of the Arabic _لا_, or _La_ (meaning “no”). It is an oversized slingshot-shaped sculpture, a reminder that longing has reach.

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“As I Find My Place” included work by Hiba Abdallah, Ibrahim Abusitta, Saks Afridi, asmaa al-issa, Basil AlZeri, Nuveen Barwari, Rehab Nazzal, Parvin Peivandi, Maya Perry, and Larissa Sansour, and ran from 17 February to 20 April 2024 at The Next Contemporary, Toronto.


“As I Find My Place” — Hiba Abdallah, Ibrahim Abusitta, Saks Afridi, asmaa al-issa, Basil AlZeri, Nuveen Barwari, Rehab Nazzal, Parvin Peivandi, Maya Perry, Larissa Sansour

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 language warrior, writer, art historian, vocalist, and artist whose ancestry is comprised of Haida (Kunn janaas), Kwakwaka’wakw (Mama̱liliḵa̱la), Anishinaabe (Fort Williams First Nation), and European. ma̱lidi lives as a guest in Mohkínstsis/Otos-kwunee/Wicispa Oyade/Guts’ists’i on Treaty 7 territory. FREE PALESTINE. END GENOCIDE IN KKKANADA AND BEYOND.


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

##### Call for Pitches for STOP!

##### C161—Autumn 2025

##### Accepted until: January 15, 2025


 In _Experiments in Imagining Otherwise_, Lola Olufemi writes of a will to live differently as “that thing which keeps you alive, or the ferocity with which you detest this world.” After Olufemi, this issue asks: What must be stopped, in an untenable world, so that we arrive elsewhere? To stop—as act, strategy, and sign—counters the relentless, forward pace of progress myths. “STOP!” is a wish, a call, an imperative.  

For this issue, we invite pitches that consider “STOP!” in relation to the aesthetic and political. This encompasses the limitations and possibilities of failure, silence, slow time, and so much more. What role, if any, might cultural production, or even the withholding of cultural labour, have in placing the genres of empire under pressure? The stop is the gum in the machine: a pipeline blockade by Wet'suwet'en land defenders, the labour strike, disrupting the flow of weapons killing Palestinians, the refrain of “shut it down,” and ultimately, the end of this world—and all of its attendant violences—as we know it.

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until January 15. Review pitches, not required to be on theme, are accepted on a rolling basis.
 
Send pitches to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com), with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and indicates the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example). 
 
Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones in a style similar to your pitched piece). We do not publish reprints or previously written pieces. Please see our [writer’s guidelines](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1697147081646416&usg=AOvVaw2LThVx84yWvZVSHyA0KeCG) for more information.

Thank you for understanding that due to capacity, we are unable to reply to all pitches. 

Note about conflicts of interest: we do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.



Call for Pitches for STOP!

Call

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until January 15, 2025.

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“As I Find My Place” — Hiba Abdallah, Ibrahim Abusitta, Saks Afridi, asmaa al-issa, Basil AlZeri, Nuveen Barwari, Rehab Nazzal, Parvin Peivandi, Maya Perry, Larissa Sansour

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Call for pitches for STOP!