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Smith Foundation

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Capilano Review

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LISTE

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Clarington

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Joy Xiang is a writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is currently Editor of _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_. 

Reviews Editor

Designer

Publisher

Gossip, as “unverified” information, has complex relations to power. As a historically maligned oral tradition, with gendered roots, it asks that we question our sources—who we trust and why—as well as who has been afforded belief or legitimization over others. In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip?


Gossip

Review

**Xalan Xaaji** is a Somali art critic who weaves their creative threads as a multimedia designer, writer, and editor. Their work digs into dissident wisdoms, embodied rituals, and metaphysical expressions.

Uman’s work transports us to realms of desire. Fifty canvases on display offer a rare glimpse into her inner world. With each painting, Uman celebrates her journey through life, and the winding path that brought her from Kenya to Denmark, and eventually to New York.

Vivid colours and intricate patterns on canvas bring to mind the aesthetics of Somali textiles, while producing a sense of pulsating energy that echoes the rhythms of nature. In _Zigzag Rolled on A Blunt_ (2023), Uman pairs kaleidoscopic colour with a visually captivating composition of shapes and lines that draw the viewer in. Undoubtedly, each canvas possesses a vitality that is as alive and dynamic as the world that surrounds us.


With _Midnight in the Park and Looking for Trade_ (2023), Uman presents a strikingly erotic depiction of cruising. A giant figure splinters off into countless forms: high-heeled feet, erect penises, and sharp white teeth that, from a different angle, resemble the sun hiding behind mountains. In place of a legible portrait, the blend of colours and swirling patterns evokes the essence of anonymous sexual encounters, bringing to light the hidden desires and connections that are often obscured by the light of day. The painting challenges our perceptions by revealing the many layers that exist in a single glance. The dancing figure in heels could also be the shadows cast by trees late at night. The deep shadows and flickering lights of the midnight setting also add to the sense of mystery that permeates the scene. Through this work, Uman reveals the fleeting nature of everything under the night sky, inviting us to explore the hidden depths of ourselves and our desires. 

In the park, danger and desire coexist, creating a space where queer and trans individuals can connect and discover new aspects of themselves, even amid societal repression. _Midnight in the Park and Looking for Trade_ offers a powerful reminder that intimacy and connection can still be found in the shadows, even when forced to remain hidden by societal norms. Uman prompts us to question our desires and consider what it means to want everything in abundance, and to summon that abundance in the present rather than waiting for tomorrow’s loss. The exhibition weaves a dreamlike narrative that pulls us in and holds us captive. In this way, Uman’s work speaks to the interconnectedness of all things, including what exists at the fringes of our realities, drawing us deeper into an intricate web of life.

Writer

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“I Want Everything Now” runs from 4 May to 17 June 2023 at Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York.

“I Want Everything Now” — Uman

Feature

Emily Guerrero is an archivist and community librarian living on the unceded territories of the xᵂməθkᵂəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. They last wrote about gossip for the journal _Archivaria_ in 2022. Emily is a parent and a Leo.

>##### 1. 

Late last summer, during a particularly delirious stretch of juggling two jobs and no spare childcare, I came home from job No. 2 to a large manila envelope on my kitchen table. Bearing stamps from the ’80s, but recently postmarked and featuring a red stamp declaring “Archive!”, the envelope spilled out a thick file folder labelled _Censorship_. Its initial title, _Porn_, peeked out underneath the label, covered but not erased. The file, full of clippings, photos, and notes, was a temporary portal from my messy kitchen to ’80s feminist Vancouver, created and sent to me via archival crate digging, a bit of time travel, and a hefty dose of gossip. 

>##### 2. 

An archive, by design, is a sleight of hand. Full of records documenting activities, organizations, and lives, its base goal to contain and preserve a legible history for future transmission is the direct result of colonial positivist logics of objectivity and capture. Collections are presented as naturally occurring phenomena, disconnected from the many hands and systems of power that touched and shaped the information within: who chose to record some information and omit others, why the processing archivist selected these files and discarded others, whose stories and activities reach the bar of becoming history. 

When new collections are added to an archive, they first need to be formally processed. Processing requires going through every box and every file to learn their contents and organizational idiosyncrasies, and then mapping these into a finding aid, a kind of treasure map to what lies within. As much as possible, dimensions, authorship, dates, format of contents, and anything else deemed important is recorded. In much of archival theory, processing is an objective exercise: information is only taken from what is on the physical object in front of you. Files are removed and returned in their “original order.” Emotions aren’t part of it. In practice, archival work can start to feel more like a good gossip session. There’s the focus on the mundane details; a vague illicitness that comes from the porousness of information moving from private to public; the possibility of digging out unexpected connections that illuminate systems of power and refusal. 

The archive I know best is the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive, housed within VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver on xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and səl̓ ílwətaɬ territories, where I worked for several years. The space holds the records of all of VIVO’s 50 years of projects, publications, and administration, along with the records of social activists, other defunct ARCs, and media artists who have lived in the city. It is also home to the largest collection of video art and independently produced media in Western Canada, spanning formats from open-reel to born-digital. The materials held in any given archive are connected in some way by virtue of being placed together in the space, whether that be geography, shared identity, or relationship to an institution. When the records amount to a network of artists, arts workers, and activists across half a century, these connections become a deep web of relationships. 

As an archivist, your role is part wayfinder and part witch; you have to know enough about every collection to be able to point a researcher in the right direction (while never _quite_ having time for your own research). You need to know how to teach students to read a finding aid and systematically navigate numbered folders, while also paying attention to the nudges at the back of your brain that point you to that one file with the hand-bill from 1975 that you KNOW you saw last winter. Requests for digitization open up stories about how a mildly fraudulent EI claim provided the funds for a film project; which “collaborators” were on-and-off girlfriends for a decade; who might have an ambivalent relationship to their past work. In other words, you become the biggest gossip. 

>##### 3. 

The analogue and tactile delight I received in the mail last summer was one half of a recent mail art project _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_ (2022) by Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney.[^1] Using the archives at VIVO as a site of activation, Meyer and McKinney were drawn to material that documented fierce splits among feminist organizers in Vancouver throughout the ’80s. The dossiers chart out two political camps within ’80s Vancouver, an outpost of the larger feminist sex wars. On one side, radical feminists argued that all sexually explicit media was harmful and a form of gendered violence; in 1982, members of the Squamish Five calling themselves the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade eventually took direct action by firebombing multiple porn shops in the city. At the same time, another group of activists and artists were organizing against the creep of government censorship of queer art, leading campaigns and conferences. 

Participants in the project signed up in advance and were mailed at random one of two files, representing a “working file” from activists within each group. The files, with labels _Porn_ and _Censorship_, are a mix of archival reproductions and speculation. “Some of the records are real, others we imagined based on scraps, remnants, and gossip,” reads the project description. (The respective titles are another sleight of hand—the contents of each dossier speak more directly to the other issue, a type of opposition research.) 

_Porn_ is full of news clippings about anti-censorship organizing: handbills from conferences (and itemized receipts for the videos screened at them); a jumble of hand-jotted notes on sheets of a “while you were out” pad of paper; a library due-date card for the dyke S&M classic _Coming to Power_ (1981) by SAMOIS; a ticket stub from “Confused: Sexual Views” (1984), the video installation by Paul Wong that was censored by the Vancouver Art Gallery before its debut. 

_Censorship_ gathers more hand-jotted notes and quotes pulled from the archive, alongside a Polaroid of a porn collection used in anti-pornography workshops; press clippings about the Red Hot Video bombings; a communiqué from the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade. The object that made me pause the longest was a small scrap of fabric with a hot-pink label: “A STICK WRAPPED WITH CLOTH MATERIAL SOAKED IN GASOLINE OR SIMILAR LIQUID.” Paging through both folders from _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_, the differing tactics unspooling in front of me showed two deeply diverging conceptualizations of control and violence. This schism runs straight through to today—the political deal that anti-porn feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin made when they pushed to get anti-obscenity laws enacted in Canada is the earlier version of current TERF/“gender-critical” feminists’ alliance with right-wing attacks on the bodily autonomy of trans people.[^2] Meanwhile, the fight against censorship led by queers and sex workers has continued as the terrain of struggle has moved from physical media to the internet. 

This mix tape from the VIVO archive is part of a larger archival remediation project, Archive/Counter-Archive, which organizes research and case studies at audio-visual archives across Canada, focusing on community-based collections “created by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities.”[^3] At VIVO, the case study is centred on the theme of gendered violence. When McKinney and Meyer started looking, they were drawn to material in several separate collections in the archive that detailed this schism around pornography and censorship within Vancouver feminisms. Ideas around gossip, pornography, censorship, and a queer public are ones that the artists have delved into before. Their installation _Tape Condition: degraded_ (2016) at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives in Toronto played with digitization, consent, and the murky place porn holds in recording gay histories. A VHS digitization station was erected in a cozy and purposely timeless space, simultaneously evoking aesthetics of the ’80s and the present day. The ongoing performance lecture _The Digital Afterlives of Queer Porn Archives_ (2016–ongoing) considers what to do with _Slumber Party_ (1984), a DIY porn created by lesbians in Toronto in protest of censorship. Long rumoured to exist, the only known remaining copy was tracked down by McKinney and Meyer through chains of gossip and friends of friends, a single 8 mm tape with a complex history radiating behind it and forwarding to the present.[^4] 

>##### 4.

Gossip can be useful, a way of cutting through institutional bullshit and bypassing the unspoken rules that so many of us trip over as we enter spaces that never thought of us existing and don’t particularly care to imagine us now. It can also be deeply fun. 

As a queer living in proximity to dyke neighbourhoods my whole adult life, and working in arts spaces a good chunk of that time, the lines between history and gossip sometimes feel beside the point. Maybe this is a universal experience of the researcher, but I feel a disorienting specificity when researching and writing about the scenes and communities that are, well, mine. The degrees of separation between figures in the archival record and my life outside its walls are often few, and sometimes nil. At what point does gossip turn into passing on a shared history? What does public vs. private look like in spaces where people’s jobs, intimate relationships, and artistic production are hopelessly intertwined? I have no definitive answers, but I’m greedily drawn to these connections, to the unexpected crossovers that give me the dirt and the back story. 

A paradox of the archive, especially felt by those who have sorted and discarded files, is that there is never “one” “true” story—and as often as not, there is a chasm right where you are looking for these histories. _And_, the scraps and gossip found within them are so often precious fragments, requiring and deserving of care to knit back together.[^5] 

Another paradox—archives are endlessly appealing spaces of research-creation, _and_ the core job of the archivist is to wrangle millions of sheets of paper and videos in various decaying formats, contending with a near-constant backlog of items to process, tasked with making sense of the histories in our care as we go along shepherding these objects into a future. 

In a conversation over Zoom, McKinney and Meyer talked to me about their mutual love of vintage stationery and the mundane ephemera that might or might not be saved. As McKinney explained, “A lot of the stuff we’re referencing in the folders are kind of like documents we made up to represent gossip or scandals as they’ve been told to us. An example would be Paul Wong’s ‘Confused Sexual Views’ being removed from the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was in the press. It was in the news; we could also ask Paul for his records about it, or his take on it, but we were wondering if there were good records of the actual everyday experience of that having happened, what would they look like, and so Hazel had this pad of blank ‘while you were out’ phone message things, so we made one to represent Paul getting this phone call from the Vancouver Art Gallery. Which is not the phone call itself, and probably never even happened, but it’s a nice sort of way to create a record of this gossipy thing.” 

This slippage between things that exist in the world today and the things that might have once, or are desired to have, existed is one of the pleasures of _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_. Archival spaces like VIVO’s hold a dense network of relationships, their records imbued with all the affection, joy, hurt feelings, and drama relationships entail. Like almost any archive, this one is an incomplete history, shaped by structural inequities, colonial violence, and silences. One way of considering this network is as an ecosystem, created by those whose stories are held within, those who work with the records daily, and those connected to the space via projects and affinities.[^6] When making sense of these deep entanglements, this ecosystem of papers and tapes and digital files, what can you do but gossip alongside them? 

[^1]: Full dossiers can be seen at: http://archive.vivomediaarts.com/dossiers
[^2]: For a deeper analysis, see Jude Ellison S. Doyle’s article “How the Far-Right Is Turning Feminists into Fascists,” _Xtra_, April 1, 2022, https://xtramagazine.com/power/far-right-feminist-fascist-220810
[^3]: From https://counterarchive.ca/welcome
[^4]: For more on _Tape Condition: degraded_, see Amy Fung’s article “Gay Liberation, Sex Dungeons, Gossip, and What We Want in Art,” _Canadian Art_, September 13, 2016, https://canadianart.ca/features/hazel-meyer-cait-mckinney 
[^5]: The term “precious fragments” is a reference to the scholarship of Kim Lawson, whose work and mentorship has shaped a lot of my archival practice. From the title of her 2004 thesis, “Precious Fragments: First Nations Materials in Archives, Libraries and Museums” (master’s thesis, University of British Columbia), https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0091657 
[^6]: This line of thinking is indebted to Vanessa Kwan and Dan Pon at grunt gallery, from the catalogue for grunt’s exhibition “An Insufficient Record: The photo-ethics of preserving Black Vancouver” (2022) curated by Nya Lewis. 

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History

Feminism

Sexuality

Emily Guerrero writes on Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney’s _The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us_ (2022)—a mail art project on the feminist sex wars in ‘80s Vancouver—to explore the systems of power that determine whose stories become history. 

Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives

Marsya Maharani (she/her) is a researcher, arts administrator, and curator working with the collectives Younger Than Beyoncé and Gendai. Marsya’s doctoral research explores practices of collective care and radical friendship as grounds for work culture and labour practices.

Petrina Ng (she/her) is an artist and organizer. In addition to her work with Gendai, she is also a member of the collectives Durable Good (a small publishing studio) and Waard Ward (a floristry and gardening initiative that supports newcomers).

154Maharani_Ng.pdf

Institutional critique

Work

Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng, current stewards of Gendai, collect a critical mass of anonymized accounts from racialized art workers navigating institutions that remain exploitative. They make the case for the prioritization of exploited workers over institutional reform, all towards collectively-led ecosystems.

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We Should _Talk_:  Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts

Nic Wilson (he/they) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik Territory also known as Fredericton, NB, in 1988. 

In the many iterations of her performance _ground and cover me_, Jessica Karuhanga traces the perimeter of institutional buildings in movements she describes as “deliberate but intuitive.” In this version of her performance curated by Gary Varro as part of QALEIDOSCOPE: Queer Film and Performance on Tour, the squeak of her sneakers echoes through the open, silent spaces of the Remai Modern, on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon. She makes her way across the polished concrete in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, superimposing her body onto the view of the South Saskatchewan River. As she moves closer to each member of the audience, the minute sound coming from her headphones goes from silent, to barely audible, and back to silent.  

 

Both times that I have seen _ground and cover me_, I have been struck by how Karuhanga’s movements, made of small repeated phrases, induced a similar vocabulary of repetition among those gathered to watch. At the Remai, Karuhanga’s movements lead the audience along a fairly narrow hallway. We continually reorient ourselves into and out of her path, while trying to find to a better vantage point that won’t obstruct the view of those around us. This vague sense of participation momentarily disrupts certain boundaries between audience, performer, and institution, but the performance is far from a gesture toward utopian unity. It seems to be more of an analogy for the careful negotiation required by racialized, queer, and disabled artists (to name just a few communities) who are increasingly called upon (both implicitly and explicitly) to make their experience of intersectional oppressions a part of their art practice.  

With this performance, Karuhanga probes notions of opacity. The vocabulary of her movement is available while the music to which she performs is not. Her gaze and attention remain somewhat indifferent to the crowd of onlookers. Her headphones conspicuously reinscribe the boundary between the performer and the audience, like a proscenium arch transfigured into a piece of wearable technology. Challenging what an audience might assume they are entitled to, Karuhanga’s headphones and their personal sound track preserve a moment of sovereignty within the performance. As she circumnavigates the third-floor mezzanine in front of a largely white audience, I contemplate the toll of this type of measured vulnerability. Karuhanga’s performed boundaries are a reminder of the need to protect oneself. 

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_ground and cover me_ by Jessica Karuhanga  was performed on 11 February 2023 as part of QALEIDOSCOPE: Queer Film and Performance on Tour, at Remai Modern, Saskatoon. 

_ground and cover me_ — Jessica Karuhanga  

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With essays by curator Rui Mateus Amaral and artist Paul P., and lush photographs by artist Scott Treleaven, this elegant book expounds on the late American artist Scott Burton’s _Garden Court_ (1990–1992), a plaza created for BCE (now Brookfield) Place in downtown Toronto. Completed after Burton’s death from AIDS, it is the culmination of an eccentric sculptural practice that, as the preface notes, “performed as both conceptual art and functional furniture.” _Garden Court _ memorializes and kindles renewed interest in a sensitively designed public-art space that welcomes visitors to rest, countering the destructive, disembodied financial speculation of Bay Street with unscripted and unproductive human leisure.

Amaral and P. both provide their own fulsome descriptions of _Garden Court_—similar, but different—triangulated by Treleaven’s photographs, which coax us to go experience the plaza in the flesh: its granite benches, planter, pond, promenade, and tall mushroom-like metal lamp-posts.


Besides Burton, the trio reacquaints us with another gay man who made the project happen: the remarkable Peter Day, an art consultant (among other callings). _Garden Court_ emerges as a collaboration between the two men, one that endures to be animated by future generations, queer aesthetes and random passersby alike. That the work was finished after both men’s deaths suggests it will remain perpetually open to informal collective use, never achieving completion because sociality is its active agent. The work has occasionally been altered—a dead artist cannot complain—with anti-homeless metal ridges added to Burton’s benches, for example, undermining its democratic aspirations in favour of biopolitical control. 

I recall the debate over Richard Serra’s _Tilted Arc_ (1981), rejected by the office workers it greeted at the Federal Plaza in Manhattan. Writing on the controversy in 1985, critic Gary Indiana provocatively suggested that the true “public sculpture” legacy of the corporatist Reagan (and Mulroney) era was the transformation to the city’s visual landscape that came from skyrocketing numbers of homeless people on the streets. Living testaments to capitalism’s failures, the unhoused are often hidden away by cities unwilling to admit any responsibility for their immiseration. However, Indiana continues, they “occupy real space, as distinct from the space of idealistic projections, utopian fantasies, and masturbatory empires.” 

This beautiful publication re-enchanted me with an overlooked piece of Toronto at a time when the city seems beyond redemption, its immoral pandering to developers and the police reaching new lows. However, the city’s queerest, most vital cultural currents tend to thrive in spite of Toronto, not because of it.


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_Garden Court_, was published by Amaral and P. Scott Burton, Belgium, 2022.  

_Garden Court_, Scott Burton — Rui Mateus Amaral and Paul P.

Steph Wong Ken is a writer currently based in Tkaronto, near a forest of black oak. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

"Worlds appear from her big mouth": The Mutiny of Online Open Letters

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture, and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin. 


ma ma is a Toronto-based curatorial collective consisting of Magdalyn Asimakis and Heather Canlas Rigg.

Perpetual Scofflaws

22nd Annual "Being Scene" at Workman Arts

**Shawn Tse** 謝兆龍 (he/him) is a father, artist, filmmaker, and community organizer. He is a member of aiya哎呀, a collective creating spaces to remember the emotional and geographic loss of ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ | amisk wacîwâskahikan | Edmonton’s Chinatown; co-organizer of Chinatown Greetings, an arts-based fundraising plat form exploring ways to build healthy relationships between the artist and Chinatown community; a consultant for the CanAsian Arts Network, a national digital platform sup porting Asian Canadian artists; and an actor and coordinator for Third Space Playback The are, committed to creating spaces of dialogue to promote community change and social justice. 

A Garden in Chinatown on Indigenous Land

**Peter Sealy** is a historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. Current projects include a history of photography’s remediations and a study of the Berlin Wall as it appears in films. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. 


**Linda Zhang** is an architect, drone pilot, and educator whose scholarly and artistic practice studies memory, cul tural heritage, and community identity as they are indexically embodied in matter, emergent technologies (including VR, AR, and AI), and material processes. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. 


Resisting Either/ Or: _Shanzhai_ Photogrammetry 

amanda wan (they/them) is a queer han chinese settler based on the unceded, occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Wau tuth) First Nations. Their MA thesis project asks how the “Asian” body is produced through erotic mediations, and suggests that staying with the erotic ambivalence around what is aestheticized as in/organic, im/material, or self/ other can enable reciprocity to become a form of queerly reproductive labour. amanda also creates poetry and artwork in the form of zines, illustrations, and published writing in _Room Magazine, Augur Magazine, LooseLeaf Magazine_, and elsewhere.

Queer Asian Diaspora as Sensibility

Godfre Leung is a critic and curator.

His writing has recently appeared in _ArtAsiaPacific_ and _ReIssue_, and his recent exhibitions include “Offsite: Christopher K. Ho” (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2022) and “TJ Shin: The Vegetarian” (The Bows, 2022). He is the Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəyə̓ m, Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

Vancouver Photohistory and the Politics of Disappearance

**Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong** is an artist and trained architect based out of New York City. Her creative practice lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and the public realm. Through site-specific architectural interventions, she creates experiences that activate forgotten or unused spaces, and that can spark people to encounter each other in unexpected ways.


 Linda Mae’s: An Architectural Past Life

**Tak Pham** is a curator and critic who graduated from OCAD University with an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice. He has curated exhibitions for the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2019– present); Contemporary Calgary (2022); Varley Art Gallery, Markham (2020); Nuit Blanche Toronto (2017); Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto (2017); Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto (2017); and Y+ contemporary, Scarborough (2016), among others. His writings and reviews have appeared in _Canadian Art, Espace art actuel, esse arts + opinions, Galleries West, Studio magazine, ArtAsiaPacific_, and _Hyperallergic_, and he currently works as Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Canada. 


AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works.
She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design,
The New School; and Performa Biennial. Her writing has been published in _Art in America_,
_Artforum_, _TheAtlantic.com_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _frieze_, _Fashion Theory_, and _Journal of Curatorial Studies_, among others.

The Spatial Imaginaries of Karen Tam 譚嘉文

**Michelle Bui** is a Montreal based artist working in photography and sculpture. Her research lies in the use of material culture as a creative modality. Looking for points of combustion between objects, Bui elicits an array of physical feelings that conjure both pleasurable and confounding sensations, offering a space where sensory identity can unfold. 


**Shellie Zhang** is a multidisciplinary artist. She creates images, objects, and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity, and assimilation are implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences.


Artificial Artifacts

Aamna Muzaffar collaborates on space, text, and moving image projects with artists and arts organizations as an independent creative director and technical supervisor. Based in Toronto, she is the Assistant Curator at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art.

Golden Jubilee: An interview with Suneil Sanzgiri

Tilling: Permanence for Black Diasporic Art in Canada 

Composition: Transplant Collaborations

Nadine Khalil is an independent arts writer, editor, researcher, and curator. After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she is currently advising art institutions such as the Ishara Art Foundation and Goethe-Institut on programming and editorial strategy. She is former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine _Canvas_ (2017–2020) and her writing can be found in _art-agenda_, _Artforum_, _The Art Newspaper_, _ArtReview Asia_, _Artsy_, _Broadcast_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _FT Arts_, _Ocula_, and _Women’s Review of Books_.

Ebb and Flow / Moving Through Mourning

_C Magazine_ is seeking a passionate and inventive design intern to assist with the design and production of two print issues and related digital assets. As a valuable member of C’s team, interns play an important role in promoting and nurturing critical engagement with and knowledge of contemporary art. Working with the Design Director, the design intern will gain worthwhile practical and conceptual experience in the fields of design and publishing. We are committed to ensuring an enjoyable, educational, and rewarding experience.


Details

Responsibilities

Please submit your CV, a brief cover letter, and a small portfolio of relevant work demonstrating your current interests and related experience. Applications should be addressed to the _C Magazine_ Publisher and sent to info@cmagazine.com with the subject line “Design Intern.” Please also communicate any information specific to fulfilling any academic program requirements.


How to Apply

Design Internship

_C Magazine_ accepts applications for part-time academic and volunteer internships, typically three times per year. As members of _C Magazine_'s team, interns play an important role in promoting and encouraging critical engagement with and knowledge of contemporary art while gaining valuable experience in the field of publishing. Internships are focussed around key areas of our operation, and recurring opportunities are available for editorial, communications, and publishing positions. Descriptions and application information specific to each internship are available with the positions listed on this page. 

C Internships

Program

Please note that we are currently operating with reduced internships. For specific information, including current opportunities and application details, please select the position you are interested in (under related events).                   

We are also interested in hearing from those who would like to get involved with _C_ by volunteering occasionally and in a specific capacity.


Positions and Applications

As members of _C Magazine_'s team, interns play a key role in promoting and encouraging critical engagement with and knowledge of contemporary art, while gaining valuable experience in the field of publishing.  



Applications will be reviewed until June 12, 2023. This position runs from July to December 2023.

Apply

_C Magazine_ seeks a passionate and inventive design intern to assist with the design and production of one to two issues.

Join _C Magazine_ for a drop-in social to celebrate Issue 154 “Gossip” (Spring 2023) and its contributors, and say hello to the _C_ team. All are welcome! 

Snacks, drinks (cash bar serving beer, wine, cocktails, and non-alcoholic options), and gossip to be had.

**About C154 “Gossip”**                                                                                                           
In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip? [Read the editorial.](https://cmagazine.com/articles/editorial-gossip)


C "Gossip" Social

Event

Join _C Magazine_ for a drop-in social to celebrate Issue 154 “Gossip” (Spring 2023) and its contributors, and say hello to the _C team_. All are welcome! 


You’re invited to submit a letter in response to C Magazine Issue 154 “Gossip” by JUNE 25.

Selected letters will be published in C155 "Codes" (Autumn 2023).

The Letters column features a selection of 100-400 word letters to our editors, contributors and readers, and is printed at the front of every issue. A $100 honorarium is paid to each writer whose letter is selected for print. Published letters may be edited lightly for length and clarity.

Letters should engage the previous issue—its theme, articles, images—and related things beyond the magazine’s pages. They may be informal, informative, creative, inquisitive, speculative, critical, or any other number of things imaginable in the epistolary form. The column is intended to create space for dialogue on and around contemporary art and to continue conversations between issues, themes, and writers.

Read the [Call for Pitches](https://cmagazine.com/events/call-for-pitches-for-gossip) for this issue.

**Send letters to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com) with LETTERS in the subject line.**

Call for Letters: Gossip

Call

The Letters column features a selection of 100-400 word letters to our editors, contributors and readers, and is printed at the front of every issue.

C The Visual Arts Foundation, publisher of _C Magazine_, seeks dynamic and devoted Board members. C’s Board of Directors work collaboratively and with staff leadership toward strategic vision and oversight, and to review and develop policies through committee work. In line with our current Strategic Plan, Board members work with the Executive Director and Staff to: 

- Diversify and sustain C’s commitment to excellence in editorial and artistic content in the magazine and across our platforms                                             
- Enhance engagement with contemporary art criticism and artistic practices for our Diverse Audiences                                                                                          
- Strengthen organizational capacity and knowledge

C considers the inclusion of perspectives fostered by voices from diverse groups to be of central importance to any successful endeavor of the foundation, and works to achieve this by applying the [Diversity, Equity, Access and Inclusion policies](https://cmagazine.com/about/accessibility) to the makeup of the organization, inclusive of the Board of Directors.

C welcomes applicants of any age or background and encourages applications from energetic and committed individuals who are familiar with or are contributors to the visual arts community in Canada. We strive to have a variety of professional experiences, and are particularly keen to hear from individuals with HR or financial backgrounds. Applicants need not have prior Board experience.



Board membership is voluntary. Board members do not receive financial compensation or another benefit. According to their means, board members support the organization and maintain a subscription to _C Magazine_ during their tenure. Board members have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of C and must declare any potential conflicts of interest as they arise.

C is an equal opportunity employer that uses an Affirmative Action Program to actively increase the representation of equity-seeking groups in the art sector, with current priority given to Indigenous, Black, Persons of Colour, deaf, mad and disabled and 2SLGBTQIAP persons. Applicants may voluntarily self-identify using [this self-identification form](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/c_self_identification_169a2a34e4.pdf?updated_at=2022-09-30T19:47:53.116Z); only those who self-identify can benefit from the C Affirmative Action Procedures. All applicants are assessed based on their merits; Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority.

_C Magazine_ is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment and providing accommodation for those who require it. Please let us know of any accommodation we may provide at any point during the application or selection process. If contacted for an interview, please communicate if you require accommodation.

Information for Applicants

Qualifications

- Serve a 3-year term, renewable, beginning in Fall 2023                                         
- Attend up to 8 meetings per year in person or virtually (currently via Zoom)       
- Attend and support _C Magazine_ events                                                                 
- Oversee the financial  health of the organization                                                 
- Steward C’s strategic plan, Board and corporate governance structures, policies, and practices                                                                                           
- Work with staff (Executive Director and Editor) to develop and implement policies and practices                                                                                                 
- Map and activate personal and professional networks                                         
- Participate in fundraising                                                                                 
- Identify or arrange sponsorships and donations                                                  
- Support _C Magazine_’s editorial vision                                                                   
- Facilitate community and local partnerships                                                     
- Represent C’s mandate and vision in communities across the GTA, Canada and internationally                                                                                                                 
- Implement all with a view to anti-racism, anti-oppression, equity, access and inclusivity                                                                                                                      


_C Magazine_, established in 1984, is a contemporary art and criticism periodical that functions as a forum for significant ideas in art and its contexts. Each issue explores a theme that is singularly engaged with emerging and prevailing perspectives through original art writing, criticism and artists’ projects. Our content focuses on the activities of contemporary art practitioners residing in Canada and Canadian practitioners living abroad—with an emphasis on those from Black, Indigenous, diasporic and other equity-seeking communities—as well as on international practices and dialogues. We are committed to facilitating meaningful, pluralistic, interdisciplinary, historically-engaged and imaginative conversations about art.

_C Magazine_ readers are visual arts professionals and those with a keen interest in the forms, content and meaning of contemporary art - including artists, curators, art writers and critics, dealers, educators, students, consultants and art collectors. We place an emphasis on graphic design as an important aspect of our readers' experience. We also consider the importance of our collective responsibility to the environment—printing _C Magazine_ in limited runs, in full colour UV inks, on uncoated FSC certified paper, perfect bound with an aqueous coating on a matte cover.


About the Magazine

_C Magazine_ is published three times each year by C The Visual Arts Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization established to present ideas, advance education and document contemporary visual art and artist culture. C The Visual Arts Foundation features the work of more than 200 writers and presenters each year in the magazine and related programming.

C acknowledges that the majority of discourses pertaining to contemporary visual art have been informed by Western European thought, values and practices. The inclusion of perspectives from diverse groups is central to the vitality of contemporary art, art criticism, its communities and more broadly, society. Please see our policies and procedures, or read more about [diversity, equity, access, and inclusion at C. ](https://cmagazine.com/about/accessibility) 

About C The Visual Arts Foundation

Policies and Procedures

C The Visual Arts Foundation Call for Board Members

Get Involved

To apply, please send a confidential statement of interest along with your CV to info@cmagazine.com by June 30, 2023.


C The Visual Arts Foundation, publisher of _C Magazine_, seeks dynamic and devoted Board members.

Call for Board Members

_C Magazine_ employs one publishing intern to assist with the production of one to two issues and related educational and fundraising events. As valuable members of _C_’s team, interns play an important role in promoting and nurturing critical engagement with and knowledge of contemporary art, while gaining practical experience in the field of publishing. Publishing interns will develop their skills in writing, communications, data management, online content management, online and social media marketing, event planning and logistics, volunteer management, donor relations, sponsor development, and grant writing. _C Magazine_ is committed to ensuring an enjoyable, educational, and rewarding experience.


Tasks

Work periods and application cut-off dates: Given that the most common arrangement for this internship is academic credit, the work periods typically align with the academic calendar (Sept-Dec, Jan-April, May-August), but are subject to variation. 

Applications are received on a rolling basis until the following dates:      
September start—July 15                                                                  
January start—October 15                                                  
May start—March 15                                                      

Please submit your CV and a brief cover letter, indicating the internship dates you are applying for, your current interests as well as related experience, to Sara Knelman, Publisher by emailing hr@cmagazine.com.


Publishing Internship

Education

We are currently accepting applications for three publishing internships per year. Applications are received on a rolling basis until the following dates:                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
September start—July 15                                                                                                       
January start—October 15                                                                                                     
May start—March 15                                       


_C Magazine_ employs one publishing intern to assist with issue production, circulation, and fundraising and educational events.  

Header

Garden Court, Scott Burton — Rui Mateus Amaral and Paul P.

C Mag

The Latest

“I Want Everything Now” — Uman

Gossipy Scraps, Gossip(ing) Archives

We Should Talk: Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts

ground and cover me — Jessica Karuhanga

Issue 154