“Watt’s models and props suggest that queerness is not confined to a location. Instead, it is everywhere waiting to be discovered and activated in the places we expect it to be as much as the places we choose it to be. The pain, loss, love, and desire that flow through nightclubs and bath houses can be just as potent in a laundromat or pool.”
mixed media
“The way these artists leave traces of our culture in their work continues to shape the ways I understand our histories, our present, and our futures. […] None of them are looking to create a clean-cut narrative of Métis culture, and–even better perhaps—they question if there really is one. But they are looking to our future while honouring those who came before us.”
“Writing about art has become a way for me to explore my own identity and cultural heritage, to engage with complex ideas about representation, history, and creativity. […] Art has become a mirror, reflecting not just the world around me, but also my internal landscape—my memories, emotions, and thoughts.”
“Frei Njootli’s works become sites of contact for ongoing confrontations: friction between the abstract and concrete, Indigenous ways of being and settler-colonial power structures, and demonization and romanticization of Indigenous bodies.”
“Making art, reflecting, means caring more than is normally necessary while also ignoring more than is normally necessary. It means parsing through the constant arrival and disappearance of images and information, often without warning or context. It means we must decide to be calloused or catalysed.”
“We don’t know what we’re making until we make it. When I shared my poem with Christine Fellows and Chantel Mierau, two brilliant artists I was over the moon to collaborate with, the page dissolved and burst open all at once.”
“To look at the surface of things is not enough: engaging with the objects meticulously crafted by Jennifer Laflamme, the Toronto-based artist otherwise known as Mifi Mifi, is a necessarily sensuous, embodied act, an invitation to touch the surface of an object in order to be pulled directly into its intricate world.”
“I think these are the reasons this form of making is so interesting to me. It’s a connection to a rich canon of cultural production and a conversation with history. […] I’m never exactly sure where the work will take me, at least conceptually. I am more concerned with the process(es) and ultimately the rhythm of the work.”
“Although many Indigenous artists use positionality to ground their work within a cultural and geographical context, Manuel Axel Strain takes this to another level, immersing us in a reality beyond oppressive structures.”
“With a focus on the everyday lives of Black queer kin, “Audacity” plays with embodiments of masculinity and femininity within recognizable gestures and expressions of Black queerness.”
“Hobot’s work creates a sense of being present in another place while standing right where you are. In the stark white of the gallery, even in the digitized white of a screen, she leads the viewer through a maze of coalescing propositions.”