Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2020 i C Magazine

It is day six of my 14-day quarantine and the couch cushions have finally yielded to the demands of conformity, marks furrowed into the foam like a defeated countenance. The loneliness of solitary isolation is almost tempered by the casual acquaintance I’ve made with this shadowy impression of a permanently reclining figure. The surrounding apartment is undergoing a metallurgical transformation all its own, with aluminum building up in every corner; three times a day the accretions mount in a clanging jumble of cylinders and serrated disks. Stripped of soggy papers that picture radiant climes, the canned peaches, tuna and beans become indistinguishable—but so do many of the things I once considered important, as life comes to a frightening standstill. Twenty-eight years ago, the United States was weathering a different kind…

“It’s like a twist of the arm,” says Toronto-based artist Kathleen Taylor as she describes her performance She-Orc (2019),1 in which she played the titular role, a riff on the Lord of the Rings character that she describes as being “raised in suburban Ontario by humans.” 2 Taylor appears to the crowd in green face makeup with prosthetic ears and teeth, carrying a hamper full of laundry. Backed by the orc theme music from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), she dumps her laundry on the wet grass and begins to violently cover it with soil. It is at this point that the arm begins to twist. As Taylor starts to scream in a deep, anguished voice and writhe on top of the soiled clothing, members of the off-camera audience…

In the exhibition Condolere Sanctuaries, Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Eve Tagny converted Centre CLARK’s Room 2 into a multi-sensory garden refuge. “Condolere” in late Latin translates to “suffer together” and in this context alludes to the garden’s potential as a site for reparative healing. Refugia, or places of refuge, referenced in the work of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are the ecological areas in which species regenerate following catastrophic events. The cultivated garden, as an extension of and expansion upon the private domicile, is a refuge for the body, memory and identity. In this way, Tagny’s installations in Condolere Sanctuaries offered a similarly resurgent potential in response to contemporary and historical trauma. The garden as refuge, however, presents a paradox, since places are cultivated not from a void, but rather from specific…

I met Sajdeep Soomal, curator of the exhibition Architecture after the Asylum, at Toronto’s Trinity Square Video, as he gave a tour and discussed architecture and psychiatry. “Psychiatry decides if you are sane or insane based on your ability to produce a coherent narrative,” Soomal explained as he invited me in. “I knew that this project about psychiatry needed to be situated in the contemporary art world because that is where people have long refused and subverted traditional narrative modes in favour of imaginative, non-narrative takes on living in this crazy-making world.” The exhibition proposed a new concept to understand the relationship between space and mental health: mad building syndrome (MBS), which plays on the term sick building syndrome (SBS). Just as SBS is a condition where buildings make people…

I didn’t go to art school. Instead, I opted to major in political science, thinking it to be the more practical decision, only to realize upon graduation that the job market cares more about who you know than what you studied. I ended up in the arts rather than politics because the art school kids threw better parties. As a political science major, I learned about the Socratic method and its desired outcome of aporia, a state of perplexity meant to clarify and challenge presumptions. At art-school parties, I often found myself taking on the role of studio major interlocutor: “Why do you think your crit went so badly?” I’d ask. Responses were almost always impassioned, fuelled by a frustration with professors, peers and, oftentimes, the artist’s own scattershot ability…

The depth of what we share can often be expressed in a joke; laughing at the same joke usually implies a sense of camaraderie, for better or for worse. A joke can also mock, deride or parody. In his performances, Mike Bourscheid uses humour, absurdity and play to critique structures of capitalism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, and reminds us of the importance of building alliances through laughter at a time when it is most seriously needed. In 2017, Bourscheid represented Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale, where as part of his exhibition Thank you so much for the flowers, he performed Goldbird Variations (Pas de deux) (2017), a take on Johann Sebastian Bach’s seminal compositions (Goldberg Variations, 1741). Instead of musically harmonic, Bourscheid’s Variations were gestural. In a peculiar handmade costume summoning…

It was the fakest of holidays, St. Patrick’s, during that frenzied week in which the global pandemic quickly and decisively announced that nothing else was going to matter for quite some time. On this Tuesday afternoon, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys were in downtown Manhattan, and I was in my Smithsonian office 320 km to the south. We talked for 90 minutes. In their own words, written before this crisis: “In our current period of existential and environmental catastrophe, desires for Indigenous epistemologies increase and enterprising settlers labour to extract this understanding as if it were a natural resource. The New Red Order—emerging out of contradistinction from the Improved Order of Red Men, a secret society that ‘plays Indian’—calls attraction toward Indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire,…

“It’s one thing to panic about uncertain futures.”—Bridget Moser The actual weight of the world is 13,170,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000 pounds and that is a load that an average human being can’t really comprehend. (As if there is such a thing as an average human being, or an average anything right now, or ever.) But what we can know is that the gravitational impact of hypothetically holding such a weight on one’s own shoulders would surely necessitate some serious physical and non-physical therapy. And while of late there is certainly an accumulation of things to be disoriented and weighed down by, I have nonetheless continued to send emails, which I have begun to uniformly sign with a resigned “Stay safe and love your loved ones and yourself.” It’s better than “I hope…

The Pathos of Mandy (2020) functions like an expanded autobiography of Walter Scott’s previous quasi-autobiographical work about an aspiring artist named Wendy. The show coalesces around the new eponymous alter-ego, Mandy, and his struggles with a Wendy-like creation. Excessive mediation, overlapping narrative frameworks, and a preoccupation with in-between states pervade The Pathos of Mandy. Characters traverse media and formats, performing themselves in ways that are simultaneously genuine and feigned, drawn and sculptural, documentary and fictional. Ultimately, Scott’s intentional confusion is a witty reflection on the mutability of identity and authorship, and a critique of rigid categorization. When I visited the exhibition space, it was strewn with glossy, black-on-pink prints and animated neon works, all rendered in a napkin-sketch style. Wires dangled from the neon tubing, and prints hung dramatically askew.…

Madelyne Beckles does not take herself too seriously. In her video work, sincerity and irony work in tandem to deliver a message that lets you in on the joke enough to laugh but, at the same time, delivers a faint punch to the gut. Gendered labour, targeted consumerism, pop culture and a canon of feminist theory are playfully subjected to her low-brow camera and prop work. Beckles doesn’t spare herself when it comes to her firm but fair style of roasting, acknowledging her active participation in every avenue of culture that she aims to debunk; “With today’s brand of feminism, you no longer have to compromise looking cute!” she exclaims while posing in a negligee in Womanism is a Form of Feminism Focused Especially on the Conditions and Concerns of…

“I remember our position, side by side, and the quick pulse of our breaths, sometimes steady, sometimes off on their own, like two men racing.”—Dennis Cooper, “Greg Tomeoni,” 1996 What the faggot mourns is not hetero sex; it’s the homosociality of the hetero he’ll never inhabit. Peeing on your friends’ backs at the neighbourhood swimming pool; wrestling in the fresh spring mud; snapping gym towels at each other’s peckers. There’s a hole in his faggot heart where the bro should be. The faggot feels the loss of the casualness in his own same-sex encounters: all that could have been innocent between men is dissolved into the narrative progress of desire that marches toward sex. The homosexual is a fallen creature, trapped in uneasy, paranoid signification, plagued with thoughts like: does…

At the opening for their show, Alyssa ‘Sikapinakii’ Duck Chief laid out a box filled with handwritten notes and a family photo album, decorated in fabric and lace. Two photographs taken by Duck Chief, of a family member and a landscape on the Siksika reservation, hung on the walls, as well as a Pendleton blanket covered in framed photos, including individual family members in framed letters that spelled out “LOVE.” The notes in the box were written like entries in a journal: “DUCK CHIEF, What does it mean to have my ‘father’s’ last name”; “Why should I be so affected by something I have no control over?” But rather than keeping these notes in a personal place, Duck Chief offered them to visitors to read and take—a communal approach to…