All of the 2017 Venice Biennale buzz (where Lisa Reihana represented New Zealand) could not have prepared me for the magnificence of this work. As I made my way to the second floor’s Indigenous and Canadian Art galleries, I needed only to follow the sounds of drums, polyrhythmic clapping, and bellowing horns to find myself in a room with a 68 foot-long screen…
School for Movement of Technicolo(u)r People, Gallery TPW 2019
This is the sort of exhibition that resists explanation and possibly even description (after all, it’s billed as a public school/dance studio/project/exhibition/artist exchange), but it is my job to try.
Pamila Matharu, A Space 2019
This exhibition “explores the politics of archives” and interrogates how we (BIPOC) artists and makers survive within and in spite of exclusionary archival practices. So I had to show up to witness not only the archive on the walls, but also the community I know this sort of work would conjure.
Productive Discomfort, Xpace 2019
What if the first thing you encountered when visiting someone’s home was an object that made a different kind of declaration, one that unsettled and reminded you of the discomfort many spaces cause?
Dying, Critical Distance Centre for Curators & Design TO Festival 2019
Perhaps it’s the new year with all its accompanying anxiety, but I was actually eager to visit an exhibition about death, hoping that the content would substantiate my macabre mood. Misery loves company, right?
Nep Sidhu, Mercer Union 2019
As I made my way down the hall, only briefly did a pair of framed photographs catch my eye, and though they are mysteriously missing from all exhibition documents, they seemed to indicate that I was entering a sacred space.
Critic’s Picks 2018
The most memorable artist talk of the year has to be Arthur Jafa at the AGO’s Bailie Court, where the Mississippi-born film director, cinematographer, visual artist, lecturer, and writer screened his acclaimed video masterpiece Love is The Message, The Message is Death (2016), which brought me to tears.
The world according to GARP, Franz Kaka 2018
How did this bizarre combination of ordinary establishments end up on such an unusual street? Perhaps we will never know the answer, but Franz Kaka’s current exhibition perfectly illustrates Wade Avenue’s allure in its simultaneous familiarity and out-of-place-ness.
Rajni Perera, Patel Gallery 2018
I immediately knew what she meant as I considered the work of the other women on stage and as a list of Scarborough artists began running through my mind. They are not linked by style, palette, medium, or even ideology but by their ability to create mythologies, wield spirituality, and materialize imagination.
*Akimbo redesigned their website in 2018 and, as a result, many links are now broken. If you would like access to a particular review, please contact me.