Terrance Houle, whose Blackfoot name is Iinniiwahkiimah (Buffalo Herder), is searching for bricks from his junior high and parents’ residential schools. He will bring all three bricks back to the IXL brick factory in Medicine Hat, where he will film a performance of him smashing them until they become fine dust. His parents will sing a […] More »

How were you chosen to curate UnSettled? I was approached in August when they had already created the UnSettled theme, linked to reconciliation. In taking it on, I decided to drop the reconciliation piece, since it’s a fundamental part of a lot of things Indigenous people are doing right now. I also wanted to give […] More »

Apartment, acrylic panel, 2016. Courtesy Heather Cline. Regina, Sask., artist Heather Cline has her own ideas about Canada’s sesquicentennial. There’s nothing wrong with a big national blowout, she says, but Ottawa’s version of an official birthday party isn’t for her. “In Canada, we talk a lot about big history moments, but I’ve always thought about […] More »

Although labelling a band “lesbian garage rock” may sound reductive or even backhanded, in the case of Sackville, N.B.-based Partner, it’s welcomed. “Most songs are straight, but our songs aren’t straight, because we’re not,” says the band’s guitarist- vocalist Lucy Niles. “We’re just plain old fashioned dykes, really.” These kinds of matter-of-fact declarations are scattered […] More »

The same day the Jian Ghomeshi trial began at Toronto’s Old City Hall, another sexual assault trial was taking place just one floor above. Kelly Showker’s upcoming documentary film, Slut or Nut: The Diary of a Rape Trial, follows York University PhD student Mandi Gray as she settles her human rights case with the university, following […] More »

Behind black lattice, parts of women’s eyes, lips, and noses peer out of the art piece, fighting to be individualized. While women in Iran are not the shrouded masses that the media stereotypes them as—a walk through Tehran, the country’s capital, usually includes women dressed in fashionable colours, patterns, and makeup—they are nevertheless required to abide […] More »

The camera pans the much-anticipated pep rally, tasked with cheering-up the students of Riverdale High after their classmate’s recent murder. The cheerleading squad performs a dance to a mash-up of “Sugar, Sugar” (aptly, by The Archies), and even though the choreography is composed mainly of coquettish shrugging, the performance is so emotionally damaging to Cheryl Blossom—twin […] More »

The seating area of the Burdock music hall is cast in a faint glow by the string lights above. A spotlight creates a faint hue behind a microphone. Tonight’s artist line up is taped on the microphone stand. The Slackline Creative Arts Series is ready for another show. The volunteer-run arts series started in July […] More »

The sound of biting lips softly. The sound of bones cracking. The sound of a light that never flickers. What we hear depends on who we are. These personal politics of sound are the focus of a challenging art exhibition in Halifax. Sound Etiquette explores the social conventions around sonic communication the hearing community might […] More »

Imagine a teenager, face smeared in soot and red and white paint, summoning the crowd to its feet. This was the breathtaking scene at Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s pep rally in the 1990s. Pep rallies, stirring and spirited as they are, don’t immediately evoke images of overtly political, much less radical, acts. But for Williamson Bathory, […] More »

Mohawks in Beehives (1991) Shelley Niro’s visual art and film have explored a borderless continent, power and pop culture, life on First Nations reserves, and much more – never without a sense of self. Niro, born in 1954 in Niagara Falls, New York, is a Mohawk artist from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ont. Living […] More »