picks August 23, 2021

Esmaa Mohamoud

In basketball, a double dribble, an illegal move, is an act of gutsiness and desperation. With nowhere left to go, the player continues, at the cost of stopping the forward momentum of the game. Esmaa Mohamoud’s latest public artwork, Double Dribble, 2021, evokes just such a scene of impossible play, transforming a public walkway into a rainbow-hued basketball court that eschews all forms of straightforward, rule-bound competition. Everyone is allowed to participate.

Shiny vinyl base lines in bright green, sky blue, black, and neon pink traverse multiple planes, creating a fragmented, Escherlike

print May 2021

Sameer Farooq

What will we do with the museum when all the objects it contains have been returned? “A Heap of Random Sweepings,” Sameer Farooq’s first major solo exhibition in Toronto, imagines just such a reparative future. Integrating sound, sculpture, poetry, printmaking, and photography, Farooq and his collaborators have transformed the gallery into a space for contemplation. The show’s proposal is that, once emptied, these sites might be used to reckon with their histories of violent appropriation and colonial accumulation.

Using museum-display strategies to choreograph visitors’ movements, Farooq’s

print December 2020

Aaron Jones

Aaron Jones’s solo exhibition “Closed Fist, Open Palm” was a study in opposing forces, of embodied tension and explosive physical presence. Extending his investigation into how Black subjectivity is constructed—and how it might be undone—in this image-flooded era, the artist presented collages that posed pressing questions about how the effects of capitalism and colonialism on Black people can be charted.

Intimate in scale, Jones’s collages are culled from print publications one might expect to find in a middle-class North American living room. The artist tears apart and fragments sports periodicals,

print September 2020

Native Art Department International

The husband-and-wife team of Jason Lujan and Maria Hupfield—aka Native Art Department International, a collaborative enterprise that, according to the duo, operates as an “emancipation from identity-based artwork”—presented “Bureau of Aesthetics,” a solo exhibition at Mercer Union and NADI’s first in Canada. Barriers, both physical and visual, abound: At the entrance to the exhibition is a large, Judd-like structure built from sheets of fluorescent-pink acrylic wedged between wood beams (Construction, 2019). The rectilinear form literally interrupts viewers’ paths and screws with our sight lines,

print July/August 2020

Stephanie Temma Hier

Entanglement, both material and affective, is the operating logic in Stephanie Temma Hier’s ongoing series of sculptural paintings. Photorealistic oil paintings of found imagery—much of it seemingly stock photography—are embedded in three-dimensional ceramic frames ornamented with clay renderings of everyday objects, including bell peppers, overgrown garden snails, and speckled spheres resembling gumballs. Although Hier replicates familiar forms, the way she juxtaposes them produces a mounting sense of unease. At the entrance to the exhibition, Wonderful for Other People (all works 2020) depicted

print December 2019

Hajra Waheed

If an exhibition is a letter, to whom is it addressed? The viewer is the obvious answer, but artworks also, of course, direct themselves to others: lovers and children, mentors and colleagues, unknown future audiences who might find within the work a blueprint for radical acts of hope and defiance.

“Hold Everything Dear,” Hajra Waheed’s current solo show, has at its heart such an epistolary address. Titled after a 2007 collection of John Berger’s essays, the show builds on a 2017 performance in which the artist manipulated a sheet of black cinefoil on a light projector, revealing a constellation

View of “One of These Things is Not Like the Other,” 2019.

picks April 16, 2019

Pamila Matharu and Sister Co-Resister

Pamila Matharu and Sister Co-Resister's exhibition uses the archive as a method for locating the self. Encompassing video, sculpture, photography, personal artifacts, and a site-specific installation, “One of These Things is Not Like the Other” is structured by experiences of intergenerational trauma as faced by three different women—the writer Lakshmi Gill, the late modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil, and Matharu herself—weaving these personal histories into transnational narratives of dispossession and resistance.

The show opens with a new video by Matharu, stuck between an archive and an

picks January 29, 2019

Tim Whiten

An altar, a prayer book, a reliquary, a miniature temple, and two crosses are arranged around a casket at the center of Tim Whiten’s solo exhibition “Suspend.” Glowing eerily in the natural light, the crystalline glass of the casket, Who-Man/Amen, 2015-16, protects a wrapped skeleton, whose toes are visible through oval windows along the top of the sculpture. The surrounding works might be read as props for a funerary rite, objects of devotion, or tools for warding off evil spirits. This ambiguity between threat and protector, decay and renewal, sets the stage for the show’s dramatic take on

print November 2018

Rebecca Belmore

In a rare self-portrait by Rebecca Belmore, the artist stands at a distance with her back to the camera, unrecognizable in a bright-orange work suit, its fluorescent X demarcating her shoulders against a huge expanse of plastic tarp. Safety vests appear throughout her photographs as uniforms for the artist as worker, but they also serve a signatory function: On land treaties with the British colonial government, indigenous leaders often marked their names with an X. In wearing this sign in the Canadian landscape, Belmore asserts her presence as both resident and author, marker and maker, whose

picks August 14, 2017

Tau Lewis and Curtis Santiago

An admixture of antagonism and vulnerability animates the faces looking out from Curtis Santiago’s paintings and those staring back from Tau Lewis’s sculptures, visages that dare you to care. Entering the gallery, one is immediately confronted by Lewis’s you lose shreds of your truth every time I remember you (all works 2017), a seated male figure with eyes downcast, shoulders hunched forward. He holds the end of a leash tethered to a small creature sitting cross-legged on the floor next to him—tufts of soft fur stretch across its wire and twig skeleton. The rusted chain linking the two connotes

picks June 09, 2016

Annie MacDonell

“When you are two-to-one, then the work becomes easier,” a woman’s voice intones as a pair of hands gingerly places documentary photographs of political protest in front of the camera in one of the untitled videos (all works 2016) that make up Annie MacDonell’s exhibition “Holding Still // Holding Together.” Blending practical instructions from nonviolent civil disobedience training (“Stretch your body out to achieve maximum contact against the ground beneath you”) with meditations on the slippery nature of embodiment (“To be lifted by three men is to feel like an oversize object: a stuffed

picks November 24, 2014

Karen Kraven

The title of Karen Kraven’s first institutional solo exhibition, “Razzle Dazzle Sis Boom Bah,” signals the Montreal-based artist’s infectious enthusiasm for mimicry, subterfuge, and speculation across a new body of work comprising sculpture, photography, and ceramics. Like a modern-day incantation, the phrase begs to be spoken aloud, evoking the shimmering strands of cheerleaders’ pom-poms and the emphatic sounds of exploding fireworks. Such exuberance is everywhere on display here, including in a series where six elaborately decorated women’s hats made of delicate straw latticing are perched

Gabrielle Moser