C Magazine

In the basement of the Chinese Cultural Centre in Calgary’s Chinatown, there is a hidden museum. A sign on a stand and an arrow pointing downward, a thin metal chain blocking the stairs that curious visitors can remove and replace on their own. There

When The New Gallery (TNG) relocated to the heart of Calgary’s Chinatown in 2010, a few blocks from the white lions of Centre Street Bridge, they stuck to their standard public programming: an artist is invited to show their work, the work goes up, t

Community associations in Chinatowns, often referred to as tongs, family clans, or benevolent societies, are synonymous with what it means to build a community from the ground up. Dating back to as early as the 1880s, they emerged across Canada as a

Taking its name from joss paper, the spirit money used as burnt offerings for the ancestors, Joss Paper Library (JPL) emerged in 2019 as a collaborative project between close friends Christina Lee and Y Vy Truong. Lee, an urban planning and geography

There is no official map of Toronto’s Chinatown in the public domain, though the community has existed at and around the intersection of Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West since the early ’60s due to the demolition of the first Chinatown to make w

About a year ago, I attended an artist talk hosted by an arts organization dedicated specifically to serving queer artists. After relishing a rich conversation between featured artists of many different identities, one attendee expressed that they co

From her home studio, visual artist and fellow Natalie Wood clearly recalls the palpable tone of the Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship’s first virtual gathering. “We looked at all the little squares,” she says, noting the now-ubiquitous gallery view of

The first place I encountered a fraction of the goliath that is the Digital Indigenous Democracy (DID) project from Igloolik-based media collective Isuma Productions was in Venice in 2019. It seems counter-intuitive that my first glimpse into an ongo

Recently, we have seen uprisings, movements that form in the virtual space and flow over into the real world. We witnessed a global reckoning on misogynistic politics and white supremacy. We saw people unite and ideas formed. But how can we even imag

White-tailed jackrabbits change colour in the winter; their dull-brown fur shifting to a wintry white to better camouflage them within the frozen expanse of the prairie. They surprise me on my walks to work, jumping away from me, appearing out of see

Creative practices that take place outside the gallery, that think their impact beyond the aesthetic, and that frame their participants as other than hapless dupes have increased in visibility in Canada over the past 30 years. While socially engaged

Curator Amy Kazymerchyk’s exhibition “Thought, outside” takes an opaque, poetic, and political problem—theorist Maurice Blanchot’s Thought of/from The Outside—to elaborate a conceptually rigorous yet affectively embracing love letter to Vancouver in

It seems like a lifetime ago that curator Bartholomew Ryan characterized contemporary art’s newfound engagement with choreographers in 2014 as “drawing dance into the gallery and often asking it to behave more like an object.” It now feels weird when

“Somewhere, underneath / It’s the same thing.” The experience of listening to and thinking about Julian Yi-Zhong Hou’s LP Grass Drama, for me, has been characterized by a cyclical return to this poetic fragment, whisper-sung by Hou on the album’s sec

The first law of thermodynamics describes how energy is neither created nor destroyed—it only circulates. We can see this in the process of decomposition, as the energy of one being transforms, and is then distributed among other beings. Another simp

In what exhibition have you been able to defy gravity and fly from artwork to artwork, or change your outfit in response to each one? It should not come as a surprise by this point to hear how the practice of weaving, thousands of years old, influenc

In his seminal book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), José Esteban Muñoz maps queer strategies for world-building as they pertain to the nature of utopia. For Muñoz, a queer future, and thus a queer utopia, is always on th

The ongoing pandemic has highlighted the way that our sense of togetherness can be interrupted, taken away, and challenged on a global scale. Yet, Victoria Redsun’s work as an artist, poet, and land defender shows us that when we hold our relationshi