Late in June, a strange, quiet exhibition opened at 918 Bathurst in Toronto. MADONNA, a group show running from June 24th to July 13th, brings together ten artists working across a range of disciplines and materials.
ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
LM Chabot’s The Cult Turns Beauty Rituals Into a Fever Dream
Self-care carries with it a particular tension: the quiet promise of repair and the creeping sense of ritual. The Cult, the new short film from Montreal-based directing duo LM Chabot, sits entirely inside that space.
AFLOAT
A snag in the season’s grip, cool points of precipitation on glassy skin, glistening like blips of light in the distance that take us where we want to go.
Body Without Flesh
“The simple gesture of turning a camera towards a woman has become equivalent to a terrorist act.”
This 1981 quote from feminist film scholar Mary Ann Doane captured her frustrations with the objectification and violence which seemed to follow every woman’s portrayal in cinematic narrative.
Touch Grass: Julia de Ruiter’s Provocative Post-Internet Art
So much of contemporary culture takes shape online, and nobody understands this as acutely as Gen Z and Millenials. We came of age on the internet and were granted access, for better or for worse, to worlds far beyond the walls of our childhood bedrooms.
Pattern Without Pulse: Posthuman Affect in the Work of Icysaw
We are living in an age defined by fluid surfaces and imperceptible seams. Digital tools are designed to vanish, as extensions of the soma and psyche.
DIRT SS25 at the Filmores Hotel
There’s a particular vibration in DIRT’s SS25 collection that resists reduction, an almost anti-linguistic quality that moves less like a narrative than a texture.
Samantha Sutcliffe’s Haunted America
In her latest project, the decade-spanning photo series titled Broken Mirror, New York-based visual artist Samantha Sutcliffe peers through her camera into the black mirror of American life.
To the Floor: Sam Besca’s Dichotomy of Dance
New York native and director Sam Besca’s To the Floor, a short film written by Electra Artemis, unearths the menacingly cannibalistic femininity cultivated beneath the glitzy norms of European ballroom dance tradition.
Dupe or Twin: The AI Fashion Model Creeps In
It seems we were expected to clap and cheer and act impressed by the fact that in a meeting of the editorial staff at Business of Fashion (BoF), only a “slight majority” correctly guessed which image of model Mathilda Gvarliani, provided by the Swedish multinational retailer H&M, was a photograph and which was generated by artificial intelligence.