While driving along the highways that branch out of Toronto’s downtown, one witnesses a bewildering contrast of forces; nestled in rolling hills of wheat lie mammoth-sized shipping and logistic hubs.
visual culture
Sara Cwynar’s ‘Baby Blue Benzo Beta’ at MOCA Toronto
Contemporary image culture is often described through excess, whether through Guy Debord’s conception of the spectacle, Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, or contemporary discourse surrounding the endless recursive circulation of algorithmic media.
Kahlil Joseph on BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions — Rewriting the Rules of Black Storytelling
Kahlil Joseph is no novice when it comes to pushing boundaries in art. Known for his evocative and complex work on Beyoncé’s Lemonade visual album and his short feature for Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D
All of Us Stars: Bobby Busnach’s Queer Dreamscape of 1970s New York
Few eras have been mythologized as much as New York in the 1970s, the decade suspended between the liberation of Stonewall and the devastation of AIDS, when queerness thrived in the city’s abandoned spaces.
Crude Semiotics: Absurdity as Cultural Exhaust
There comes a point in any saturated system wherein meaning no longer accumulates. It combusts. Contemporary culture functions less like a cogent symbolic order and more like a refinery under pressure, endlessly processing images, aesthetics, affect, and identity into liquid form.
Enter the Void
The promise of visibility, once associated with recognition, agency, even liberation, now arrives heavily mediated. To appear today is to be parsed: through lenses, platforms, and systems that do not look so much as scan.