Robert Enright

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  History Maker

  If Stan Douglas weren’t a filmmaker, video artist and photographer, he’d be a writer. He thinks like a writer. When he talks about his projects and bodies of work, how they come into being and how they develop, it is like listening to a novelist outlining a plot, setting a scene or describing a character. He provides a narrative frame in which stories and characters present and configure themselves, often in complicated situations.

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  Cinema Like the Music

  Arthur Jafa’s unparalleled seven-and-a-half-minute-long video opens and closes with two kinds of Black hero.

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  Pressure on Verbal Matter

  Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, 2018, subtitled an Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, has two characters, the author and the clerk. Their interaction is an inventory of complex disagreements and antagonisms.

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  Esmaa Mohamoud

  For Esmaa Mohamoud, growing up as the only girl between two older brothers and two younger ones, an engagement with sports was inevitable. A self-described tomboy, she played sports like a boy, wore a jersey, was a Raptors fan who admired Vince Carter and wanted some of his magic for her own.

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  The Song of Her Self

  Tschabalala Self is very clear, very focused, very persistent. She says, when queried in the interview that follows, “My work is all about figuration. It’s all about people, lives, lived experiences.” She says, “The main subject of my work is the Black woman, and I care for Black women and I also care about the reputations of Black women as they exist in the real world and also in the collective imagination.”

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  Andy, We Hardly Knew You

  In his lifetime Andy Warhol took an inventive approach to the facts of his biography. At different times he claimed to have been born in 1929, 1930 and 1933; he even lied about his age to his doctor; and he changed his place of birth from Philadelphia to Newport, Rhode Island, and to Cleveland.

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  Image Hunter

  I use the kind of infrared cameras that hunters put in the forest as a way of detecting movement of game. The photos these cameras took always represented a strange universe to me, and when my boyfriend and I bought a house and moved to the Eastern Townships six years ago, I had the opportunity to use a night camera myself.

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  Keep Giving Signs

  In 1981 Robert Frank travelled with his wife June Leaf to Saskatoon, where he showed films and talked about his work at an artist-run space called the Photographer’s Gallery. The night before his talk, at a casual dinner in his honour, he met a writer named Chester Pelkey and they immediately found common ground.

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  Luminous Being

  In October of this year the Montreal-based, award-winning photographer Benoit Aquin published a book in Paris called La dimension éthérique du réseau par Anton Bequii (The Network’s Etheric Dimension by Anton Bequii).

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  The Hand Made’s Tale

  Lindsay McIntyre’s films are familial and cultural meta-narratives; at the same time that they tell the story of her Inuk great-grandmother’s life, they also tell the story of their own making.

• Words About Pictures

  In this suspicious and cynical time it is obligatory, in the interests of transparency, to admit to something referred to as “full disclosure.” Since I am a creature of my time, here is my admission: I am a print interview freak.

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  Entanglements

  A discriminating survey is the most tantalizing and revealing of exhibitions because it tells us much, and promises even more. Entanglements, which includes 60 paintings by the perennially gifted Gordon Smith, is one of those exhibitions; it indicates how much he has achieved in his distinguished career and for how long he has done it.

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