A Very Real American Place: The Suburban Unconscious in Mike Kelley
The suburb of Westland, Michigan, where Mike Kelley grew up, may be one of the only cities in the US renamed after a mall….
Lineage and Light: Rose Marie Cromwell’s “A Geological Survey”
In what ways is a mother like a tree? A mother—a caregiver, really, because lineages are built not merely by blood and biology but…
On Weather and the Archive: Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Tony Cruz Pabón
For five months I lived with open windows in a suburb of San Juan, air ventilating through my apartment on days of both intense…
Ritual Maintenance: Edges and Encounters with Tina Girouard
Maintenance I: Role Change, 1970 I give myself a haircut using the video system as a mirror. It is completely private, no one in…
Disposability, Divestment, and Action: The Palestine Solidarity Movement and the State of Art in Toronto
What was the problem? I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway? Yes, I did know…
When Women Run the World: Gail Thacker’s Queer Feminist Marvel
In late June 2024, a couple of weeks before Joe Biden withdrew his bid for reelection and Kamala Harris launched her campaign for president,…
“You Took, Took, Took”: Alanis Obomsawin’s Work is Never Finished
In 1969, the young Abenaki singer and activist Alanis Obomsawin, newly hired as a consultant at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), took…
Tiana Reid
Momus: The Podcast’s Season 07 finale features Tiana Reid, a Toronto-based critic and assistant professor of English at York University. Reid is a former…
The Wish in Yong Soon Min’s KISSSSS
“It is worth wondering, perhaps, what the wishes are in kissing,” Adam Phillips writes. In his readings of Freud, Phillips suggests that a kiss…
Prescient About Still-Active Threats, Marisol Is Right on Time
Near the end of the definitive, long-overdue survey of the artist Marisol at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, after a parade of totemic sculptural…
Arenas of Freedom
“Time is more than a container; time participates.” —Susan Rethorst, A Choreographic Mind I often enter retrospectives with a certain girding of the…
Claudia La Rocco
Esteemed critic and writer Claudia La Rocco speaks to Lauren Wetmore about being a “dance partisan” and how “language can nail things down in…
Swelling Time: Sam Tam Ham Probes the Prime Meridian
Like most other instruments of empire used to chart our world, the international prime meridian is an invisible, regnant force. A product of colonial…
Picturing Disease and Desire
Across fourteen photographs, clothes strewn in a moment of passion transfigure into lasting compositions. Empty shoes perch and keel over, bra straps lie tangled,…
Sinister and Playful: Anne Duk Hee Jordan at Canal Projects
Snailing (Slippy slimy slug slut), the first solo institutional show in New York by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, features an immersive installation that explores…
Niela Orr
Niela Orr is a culture writer and editor who has published in The Baffler, The Believer, and The Organist, among others. Since 2022 she…