Grateful for the detailed report on the censorship of artworks expressing solidarity with Palestine in @hyperallergic . Link in the bio 🎯

Surreal to be at @nathanphillipssquare with The Exquisite Corpse!! Thanks to all the GREAT artists who came together to paint a self portrait of the collective subconscious & thanks to @mokshacanada for hosting Diversity Fest!! Such a showcase of unique talents, skills, cuisines & crafts #toronto #art #interactiveart #exquisitecorpseproject #cityhall #nathanphillipssquare #torontoartist #paint #collabortiveart

Tetris syndrome [🎶 by @kazdouramusic ]

Our Home and Native Land got a lil dusting over the weekend after being on the walls in @joannetodstudio ’s bathroom since 2017 This piece feels like a fossil record of my brain at the time, a world of neon abundance from a gilded guilted age. Photos of friends and cut outs from pamphlets of every exhibition I attended that year with garbage and acrylic paint. I was thinking of hysterical realism and divided touch and treeplanting and landscapes defragmenting and landback and how the pharmaceutical and beauty industries are linked and how every single piece of plastic we ever used is still out there somewhere and how visual language develops because artists are always building off each other as we update the documentation of reality. Joanne keeps a branch from one of Tom Thomson’s White Pines that she went to paint for the The Walrus on the side of her tub, and this piece kinda grew from there. It’s messy and ugly and beautiful and fading but I think it captures the sheer sense of excess I feel in a shampoo aisle in a shoppers drug mart in a strip mall. It’s best viewed up close from a ladder on top of the tub, but you’ll probably never have that chance so here is my view and also my conservators notes. It’s been almost 10 years sitting under the skylight and the glue is holding, some ink is fading but only the balloon animal balloons are starting to crumble. If I’d know they were going to outlaw plastic straws and shopping bags I would have used more! Bad rap aside, plastics can be thrilling. Grateful to Joanne her vision on the commission and giving me the audacity to believe in myself as an artist

A day so beautiful it just begs to be shared! Winters like this don’t come around every year Recreation is the re-creation of your own energy SoOo Go Outside and Play! Visit the island at least once per season And if the whole world feels like it might fall apart Then the least we can do Is to hold it together. Thanks to @forever__trevor for freezing fingers filming & @ethan___sk25 + the other wild ice chasers for keeping everyone safe out there 🧊❄️ don’t try this alone

Paint your self

My phone promised me if I posted this compilation video of 2024 made New Year’s Day I could reclaim 4 gigs of storage and be able to send texts & take videos again and really it’s right because honestly what’s the point in all these memories if I don’t share them??? Grateful for another trip around the sun☀️ AKA every time I took my camera out in 2024 Looking back I’m filled with gratitude and appreciation for all the stories unfolding. Sending love all the flowers, the bugs, the organizers, the doers, the dreamers, the beautiful people, the neighbourhood cats and my parents; thanks for doing your things- I’m so lucky we crossed paths xx

Screening on Thursday!

The collective unconscious manifests in mysterious ways. Sometimes it all it thinks about boobs and eyeballs but right now it’s screaming at the top of its lungs for a free Palestine 🇵🇸 It also reveals the insanity of our world when a project like this shuts down an art show 😮‍💨 Big fan of this song by @brianhuntresss 🎶 In case you think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s been painted by thousands of people, I’m really not! Approaching the 6th year of this project- hit me up if you want to see it at your favourite city/protest/festival/wedding in 2025

“Expressions of Critical Thought” would have closed over the weekend had it not been censored the day after it opened, turning an 8 week exhibition into an 8 hour opening. It’s hard for anyone who has never put an art show together to understand how much labour goes into making it happen. Here are clips from behind the scenes as works by @em_thepainter @vridhhi @_social_anti_ @halalsalman @138baeto (Alberto Castillo) and I were installed back in August. I share this now because I don’t want to waste all the hard work that went into building up the exhibition. The show was designed to link different kinds of critical expressions, making the interconnectedness of unseen social tensions bubbling under the business of life visible through artistic practice. What came to the surface was not the conversations we expected to have, but a disturbing discourse around what we are and are not allowed to talk about in our art. Turns out that we are not allowed to talk about Palestine at the @auroraculturalcentre - which is all the more reason why we must! Closing the show means that fewer people could experience it in person but more people have heard about it than I ever imagined. Thanks to those who didn’t let the show disappear, friends and strangers expressed support, wrote letters to the editors & published on the censorship. Never did I imagine we would make international headlines. When artists are silenced, our outrage rings louder. The music here is Paolo Nutini sampling silent film star Charlie Chaplin’s first ever speaking role in the satirical anti-fascist film “The Great Dictator”. The film was released in 1940- before the US joined WWII. At the time, the Chicago film board banned the movie out of concern for the city’s well-established German community. I cannot believe we are still banning art & putting limits on the vital conversations that artists need to be having in 2024.

@auroraculturalcentre has censored ‘Expressions of Critical Thought,’ an exhibition I curated as part of @carousel.collective inspired by our zine. We brought together 6 artists investigating how the personal and political intersect globally. We were inviting conversations that we know can be difficult. By closing it we lose the opportunity to have these dialogues in the safe (dare I say sacred?) space of a public art gallery. The show was closed the day after it opened. @halalsalman and I are being falsly accused of a hate crime because we expressed solidarity for Palestine through our art. In a piece tracing the providence of looted cultural history during the 2003 the invasion of Iraq, Hala had to add Palestine to the map because it was not already there. The Exquisite Corpse captures a self-portrait of the collective unconscious. It’s an ever expanding participatory painting created by thousands of people separated in time and space. Calls for a “Free Palestine” have been appearing on the canvases for years as it is an issue on the hearts and minds of people around the world. Other artists @em_thepainter @vridhhi @_social_anti_ and Alberto Castillo contribute to the essence of the show by making often unseen social tension visible through their work. The intention is to investigate the intersectionality of systems of oppression to open dialogues and imagine new solutions. Freedom of expression is essential to a fully functioning democracy. In the past, fascist regimes could hide their crimes. Everyday people could say they didn’t know, but today we are witnesses to what is happening in Gaza. War crimes are being live streamed. Censoring art silences dissent & manufactures the consent of all Canadians to this conflict through our continued diplomatic support. I took a break to process the false accusations, hoping the Centre would stand by the artists and defend the work. It is not. Today I discovered letters of support & outrage sent by the public to the editors of auroratoday.ca These letters give me hope and encourage me to keep talking about Palestine. I will be sharing each body of work soon to reopen the conversation

“Expressions of Critical Thought” / Sep 21 - Nov 16 / @auroraculturalcentre We’re thrilled to announce that we have curated an exhibition at the Aurora Cultural Center as an extension of our Zine. The underlying essence of this exhibition is to collect, build in common, and bring together fragmented expressions of critical thought. Through painting, installation, performance, and more, several artists have come together to examine how the personal and political intersect. Exhibiting artists: @halalsalman @vridhhi @em_thepainter @haz.bin @_social_anti_ Alberto Castillo Opening: Saturday Sep 21st 4-7 PM (featuring ambient soundscape by @Chafic__ ) Link in our bio for details.