Culture

Portable Culture: Soheila Esfahani

  Billions are said to be in global circulation. In the United States alone, five hundred million are manufactured every year. They are everywhere, including inside and outside of our large retail shops. Their ubiquity and number, however, do not guarantee their visibility. Few of us look at, let alone think about the wooden shipping...

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JJ Lee’s Hyphenated Realities

Exploring Chinese-Canadian identities through the lens of "Chinese Food"

*This article appeared in the Summer 2018 Visual Arts News’ Special 40th Anniversary Issue Driving down the Bedford Highway in Halifax, you pass signs for China Town restaurant—a Nova Scotian behemoth dating back to the 70s, with that kitschy “Chinese-style” font in huge fire-engine red letters across faux panelling that you can’t miss. Artist JJ Lee’s...

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From the archives: Mathieu Léger transforms cultural detritus

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran in the Fall 2014 issue of Visual Arts News. In Acadian author France Daigle’s 2012 novel Pour sûr, Antoinette opens a game of Scrabble against her husband, The Cripple, with a controversial 125 points. Her word, dialyse, she argued, to her husband’s chagrin, contained two vertical words—“y” and “a.” “It wasn’t the 21...

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