women – curated.

Paulette Cameron

November 23, 2021

Paulette (she/her) is Co-Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Like A Prayer Magazine. A recent graduate of a Master’s in Architecture from Dalhousie University, she is working as an Junior Architect at MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects in Kjipuktuk-Halifax, Nova Scotia. Paulette’s graduate thesis – entitled Invoking Memory: Traced Narratives of Mabou, Cape Breton – focused on framing and reframing memory in a landscape-driven process. Her work teases the boundaries between art and architecture, demanding a critique of theory and process. Among her body of work, she has exhibited Newfoundland/Lines, featured in the Rossetti/Watson Exhibition; Suitcase as part of the Public Architecture Copenhagen Studio’s open exhibition; and Fabrics of Power: Past and Future presented in the Amsterdam Urban Systems Studio. She was also a contributor to Catherine Venart’s Conceiving the Plan: Nuance and Intimacy in the Construction of Civic Space exhibited in honour of Diane Lewis at the 2021 Venice Biennale. Paulette brings a nuanced design lens to the team at Covert Art Collective where she seeks a deeper understanding of process through the persons and rituals that construct it. She also currently co-hosts a radio show on CKDU 88.1 FM with her sister, Josefa.

likeaprayermagazine.com | @paulette.anne

Josefa Cameron

November 23, 2021

Josefa (she/her) is a journalist and creative writer based in Halifax. She is currently working as a documentary writer with a Halifax-based production company. In 2020, she launched Like A Prayer Magazine with her sister, Paulette, and is the magazine’s Co-Editor-in-Chief/Executive Editor. Josefa is a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists and was recently named an influential woman on the East Coast of Canada by Amplify East.

Josefa studied Cultural Anthropology at The University of British Columbia and English Literature at Dalhousie University. She is currently a postgraduate student at The University of King’s College Journalism School. Josefa freelanced for The Coast, Discorder, Halifax Magazine, The Dalhousie Gazette, The Maritime Edit, ION Magazine, DOTE Magazine, Beatroute, and Weird Canada. She worked as a reporter and columnist at The Inverness Oran and a news broadcaster and interview producer at Seaside Radio. She hosted a radio show at CiTR 101.9 FM in Vancouver and currently co-hosts a radio show on CKDU 88.1 FM with her sister, Paulette.

likeaprayermagazine.com | @josefa.bambam

Rita Godlevskis

June 10, 2020

PhotoED Magazine’s Editor /Publisher Rita Godlevskis has more than twenty years of experience in photography based, creative media work, in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. She has worked across multiple platforms with a diverse range of projects in her portfolio in editorial, and creative production contexts. A passion for promoting diverse voices in Canadian photography, and great coffee keep her fueled.

Rita Godlevskis – Spotlight

November 12, 2021

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Suzanne Luke

June 3, 2021

Suzanne Luke is actively involved in the cultural section and has nurtured a solid reputation as an arts advocate and community leader.

Peppa Martin

October 27, 2020

Peppa is a gallerist, curator, art advisor and artist consultant, reviewer, career professional photographer, and independent writer on art and culture.

Lisa Kehler

March 30, 2020

Lisa Kehler is a former gallery owner and curator based in Winnipeg, MB, Canada. She holds a BA (Honours) in Art History (2007) and an MA in Curatorial Practices (2013).

Martha Rosler | House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–1972

March 24, 2023

Martha Rosler | House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–1972

Cotton’s generation grew up with a war in the house. For them, games of cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians no longer satisfied the senses. A boy had but to turn a control to be totally involved in the violent distension of experience that was Vietnam on television. Cotton became addicted to it. Vietnam was even a portable war.
A boy had but to move his personal set to have air strikes in the living room, search-and-destroy operations in the bedroom, naval bombardment in the bathroom—napalm before school, body bags before dinner.
(Glendon Swarthout, Bless the Beasts and the Children)

I recently read The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly by Stephanie Oakes. The premise – of a young woman who survives a doomsday cult – sent me down a rabbit hole, if you will, of research on these cults, and since then I’ve been devouring a number of texts on the topic.

One of these – Jeffrey Melnick, Charles Manson’s Creepy Crawl: The Many Lives of America’s Most Infamous Family – offers an interesting supposition. Melnick argues that the Tate – LaBianca murders were used by many on the right – Nixon, for example – as a means by which to shutter debate about the (even then) failure of the nuclear family in the United States. This is similar to Zizek’s comment that most conversations about socialism always have a chicken little proclaiming it ‘will end in the gulag!’. Other societal issues are cast in a different light from the Manson murders, as well (for example, Melnick talks about the dismissive attitude towards runaways – especially girls – at that time, criminalizing or infantilizing them, using several of the Manson ‘family’ as examples, instead of focusing on larger issues within society).

Melnick dismisses with derision the idea that Manson ‘ended’ the supposed utopic dream of the 1960s – and for this post, a point he makes stays with me. Bluntly, that the violence of the Manson family was nary a drop in the bucket to the televised, sanctioned and officially endorsed violence of the war in Vietnam and other societal pressures. His words: “If the countercultural fabric got torn it was not because a few celebrities were killed in August of 1969. We would be better off attending to the plight of returning veterans, the not unconnected influx of harder drugs into American cities, the ongoing runaway crisis, and a major effort by the dominant culture—from the president on down—to repudiate and abandon young people and their culture.”

And this brings us to Martha Rosler’s series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–72.

The initial incarnation of this series was about Vietnam: in a despairing commentary about history Rosler would revisit and reinterpret it decades later, for the ‘war against terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan…..

Rosler – in the tradition of artists like Hannah Höch – employs collage, using images that are familiar to us in tandem with others that fracture and trouble the original ‘homes’ on display. These might ‘homes’ in the literal sense, but also the ideologies and assumptions that inform those spaces, sometimes so implicitly that to highlight them engenders a denial of them, like a fish unaware of water as it’s so ubiquitous.

‘This work is one of twenty pieces from Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c.1967-72) series created during, and influenced by, the Vietnam War. It was the first war in history that was literally brought into the homes of American people through the revolutionary new television set from which its horrors could be witnessed daily. It was often described as a “living room war” – a description loaded with strange poignancy as it shined a light on the eeriness of a nation living their everyday lives, ripe with consumerist concerns like keeping the stylish home drapes clean, all the while gruesome political realities took place elsewhere, becoming just another form of nightly entertainment in front of the tube.

Simultaneously, there is a feminist element to the work as it comments on the robotic mundaneness of female domestic work in the midst of global unrest. The idea of women striving to keep the house beautiful while war’s tragedies are omnipresent becomes almost comical, and presents a surreal picture about what we deem important. Recognizing the potential for manipulation in the photographic medium, Rosler once stated, “Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography.”’ (from here)

More of Rosler’s extensive practice – and her roles as social critic and historian for more than half a century – can be seen here.

~ Bart Gazzola

Robin Claire Fox | Reflections

March 17, 2023

Robin Claire Fox | Reflections
Photography is inherently nostalgic. Every image taken is essentially the capturing of a moment from the past. That moment no longer exists, just the memory of it and an analogue print or a digital impression trapped on an electronic device. Many modern photographers harbour longings for the saturated or contrasty renderings of images made with processes and media (like Kodachrome) long out of use or no longer in production. Quite a few of them try to recreate the look and feel of these processes digitally, running their captures through filters and algorithms to bring back the visual past. While many are overdone (why keep it at 3 when you can dial it up to 10?), there are a few who have mastered the ability to make us believe that we are viewing an image taken decades ago. The evocation of this photographic past is (I believe) an effort to physically reconnect with it in a way that seems familiar, safe and warm… like sitting with your family watching slides projections of photos from a vacation taken years ago.

Ancaster, Ontario’s Robin Fox started taking photographs around the time of the birth of her most recent child as a conscious attempt to document her family’s childhoods for her future self to enjoy. She is a natural at capturing the uncertainties alongside the joys of growing up. A huge fan of Saul Leiter’s colour work, she has found a method of perfectly capturing the deep saturation and contrast Leiter exhibited in his work with Kodachrome and other slide films[1] in the 1950’s. Her images seem imbued with palettes that exist only in the memory of childhood, where everything was so much bigger and the world was awash with primary colours.

Jana Sterbak | Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987

March 16, 2023

Jana Sterbak | Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987

“Adam was left alone. It was then that God created the Second Wife.”
“Yeah? What was her name?”
“Oh. She never had a name, poor thing. God created her for Adam, out of nothingness. Bones first. Then internal organs. Then flesh. Muscle. Sinew. Fat. Bile. Eyes. Snot. Skin. Hair. Breath…
Adam couldn’t bear to go near her. He wouldn’t touch her.
Bodies are strange. Some people have real problems with the stuff that goes on inside them.”
“Jesus. What happened to her?”
“Opinions differ. Most say God destroyed her. A few have claimed that she was permitted to leave the Garden alone.”
(Neil Gaiman, A Parliament of Rooks)

Ah, the controversy, the pearl clutching, the performative gnashing of teeth: back when this work was installed at the National Gallery of Canada, you would have thought that a Canadian government had wilfully allowed a citizen to be tortured or sent body bags to an Indigenous Reserve as a continuing pattern of colonial violence both literal and ideological. To inject my own time in Saskatchewan, it’s not like Premier who has three DUIs where one led to the death of a young mother, or like Indigenous men are being dumped outside the city, in winter, by police.

In tandem with the hypocrisy around the purchase of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire (which has only appreciated with age, unlike the money the taxpayers have paid out in unmerited pensions and perks to the ‘politicians’ who whined about it), it was a strange time for the visual arts in Canada.

But now some facts to balance that vitriolic tangent.

“The artwork consists of a “Flesh Dress”, constructed of slabs of beef sewn together, hung on a tailor’s dummy. It is a one-piece, sleeveless, calf-length “house dress”, with a jagged edge. The marble texture of steak and the thick fat are fully visible, displaying its expressive and bloody appearance. On a nearby wall, a photograph of a young woman poses in the dress. The dress is stitched together from 50–60 pounds of raw flank steak and must be constructed anew each time it is shown. Initially, the steak is fresh and fiery red, and then it gradually turned beige and brown, changing its shape and size to conform to the dummy’s hourglass shape. The work included either $260 or $300 worth of meat, as of its 1991 showing.

As suggested by the title, the work is considered within the genre of “vanitas”, a category of art showing death and decay. The work includes non-traditional materials, a trend in 20th-century art. It “stands in the Surrealist tradition of the uncanny….disturbing the distinctions, by which we categorize experience”.

Progressive Conservative MP Felix Holtmann, a pig farmer from Manitoba commented: “I call it a jerky dress. There are a lot of people who hold food sacred in this land, and they are appalled by the use of food for this thing.” In response, one newspaper editorial called him a “meat head”. Holtmann was chair of the House of Commons Communications and Culture Committee, which oversees the NGC funding; the committee itself was split on the issue. The artist called Holtmann a “self-proclaimed Philistine [who is] not even successful as a hog farmer.” Art critic Christopher Hume commented that the committee’s concept “was based on the notion that the National Gallery is somehow accountable for poverty and hunger in Canada. Surely the irony of their desperate position is that they are members of the group that created the mess the country is now in.””
(All of the above from here).

Sarah Milroy – then writing for Canadian Art, now one of the engines driving the Art Canada Institute – observed that reaction would have been very different if the artist had been male. I’d also inject an observation from Lucy Lippard, when she was writing about the controversies in the United States around the works of Andres Serano, Karen Finley and Robert Mapplethorpe: most – if not all – were driven by those defined – or deformed, if you will – by religion, and thus the body is always ‘bad’ and the only thing worse than that is a woman who makes work about the body. How little has changed, it seems.

But the work itself is at that intersection of horror and aesthetic evocation that we know from art history in the works of Francis Bacon or Francisco Goya. In other ways, this installation by Sterbak can be considered in tandem with Carolyn Wren’s War Map Dress Trilogy, that is a more subtle assertion of Barbara Kruger’s iconic work Untitled (Your body is a battleground).

I feel it’s also important to disclose that while writing this, I was also rewatching Todd Haynes film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story that “portrays the last 17 years of singer Karen Carpenter’s life, as she struggled with anorexia.” (from here) This is also an artwork that had to deal with the travails of censorship…..

About the artist: “Jana Sterbak forges conceptual, architectonic objects that encourage their wearers to experience bodily and out-of-body freedom. Drawn to notions of doubling, physicality, and self-awareness, she favors juxtapositions between vanity and decomposition as a reminder of human vulnerability. This is evident in her dress of raw meat, which is meant to rest on a hanger until it rots and deteriorates. Such wearable, cage-like constructions allude to technological and societal constraints and a quest for freedom beyond corporeality. Sterbak’s art is marked by a dark humor and absurdist themes likely influenced by her childhood in Prague and education under Marxist and Leninist systems as well as the work of such writers as Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek.” (from here)

More about Sterbak’s life and work can be seen here.