Image courtesy of Michelle Kosak

Michelle Kosak comes from a long line of artistic talent. Growing up, she remembers how her father inspired her and her brother to follow in his creative footsteps. Despite her artsy flair, she remembers kids at school bullying her about her appearance throughout her childhood. She eventually developed an eating disorder that stayed with her into adulthood. While attending Toronto’s OCAD University, she decided to channel her artistic talent into creating a series about insecurities, something she had dealt with first-hand but also something others could relate to. The series was titled Grotesque Gorgeous and featured several brightly-coloured and exaggerated illustrations highlighting how people’s perception of their flaws is warped and emphasizing the preoccupation people have on a “quick-fix” mentality to correct their flaws.

“What we’re insecure about, it kind of makes no sense.… No one else that looks at you sees that. So, I just kind of wanted to make it absolutely ridiculous,” Kosak says.

The series’ illustrations depict common insecurities people may have such as being too short, experiencing baldness, or having a small chest. When preparing for the series, Kosak realized how one’s personal insecurities are often unnoticed by those around them, but exaggerated in the minds of those experiencing them, especially with the presence of social media and influencer culture.

“Talking to other people and hearing what they’re insecure about, like, their nails are too fat, or their toes are too long… it’s like, I’ve never in my life thought about that,” Kosak says.

Now, Kosak is working on an upcoming picture book for adults, which she hopes to self-publish through Amazon by April 2022. The book, which is tentatively titled F*uck Yes/F*uck No: A Quick Guide to Life Decisions, will include comical illustrations to help individuals with their decision-making through life’s good and bad. The book will touch on issues of self-image and building one’s self-esteem among other topics, which Kosak hopes will encourage others to grow their self-love and acceptance.

“Everyone is worthy of love, and it starts with you… sometimes it’s hard, but it takes every day to just get a little better every day to embrace who you are, and love who you are,” she says.

Holly Schmidt, Fireweed Fields, 2021-ongoing. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography

Fireweed is a tall, pink wildflower that blooms in areas burned by fire. For artist Holly Schmidt, it represents sustenance and resilience. In her residency, Vegetal Encounters, as part of the University of British Columbia’s Outdoor Program, Schmidt planted a fireweed field at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver.

Fireweed produces an abundance of seed and sends out underground roots from its nodes, allowing new shoots to grow. Schmidt’s approach to art is similarly organic.

“I feel like the way that I work as an artist or my practice is very rhizomatic in that way, it’s sort of working in this one place, building relationships, and it sort of sends out shoots and new things kind of grow from that,” said Schmidt.

Schmidt said the idea to plant fireweed stemmed from the COVID-19 pandemic because of the way the plant interacts during a crisis. Her residency began in fall 2018 with preliminary research, followed by the grant process in 2020. The project began in 2021.

“At any university, there’s always a lot of work to be done in terms of seeking permissions to do things, especially things that might alter landscapes,” says Schmidt, who describes herself as a socially engaged artist. In the last decade, her work has mainly focused on the complexity of human relations with the natural world.

For Schmidt, Fireweed Fields acts as a way to bring people together. She held a two-day summer intensive in 2021 that included six UBC faculty and six artists. The intensive took place outside for participants to connect with plant life. She also got to host workshops and talks with students from different disciplines.

On the lawn of the Belkin, Schmidt planted the fireweed seed on April 12, 2021. She said that unlike working in a studio, working with the natural world is something the artist has little control over.

She worked with the UBC Horticulture Training Program and took a gentle approach to the project. Instead of lifting the turf and laying down seed, they worked to sow the seed into the lawn. But the lawn outcompeted the seed and the fireweed didn’t germinate. Still, the lawn grew to reveal the biodiversity that already existed.

One of Schmidt’s project partners, Vancouver’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum, is taking samples on an ongoing basis to track the biodiversity changes and growth within the field.

“It was an incredible transformation just by allowing the lawn to grow,” said Schmidt, who is going to look at planting fireweed again.

Schmidt also co-created a reclaimed cedar boardwalk with Charlotte Falk, a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary designer and educator at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. The boardwalk leads people into the field and tries to surface the rhizomatic structure of the fireweed by creating nodules for gathering. The boardwalk also serves as a place for gathering while watching UBC’s digital screen that includes documentation of the field through different seasons.

Another project element, Forecast, is on the windows of the gallery. Its short, poetic texts describe the effect of weather on human, plant, and animal bodies on campus. The texts change seasonally and Schmidt is currently writing winter into spring.

“It’s almost like these very hyper-local weather forecasts,” she said.

Fireweed Fields is ongoing and Schmidt plans to curate other projects around the field. The field will continue to operate as a growing and changing space, but it also serves as a potential legacy of climate-engaged work.

Schmidt said some things in the space are tangible while others are not. One of the curators she works with, from the Outdoor Art program, describes the project as “learning in public.”

“There’s never working in the studio and then presenting something,” said Schmidt. “It’s always kind of all happening in the moment and with others.”

Photo courtesy Ami Sangha

Over a decade out of art school, Vancouver-based artist Ami Sangha has found her niche. Sangha is the owner of Ami Like Miami, an online shop where she sells handmade ceramic dishes, painted with funky patterns and bright colours.

During her undergraduate degree, Sangha studied printmaking. In her late twenties, she fell into a deep depression, which prevented her from creating for a couple of years. While Sangha worked to get out of her depression, she took a ceramics class, which contributed to her healing. “I felt really free in ceramics, like I felt this sort of childlike way of trying to experiment and play and it felt so uplifting,” says Sangha.

Now, Sangha has a process when designing ceramics, which includes referencing various photos, colours and patterns that she’s found, sketching the design and going into her studio to make it. Still, there’s room for experimentation. “Recently I saw someone wearing a sweater vest, and I was like, I love that pattern. I’m going to try and make it with ceramics.”

In 2019, Sangha started making what is now her signature wavy dish. After gaining interest locally, Sangha’s ceramics grew in popularity in mid-2020 when the dish garnered attention on Instagram (@ami.like.miami). The success led to orders from larger retailers like Home Union and Wolf Circus, which further increased her audience. “Last summer I didn’t do anything but paint. The pandemic ended up being great timing,” she says. At this point, Sangha has sold between 600 and 700 wavy dishes.

Despite the growth, Sangha is a one-woman maker. She prioritizes slow creation and aims to release a new ceramics collection every year. “These are pieces of art to me, and I can’t go any faster than what I’m doing,” she explains. “It’s really important for these [pieces] to be coming from me and my body and my hands.”

This growth has also given Sangha the platform to share her Indian and Ukrainian identity. “If you want to ascribe to Ami Like Miami, you’re also following my political views, my personal views, how I feel about
my family and where I’m from, and that’s been really freeing,” she says. “As a first-generation Canadian, it’s a very overwhelming feeling to get to experience this type of freedom.”

Sangha is currently testing new ceramic styles and hopes to have them released by the holidays. In the future, she plans to expand beyond ceramics and have an art show, the first since her art school days. But one thing is certain: she’ll trust her intuition. “It’s important for me to express myself in whatever medium pulls me at the moment, and for right now it’s clay.”

Will Robinson's Young Prayer

Going through Toronto’s Nuit Blanche website is somewhat akin to the childhood experience of maniacally ripping through Sears’ Holiday Wish Book. After cutting out photos of every game, stuffed animal, and doll came the harsh realization that there was no way anyone, Santa or not, was going to indulge that kind of greed. So, I’d reluctantly remove the less-desired items (sorry, Hugo, Man of a Thousand Faces) from my wishlist collage.

Unless you’re Julian Higuerey Núñez or Henry Adam Svec, who are facing off in an attempt to critique every single project Saturday night, or you’re just going out to get hosed, Nuit Blanche requires strategic editing. Now’s not the time to get greedy.

What struck me with this year’s event is the increase of international artists and projects that rely on social media. While I think there is a lot of room for artistic experimentation using Twitter, Facebook et al, my standout memories from previous years are very physical experiences, like bouncing atop a 10-foot wedding cake with Cathy Gordon at her public divorce ceremony, or last year’s reenactment of the epic 1982 Wimbledon tie-breaking tennis match between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, as performed by artists Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen.

With that in mind, I have narrowed down my list to a few must-sees, and will leave the rest of the night to chance, so as not to be disappointed in the morning. There are about 1,000 ways to approach the night, but this year I’ve narrowed down the choices by theme, focusing on sound and music.

Gordon Monahan

The Piano, University of Toronto’s Hart House and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery

In 2009, musician and sound artist Gordon Monahan rigged up Massey Hall with piano wires. He has also airlifted a piano by helicopter to the top of a hill over St. John’s Harbour, where it acted as a soundboard for piano strings that danced and played in wind – until he gloriously smashed the instrument two weeks later. This year at University of Toronto, Monahan, Michael Snow and five other artists pay homage to Elton John’s instrument of choice.

Kelly Mark, Scenes from a Film I’ll Never Make, with Alternate Scores

Kelly Mark is one of the artists who never disappoints—she’s like the Streep of the festival. With that in mind, her new video plays with music she “always felt would be great film scores or, alternately, music that she remembers from films because it has worked so well.”

William Robinson, Young Prayer

Will Robinson is one of the smartest artists and musicians working in Halifax today. For this irreverent installation, which takes place at Metropolitan United Church, Robinson uses an automated pulley system to pay homage to rock ’n’ roll’s greatest gift to humanity: the guitar smash.

Ruth Ewan and Maeve Brennan, Tremolo

There is a tiny cinema near St. Lawrence Market, and inside its lobby there is a piano. On weekends, musicians entertain the movie-going crowds. For one night, in a collaborative project with U.K. artist Ruth Ewan, the instrument will be taken over by Maeve Brennan, an accomplished pianist who suffers from severe performance anxiety.

Leif Inge, 9 Beet Stretch, Old City Hall

Norwegian artist Leif Inge stretched Ludwig van Beethoven’s “9th Symphony” to a 24-hour duration, which will fill Old City Hall with “suspended, seemingly glacial, sonorities” instead of its usual blowhard yelling.

If 24-hour marathons are your thing, I had a chance to watch a few hours of Christian Marclay’s day-long cinematic video mashup, The Clock, at the National Gallery, and the sound editing is beyond amazing. Nighthawkish film fans, please go to the Power Plant  at 4 a.m. and tell me what happens.

From “Studies in Sea Ice” (2009) by Roberta Holden. Image courtesy the artist.

Vast, impressionistic, and haunting in its sparseness, Roberta Holden’s landscape photography calls to mind the dark, faraway corners of memory and dreams. Taken from days in the Arctic, over the frozen oceans near Greenland, and during the long nights in Morocco, Holden’s work evokes nostalgia for landscapes untouched by human development—a phenomenon many of us have never experienced. Despite the fact that her work focuses on international subjects, her photographs feel distinctly Canadian in their quiet study of our connectedness with the natural environment and the unspoken effects of the land on us.

Holden, now 33, spent her childhood on a sailboat. her parents sailed frequently up the coast of British Columbia, often stopping in remote locations to hike and work. Taking breaks from life at sea, they would dock the boat in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour and spend seasons harvesting wild rice in rural Manitoba as part of a family business. Until she was 14, Holden worked in the rural landscapes she now documents in her work.

“I think a lot of traditional landscape art tends to romanticize the natural environment. And of course there are a lot of experiences where you can sit back and just appreciate the environment,” she says. “But when you’re actually living and working with the land, it’s just an everyday experience that takes more of the senses than just sitting back and gazing upon it. It’s not just a passive, peaceful thing to look upon, but there’s a struggle in just surviving the day-to-day hardships of the landscape.” Tensions of ancestry, colonialism, barren spaces and the vulnerability of a planet facing the effects of climate change play out in Holden’s most recent touring exhibitions, “Studies in Sea Ice” and “The Stillness of Motion: Changing Polar Landscapes.” Studies in Sea Ice is a series of archival images taken in 2009 by helicopter off the northwest coast of Greenland, a region that has undergone a significant warming trend in the past decade. The Stillness of Motion is a series of black and white images shot in Arctic Canada and Antarctica in 2007 and 2008. The series explores the intersections between humans and the landscapes they inhabit.

Both series have been part of six exhibitions in the Vancouver area during the first three months of 2011. In that time, Holden travelled for the second time to Morocco on a five-month photography trip, where she honed her skills as as photojournalist. As someone who hates having her own picture taken, she can identify with people who don’t like being photographed, an understanding which informs the way she interacts with her subjects.

“It’s taken a little longer to be able to bring a camera out in situations that didn’t create a barrier between people,” she says. “That’s what I see as a problem with a lot of photojournalism that focuses on different cultures.

There’s often a lot of that objectifying of people because you bring a camera to a situation.”

Holden brought her camera to a peaceful protest in Marrakech in late February after which the military ordered that she delete all but two images. Both of them depict a human barricade of soldiers.

Holden’s encounter in Marrakech stands in direct opposition to what she hopes to achieve in her photography—to break away from uni-directional, us-versus-them narratives and, in so doing, illuminate social justice issues, political tensions, and the grey spaces in between. “It’s more of a visceral experience,” she says of her work. “Something felt and not just seen.”

“Total Eclipse” (2005) by Will Munro. Photo by Sean Weaver, courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

It is impossible to speak of Will Munro. It is easy to talk about Will Munro(s).

Will Munro, the artist/activist/social wizard/impresario and all around wunderkind, passed away one lovely, clear-as-a-bell summer morning in 2010. He was 36.

In that too-short time, Will produced an enormous amount of highly influential, DIY-infused art, reinvigorated the Toronto, and by extension the Canadian, and some argue international queer club scenes—and I support that argument, having seen Will’s influence up close in countless cities far and wide. He empowered an entire generation of artists, who felt the ossified Canadian art scene was not for them, to simply make/display/distribute their art on their own terms.

You’ll note I’m using the “/” rather a lot—I have no choice. Will was so many things, Will made so many things.

I generally distrust the concept of “legacy,” but not in the case of Will Munro. His simplest and most inspired conceit was that queers of all stripes (homo-normative, hetero-normative, just plain fucking crazy, what have you) have far more in common than not, and can share a big sandbox with joy. And we did. For a decade, Will ran the legendary Vazaleen parties— mad, dressed-to-thrill events that spawned many, many subsequent cultural products and collaborations. And that’s putting it mildly.

The parties and the underlying concept—shared space for a diverse population—were both quickly copied, largely because a generation of queers had grown up under the segregationist, essentialist politics of the ’80s–’90s (dykes only go to dyke spaces, fags only go to fag spaces…oh, it was all so tiresome, so numbing), politics that no longer made sense, no longer reflected the day-today reality of the third wave of queer liberation. Suddenly, we all had a meeting place, and we used it.

Now it’s time for a more rigorous examination of Will’s beautiful, sexy art. Will’s social contribution is well-documented (and I’m doing it again), but his highly original art practice, one fuelled by punk-rock aesthetics, righteous rage, and delicious impertinence, rough homemade fashion, sex-worker rights, and queer youth advocacy, club and DJ culture, anti-corporatism, and, less remarked on, his long fascination with, and promotion of, queer cultural history (an interest that made him, again, unique in his generation) has been, to date, not as well-considered.

I sense a sudden boom in Munro studies coming. Retrospectives and monographs galore. More gifts from a relentless giver. It’s the least we can do.

But this is not the place for academic pursuits. Let other people get post-grad degrees off Will’s back.

Right here, right now, I just want to say thank you. I miss you, Will.

Manipulated photo from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

Surfing the internet for a Grey Cup art project in November 2008, Kristin Nelson landed on a saucy image of Pamela Anderson. It immediately provoked a spark of inspiration that she couldn’t explain but also couldn’t deny. Thus emerged the seed of a body of artwork called My Life With Pamela Anderson that documents, in finely crafted fiber works and manipulated photos, an imaginary yet deeply felt relationship between the artist and the celebrity.

The Winnipeg-based multi-disciplinary artist has often explored the cultural representation of identity and sexuality, yet she had no feminist or deconstructionist impulse going in.

“I had a lot of hesitations about using her image,” Nelson says, “but in working out those thoughts I decided the main purpose would be to get to know her.”

In some ways the work is typical of Nelson’s art. She strives to get to know people and places and to reveal over-looked or un-thought-of aspects of them to herself as much as to her audience. The much sought-after Drag King Trading Cards (2007 and 2010), for instance, featured portraits of butch women in packs like those of sports stars for sale at corner stores. These subversive collectibles allowed Nelson to collaborate with and explore her own relationship to the queer community.

Manipulated photo from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

Currently, however, Nelson’s interest is finding more universal points of entry to her art. Her most recent subject, however, proved a challenge: How do you get to know someone so famous, not to mention already a well-worn subject of cultural criticism?

“It was important for her character that I stay quiet about the project and not justify it,” Nelson says. As she researched lesser-known aspects of Anderson’s life, Nelson decided that she would put herself in, thereby going beyond a critique of celebrity consumption to a playful take on how we absorb the lives of the famous into our own.

In the most striking pieces, pin-up pictures of the actress have been transformed into shimmering, larger-than-life cross-stitch portraits executed in yarn on aluminum panels. Also, in line drawings made from yarn and nails and manipulated family photographs, Nelson and Anderson hang out, watching TV and riding bikes, like old pals in gauzy dreams. The whole effect softens the celebrity’s official image and transforms preconceptions of its audience, too.

Large cross-stitch tapestries from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

On the one hand, Nelson’s work is laugh-out-loud funny, a luscious manifestation of celebrity idolization. On the other, the needlepoint technique highlights Nelson’s patience and care for her subject. “She’s a very dehumanized person, even in scholarly discussions by feminists,” Nelson points out. “She’s something to bitch about, or insult. She’s talked about in terms of either-or, but nobody is just an image of themselves.”

Indeed, in Nelson’s images, Anderson is neither Madonna nor whore, but something less sensational—a focal point for talking about sexuality and popular representations of it. “I’ve learned to see her in a different light, rather than categorize her as ‘other’ than myself,” Nelson says.

Currently, she is making another series of smaller cross-stitches about what she imagines was a real turning point in the actress’ life, this time patterns generated from the landscapes of a well-known leaked video from the mid 1990s of Pamela and her then-husband, Tommy Lee, having sex on a boat. The hope is that people may recognize the images. As Nelson explains, “Discussing is more interesting than showing.”

Detail of "2005 of the Top 3000" (2005) by Olia Mishchenko. Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario, image courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

“A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” Karl Marx noted. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Born in Kiev in 1980 and based in Toronto since 1997, artist Olia Mishchenko uses a paraphrase of this passage to situate her work. Bees perform a collective algorithm larger than any individual, while architects are engaged in singular imaginative play, a poesis, that brings forth something new. The tension between the plan and the realized built form—the translation of thought into reality—is a creative crucible, like the battle between paint and canvas, ink and paper, body and field of play.

But whereas Marx falls firmly on the side of the architect and human imagination, and thus allows architects more of the Fountainhead-style self-congratulation that can make them so obnoxious, Mishchenko’s whimsical renderings of collective construction are just as unstable as the buildings being erected in them. Or are they even buildings? In work after work, armies of tiny cartoonish figures—running children, dogs, people on bicycles—enact coordinated but uncanny undertakings, building and playing, laughing and working, leaving behind piles of materials, tools, ramps, walkways, and rickety towers as they venture across sometimes long horizontal vistas of creation. The details offer ambiguous and sometimes disturbing narratives. Who are the children? What are the structures for? What is the social system that calls them forth?

I have one Mishchenko drawing, untitled like all of them from this period, and in it there are no figures at all, just an apparently abandoned minaret fashioned of waterwheels, boxes, and large canisters full of clothing. Is it a dump or a supply centre, a folly or a shrine? And where are the usually busy figures, with their game boards and ladders and rope pulleys, their walking sticks and trunks of hewn wood? The absence is provocative. Mishchenko doesn’t celebrate architecture, she investigates the very idea of shared space, of public meaning, of makers and made. In their lighthearted manner, these joyous political artworks offer fresh sketches of the place where individual identity meets its collective other.

An outdoor festival hosted by Edmonton's Arts on the Ave. Photo by EPIC photography.

When I meet Christy Morin, founder of Edmonton’s Arts on the Ave, in the community arts cafe The Carrot, volunteer baristas are working the bar and activists with Black History Month are collecting their posters. Nearby, two community liaison police constables are huddled with a by-law officer, talking about their “weed and seed” program that targets drug houses and “predatory retail” drug-dealing fronts.

Morin lives in this Edmonton neighbourhood, the Ave—short for 118th Avenue—where I grew up in the 1950s. Once a proud working-class and immigrant quarter, it deteriorated like many old, inner-city neighbourhoods as the suburbs metastasized around Edmonton’s periphery. Today Morin tells me, with glowing satisfaction, that AOTA has just managed to find rehearsal space for four bands above an Avenue pawnshop—exactly the sort of growth she had hoped for.

“We are a community-based, grassroots initiative engaged in developing 118th Avenue as the community arts avenue of Edmonton,” says Morin, with the goal of “tapping into the non-institutionalized soul of art.” As an incubator, AOTA is a catalyst for other projects. “It’s a place of convergence for the whole community,” she says. AOTA began seven years ago as Morin’s vision of bringing artists into a neighbourhood of still-affordable housing and studio space, to see what the impact would be on this distressed neighbourhood. It turned out her vision was attractive to people all over the city who wanted to get involved—some of whom moved into the Ave so that community members now include professors and international students, people on disability-related income assistance, West African immigrants, and retirees, as well as the founding artists. “A new artist from Namibia is starting a community choir,” Morin says, part of a new connection to faith-based communities in the neighbourhood.

The list of activities goes on: the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts has recently opened with a gallery of art by “those who face barriers to artistic expression”; AOTA has held public meetings to brainstorm uses for a vacant cycle shop; murals and back-alley paintings spruce up walls; The Carrot café holds open mics for “zoomers” and Aboriginal drummers. That’s in addition to a farmers’ market, a popular block party for neighbourhood dogs (and their humans), and the annual Kaleido Arts Festival, which holds a popular “No-Tie” Gala—because, Morin explains, “for a lot of residents art is outside their comfort zone” and the casual vibe makes it more accessible.

Arts on the Ave was initially supported by an arts-friendly mayor and council committed to neighbourhood revitalization. But what it represents now, says Morin, is a “futuristic model of community involvement and development, putting your ideas out there before you have structures, letting go of your brand. It’s a web.” But this web isn’t online—it’s right around the corner.

'Moral Hazard' (2009) by Michael Lewis. Image courtesy the artist.

The hotel hallway is empty, save for trays of dirty dishes stacked on the muted blue carpet and on a room-service cart along the beige walls. A man in a loose tie bends over the cart, holding a glass of red wine and stooping tentatively over a half-eaten plate of food. He reaches for a chicken drumstick, hazarding a bite from the refuse pile before his colleagues discover his secret indulgence.

The guilty pleasure, intense privacy, and mounting tension of moments like those depicted in his darkly funny 2009 piece “Moral Hazard” underscore Michael Lewis’s large-format paintings. He skewers every office worker’s dream to get away from the grind of daily life in his 2010 piece “Options,” a satirical depiction of a man attempting to escape his office by climbing head first through a ceiling vent. Lewis hasn’t worked in the cubicle farms he documents prolifically in his work, but for the 41-year-old Toronto artist, the feeling of being in a workplace mirrors the experience of living in a society where everyday life is subject to the surveillance, homogeneity, and private crises of business culture.

His paintings aim to capture the experience of living in the past decade: the postmillennial, post-9/11 era where right-wing politics took centre stage in North America.

Many of those works are appearing this spring at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, where Lewis’ paintings form part of a touring group show, Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control.

“Something really fell off of reality when George W. Bush came in, for me,” he says. Conservative notions of “the good war” and our cultural obsession with commercial and consumer life are more overt than ever, Lewis says—a troubling context for an increasingly uncritical society.

“It’s quite apparent that this is not freedom that they’re pushing,” he says. “My work has addressed the kind of psychology that will allow for acceptance of these extreme messages.”

Lewis explored the Wall Street financial crisis in Purge, a series he began developing in 2008 during the crash. At the time, the global economic crisis was presented to the public as though it had spontaneously erupted out of the blue, but Lewis’s paintings explore the culture of complacency and denial in big businesses that foreshadowed the collapse. “It seemed to let people off the hook for not really having the foresight, when it was definitely out there,” he says.

Purge is anchored by Lewis’s ironic depiction of office workers literally collapsing in offices and at trade shows. His choice to blot out the eyes of his subjects and almost exclusively paint in the dark, drab tones of traditional office environments lends a sinister quality to his paintings. Their surreal, often embarrassing subject matter explicitly interrogates the nightmarish aspect of office life.

'Options' (2010) by Michael Lewis. Image courtesy the artist.

The stuff of nightmares, perhaps the very dreams of the office workers featured in previous works, was investigated in a January 2011 show, The Deformity Competition, at Toronto’s Meredith Keith Gallery. There, Lewis abandoned straightforward depictions of office life for the more macabre territory of skeletons and corpses.

While Lewis’s paintings deal with the political, financial, and mental fallout of a dark decade, his black humour introduces welcome notes of levity, too. “I know it doesn’t seem exactly funny, people collapsing everywhere,” he says. “Even though it’s a very serious time period and very serious subject matter, I’ve been pushing toward bringing a little humour to it.”

After years of war, financial collapse, and social unravelling, the dark humour of Lewis’s paintings comes as a welcome relief.