In a time of climate disasters, humanitarian crises, racial injustices, reconciliation failures, economic downturn, and political theatre, Response: Soft Action asks us to pause and reflect on conversations about care, ideas of home, explorations of identity and belonging, and how that can translate into action/activism.
Read MoreWelcome to artist Saida Saetgareeva’s lavender twilight world as she explores futurism in her 3D designs. A full-time freelance 3D/2D motion designer, Saetgareeva creates futuristic art in her spare time as she ponders the ties between utopia and dystopia and the supernormal potential of a digital world.
Read MoreFebruary begins in Aquarius season, and we’re launched straight into the energy of the month with a New Moon in Aquarius on the 1st. This transit is about freedom, autonomy, and possibility pertaining to our needs. If Capricorn’s Saturnian energy is about boundaries and limitation, Aquarius is about going beyond structure and certainty into the unknown. It’s leaving the village to begin a grand adventure towards life’s higher truths.
Read Moresummer.
summer
summer
summer
all the other girls
are bitches. they speak with fluency i don’t
understand. they have a secret
stash of ice cream. they giggle in the mornings, warm
their lips on the grass. i watch with awkward feet.
i am fraudulent, half-wrong, but i want to be good.
the men, though––the men are tall, dark
and haptic,
just like everyone said they would be.
Flipping through my old Blackberry photos from 2011, the one from high school, I found photos of at-home dye jobs that left the blondes—myself included—brassy, the brunettes closer to red. I smiled at how young we looked, frolicking in the freedom from ourselves that we found in plastic bottles of Smirnoff vodka. With alcohol we acted older than we were, escaping our teenage selves and emerging fearless. Later, we hid behind it: I didn’t mean it, I was just drunk. Our eyeshadow unblended, our foundation a tone off our skin colour, our crop tops and skirts hardly covering our bodies. We were gloriously unburdened.
Read MoreTwo poems by Charlotte Nip, "Funerals are for the living" and "I drink wine sometimes," accompanied by illustration by Allison Eng.
Read MoreThroughout the past two years of civil unrest, financial collapse, and pandemic, we have each been reminded of the frailty of both our systems and our bodies. Whether this frailty struck us in the form of lost loved ones and Zoom-sponsored funerals, or through government-sanctioned murder turned viral video, it has become undeniably clear that radical systemic change is needed to address the continued subjugation of the displaced and disenfranchised. For those who, thanks to the sacrifices of those that came before, march for a post-colonial future either in spirit or in the streets, survival has also reminded us to breathe, to grieve, and to remember. In the same light, We Lost People: Diasporic Departures by Berlynn Beam and Chase Keetley of Black Arts Vancouver – on view at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology as a part of Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots – invites viewers to pause and consider the land we gather on, the places we come from, and the people we have lost.
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