Nikki Middlemiss at Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa

This summer I reviewed the exhibition Innerline which consisted of three recent and concurrent series of process-driven works by Nikki Middlemiss that complement each other and create an environment conducive to reflection and contemplation, further enhanced by the climate-control in the gallery where it was displayed.

Nikki Middlemiss, Remains series, 2024, folded National Geographic magazine pages, glue

Although drawing is central to Middlemiss's practice, you could argue that withdrawing is a more apt verb, given that abstraction and subtraction are typical of her work. In my review, with reference to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of “hot and cool” media, I suggest that Middlemiss’s removals (of a particular material or a referent) engineer a cooling effect and engage the viewer more in actively figuring out the work – the hallmark of McLuhan’s “cool” media. The precarity manifested by the works in Innerline offer a portrait of a civilization in the process of undoing itself through its own making. For the full text of my review check out the July 16 post on the Akimblog.

BlackFlash Artist Profile: Joyce Joumaa

The Spring issue of BlackFlash (43:1) includes an artist profile that I wrote, entitled "Joyce Joumaa: Prologue to Future Possibilities." The occasion for this profile was Joumaa's exhibition "Prologue" at the Galerie UQO in Gatineau, Quebec, which ran from January 21, 2026 to February 21, 2026. The profile offers a capsule survey of Joumaa's previous body of work in order to provide context for an interpretation of the works on view at Galerie UQO.

Although Joumaa has tackled a range of geopolitical issues, a major focus of her investigations has been Lebanon and its history. The exhibition can be understood as a prologue to a deeper understanding of historical conflict in the region and the way it has been represented to the public. Considering her other work, I identify a common aesthetic strategy employed by the artist: By leaving deliberate gaps between (and even within) related elements, Joumaa compels viewers to fill in the blanks by traversing the space of their installation, taking a closer look, and participating in the accretion of knowledge.

2025 Akimblog Critics' Picks

For Akimbo's round-up of the Akimblog's critics' picks for 2025, I was asked to provide a highlight from the previous year. Against the backdrop of a negative news cycle, I selected the positive note struck by the Ottawa Art Gallery's Grotto: The Bill Staubi Collection.

Grotto: The Bill Staubi Collection, 2025, installation view at the OAG (photo: Rémi Thériault)

Curated by Sam Loewen and Caro Stewart, the exhibition consists of works donated by a local art collector to the permanent collection at OAG. Bill Staubi’s support for emerging artists and queer artists in particular will have a lasting impact on the way art history in Ottawa can be told. The gallery has also established the Bill Staubi Acquisition Fund, furthering institutional support for emerging artists from the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. One of Staubi’s most recent purchases on view, Blooming Together from 2024, is by the artist Saivani Sanassy (Ubuntu Art House). 

Adorning Sanassy’s piece, replete with the colours of the non-binary pride flag, the phrase “We Have Always Been Here” echoed within another highlight of the arts calendar in Ottawa in 2025: a major retrospective exhibition of the trans artist Erica Rutherford at the National Gallery of Canada. You can read the full text of my post here on the December 18 Akimblog. 

vert soleil green sun at AXENÉO7, Gatineau

Pologne-en-Québec, a major video installation in two galleries at AXENÉO7 by Kinga Michalska and Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, is undoubtedly the best work of art about the pandemic that I have seen yet, tapping into the insecurities, fears, and sense of potentiality that existed during the suspended time of the lockdowns. It is in fact a product of a so-called Autoresidency at the centre, which was the method of providing support to artists they instituted during that period. Elements in the videos appear in the physical environments created for their viewing, loosening the boundaries between the two as well as contributing to the blurring of the lines between reality and fiction that occurs in them.

Kinga Michalska & Sarah Chouinard-Poirier, Pologne-en-Québec, 2025, installation view (courtesy of AXENÉO7; photo: Emma Jacques)

In a third gallery, another Autoresidency project by AM Trépanier, soif de communauté / hungry for community, presents oral, visual, and archival documentation of rural communes created by women, trans, and non-binary people in the area. At least one still from Pologne-en-Québec appears in this material, mingling fact with fantasy. The oral histories are also presented in a fanciful manner on audio cassette players resting on a low table with funky cushions, connecting again with the work presented in the other galleries. Both projects engagingly explore the pleasures and pitfalls of interpersonal dynamics and the lure of nostalgia. The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the October 30 Akimblog. 

Camille Turner and Yaniya Lee in C Magazine

The fall issue of C Magazine (161) contained my letter to the editor regarding the previous issue's interview with Camille Turner, which gave me additional insight into a work that Turner produced in collaboration with Yaniya Lee that I encountered in the exhibition Archives by Artists which was at Galerie UQO between March 12, 2025 and April 12, 2025. 

For me, the blank cards in the Black History Navigational Toolkit (2021) perfectly captured the notion of "Extra Life" that was the theme of the issue. With reference to the duration of a video game, the play of meaning in an artwork is extended by the multiple lives that it can engage.

Joyce Wieland at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Pucker Up! The Lipstick Prints of Joyce Wieland is billed as a vignette exhibition, presented in association with a major retrospective of Wieland’s work, Heart On. Celebrating an acquisition that completes the National Gallery of Canada’s collection of Wieland’s so-called lipstick prints, this show is an amuse-bouche in relation to the travelling survey; nevertheless, when considered alongside works by other artists currently on view at the gallery, Pucker Up!’s limited scope still underscores Wieland’s concerns with equity and cultural sovereignty in a manner that resonates with current debates.

Joyce Wieland, The Arctic Belongs to Itself, 1973, lithograph on wove paper (© National Gallery of Canada; photo: NGC)

I recalled Wieland on the same visit while viewing the New Generation Photography Award exhibition where I encountered the work of asinnajaq, a Canadian Inuk artist from Inukjuak, Quebec.  Featuring details of nature and terrain, her prints, unframed and affixed to the wall with magnets, or on a piece of synthetic fabric bunched up in the centre of space, reminded me of the provisional and performative aspects I discerned in Wieland’s work. Through artworks like The Arctic Belongs to Itself (included in Pucker Up!), Wieland raised awareness about Indigenous rights and the threat of environmental devastation. In accordance with Inuit values, asinnajaq similarly expresses a love of the land. Her video holding piece, like Weiland's work, suggests that an act of loving care can also be an act of resistance. The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the May 29 Akimblog. 

The Arnold Trevor Tolley Art Collection

My essay, "Unexpected Revolutionaries," was published in The Arnold Trevor Tolley Art Collection in 2021 but I didn't see a copy of it until 2022 due to the delays and the upheavals of the pandemic. Produced by Glenda M. Patrick, the publication is meant to be a memorial to her husband A.T. (Trevor) Tolley (1927-2018) and a document of the art collection that they built together at their home on the Seven Willows estate in Williamsburg, Ontario.

Cover image: Meryl McMaster, Secret Darkness of Birds, 2016 (detail).

My essay uncovered the way that chance encounters and personal connections are enabled by an approach to art that is open and exploratory in character, characteristics that largely describe the artworks in Glenda and Trevor's collection. In what struck me as an incredible coincidence, during my visit with Glenda at her home, I found myself looking at a view from an apartment I had briefly inhabited decades earlier in Montreal, depicted in a painting by one of my roommates, Christopher Arnoldin. Only now, through reference to the title of his painting, do I realize that we also shared an appreciation of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 

Christopher Arnoldin, A Mountain Never Seems to Have a Need to Speak (2003), acrylic on muslin. 

Postscript: I was saddened to learn of the death of Glenda M. Patrick (1938-2026) and want to add that the Arnold Trevor Tolley Art Collection was a testament to her passion for and support of the arts as well. I have a very pleasant memory of meeting with her and touring her home to survey the collection while researching my essay.