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Headnote

A national survey of artists with forward-thinking practices

ANNIE MACDONELL

In Annie MacDonell's 2015 film The Fortune Teller, recently exhibited at London's McIntosh Gallery, the meticulous repair of a cast-resin hand belonging to a penny-arcade fortune teller soon becomes a continuous age-old loop of the hand-object, and its varied gestures. "I had the idea that by reactivating the hand, it would become a portal through which past, present and future could be made to merge and collapse," explains the Toronto-based artist of the film's intent, which could also read as an artist's statement on her photography and film work. Appropriation-like the choreographic restaging of passive political resistance in Holding Still // Holding Together, her multi-channel video installation that debuted at the 2016 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival-is a means of re-circulating images, and ultimately, narratives. "We're all telling the same stories over and over again, even while the language and the forms continue to change," says MacDonell, who made the Ontario longlist for the 2016 Sobey Art Award. "For me, appropriating and re-animating existing images is an acknowledgement of the continuity of experience, even through all the wild and seismic shifts of history."

Annie MacDonell The Fortune Teller (still) 2015 HD video 12 min

JAY MOSHER

An artist's day job always has a way of influencing their work. For Jay Mosher, the couple of months he spends out in Fort McMurray handling inspections for oil and gas companies informs his preoccupation with the processes of decay. "This whole industry I'm a part of is corrosion and mitigation, so you're always fighting decay, identifying it and coming up with solutions to prolong the life of equipment and materials, " says the Calgary-based artist, who received his MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2013. His 2016 solo show at Edmonton's Harcourt House mingled this industry knowledge with romantic notions of nature to explore sacrificial memes. The show had bronze mangrove leaves-known as the "sacrificial leaf" because it purportedly contains excess salt filtered from brackish water-zip-tied to aluminum and zinc objects that recall "sacrificial anodes," highly active materials often attached to boats, bridges and pipelines as a means of protecting less active material from corroding. One of 25 artists selected for the 2017 Alberta Biennale, Mosher...