Canvas 4/27/25 Canvas 4/27/25

“The House with the Ocean View”: Isolation as a means of resistance in the work of Marina Abramović

Isolation can be a powerful tool to establish profound relationships and to prompt solidarity. In a postmodern, technology obsessed world, it also becomes a way to challenge the superficially connected landscape.

Canvas 4/26/25 Canvas 4/26/25

Timoh Garcia’s Reimagined Waste: “Art et Écologie” and the power of creative sustainability through street art

Montréal-based street artist Timoh Garcia transforms waste into a powerful ecological critique. Former L’Original intern Anne-Lise Mocanu gives us the scoop on how.

Canvas 3/24/25 Canvas 3/24/25

Private Ritual to Public Spectacle: Contemporary Perspectives on the Rise of Coquettes, Cosmetics, and the Blurring of Gender and Class Identities in François Boucher’s Toilette Scenes

François Boucher's toilette scenes explore the complex gender and class anxieties that connect the hyperfeminine aesthetics of the Rococo style and its modern counterpart, the coquette aesthetic.

Canvas 3/19/25 Canvas 3/19/25

Sensing the Past: Early Modern Apothecaries as Proto-Sensoria and their Influence on Contemporary Retail Environments

In cultivating a multisensory environment of sounds, scents, and sights, the early modern apothecary functioned as a proto-sensorium not dissimilar to contemporary immersive retail spaces.

Canvas 1/18/25 Canvas 1/18/25

Haunted Blueprints: Unveiling the overlook hotel’s role as the most dynamic character in “The Shining”

In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, The Overlook Hotel is more than an inanimate structure. Rather, it is a malevolent presence with a mind of its own, emerging as one of the film's most compelling characters.

Canvas 1/15/25 Canvas 1/15/25

Navigating Practicality and Aesthetics: Byzantine floor coverings challenging our estrangement from late antique material culture

Weaving together affective, visual, and social power, Byzantine Floor Coverings demonstrate a rich artistic tradition which underpins the craft of modern rug-making.

Canvas 12/10/24 Canvas 12/10/24

“Cybernetic Guerillas”: Engagement of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional with “Culture Jamming”

The EZLN’s struggle reveals how creative media are re-appropriated to denounce and disrupt the status quo, illustrating the possibilities for political mobilization in the new age of communication.

Canvas 12/3/24 Canvas 12/3/24

Decay and Desire: Analyzing queer narratives in Alvin Baltrop’s “The Piers” (1975-86)

Baltrop’s photographs capture and preserve the beauty and secrecy of queer experiences that took refuge within the decaying architectural milieu of Manhattan’s piers in the 1970s and 80s.

Canvas 11/22/24 Canvas 11/22/24

Commodifying Fibre and Flesh: Guinea Cloth and the Dutch Slave Trade

Dutch artists contributed to the commodification of Black bodies in colonial Brazil by employing cotton as a visual signifier of enslaved status

Canvas 11/18/24 Canvas 11/18/24

A Postmodern Defamiliarization from Time in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Theaters”

Sugimoto's photographs disrupt perceptions of linearity by conjuring nostalgia for a bygone era of American cinema.

Canvas 11/14/24 Canvas 11/14/24

“Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt” and on the Ceiling: Visual reappropriations from Qajar Iran to modern India

The painting affixed to the ceiling of India’s Rashtrapati Bhavan holds a complex history of hidden meanings and reappropriations over time.

Canvas 11/13/24 Canvas 11/13/24

Fashioning Holland: The hidden language of clothing in seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture

Dutch portrait artists in the seventeenth century carefully selected clothing as a statement of class and social attitudes to reflect the nation’s ideals.