Baldassare Longhena’s Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute in Venice (1687) embodies the Virgin Mary through the symbolism and iconography of the building's architecture, ultimately revealing the Virgin’s clemency towards Venetians in the wake of the bubonic plague. 

By distorting reflections, scale, and spatial logic, Surrealist photographers transform architecture from a stable marker of reality into an uncanny threshold where the familiar slips into dreamlike disorientation.

Endorsed by social hierarchies that privilege the white, able-bodied, heterosexual male, stereotypes surrounding disability inform bodily representation in medicine, literature, popular media, and visual art, imbuing our culture and consciousness with learned biases against non-normative bodies.

By exposing how fear-induced cultural fictions homogenize complex lived experiences, Luca critiques society's inherent binary reductionism,  highlighting identity as a constantly negotiated and interconnected notion. 

Diego Velázquez’s 16th-century portraits of court dwarfs for Spanish King Philip IV radically depart from pictorial conventions to imbue his subjects with dignity and gravitas, thus subverting traditional hierarchies of power. 

Beaming children in tattered clothes starkly contrast bleak environments in Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's paintings, depicted with an ethereal radiance which diverges from their orphaned and impoverished state. In his renderings of childhood, Murillo bridges the secular and the divine, forging a hybrid visual language that sanctifies the poor, ostensibly secular children during a period of devastation in seventeenth-century Seville.

“Diaspora” operates as an institutional label across exhibitions and art historical discourse, shaping how contemporary Asian art is interpreted. Examining this term reveals complex tensions between political recognition and curatorial constraint.

Caroline Monnet’s IKWÉ embodies the reciprocities of care between Indigenous women’s bodies and the Earth’s land and waters, entrusting viewers to engage with intergenerational knowledges that endure beyond linear settler time.

By weaponizing self-portraiture and opacity, Dayna Danger and Nona Faustine turn the camera back on colonial power, transforming the image into a site of refusal, resistance, and self-authorship.

Transforming textiles into a second skin for the "Oriental" woman, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Odalisque, Enslaved Woman, and Eunuch epitomizes nineteenth-century French Orientalist ideologies, both exoticizing and eroticizing her.

Transforming a mere scrap of hotel paper into a striking commentary, Pat McGuire's drawing boldly challenges perceptions of Indigenous identity and resilience in the colonial landscape of 1960s Canada.

Reading the works of Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg through the lens of queer identity, Zen Buddhist thinking and practice was tied to the visual language of queer artists during the mid-20th century in New York. 

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.