Joyce Joumaa, A Temporary Loss of Consciousness, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 19 August 2024

50 or so species of ants have been known to practice various forms of what we might consider slavery.

Aphids, the minuscule insects that suck sap from plants and flower petals, produce honeydew as waste matter. So, farmer ants collect colonies of these sugar-making aphids and mine them for their sweet excess nectar.

Scientists call this a “symbiotic” or “mutualistic” relationship because the farmer ants exhibit a protective kind of behaviour, often moving their aphid populations to new and more fertile ground and shielding them from other predators.

But farmer ants also act violently to keep their aphid populations under strict control, deliberately clipping their wings so they can’t escape, and secreting a tranquilizing chemical from their feet which makes them docile, continuously producing sap for their Formicidae masters.

The Polyergus genus of ants go one step further, enslaving other ant species to perform virtually every aspect of work life for them — from cleaning their nests to taking care of their young and even feeding them. Polyergus are so reliant upon slave populations that they no longer do anything autonomously; they exist solely to raid, entrap, and subjugate other ants.

Even though they should be capable of overcoming their attackers in sheer number and physical force, researchers discovered that Polyergus discharge a compound called a “Propaganda pheromone” that confuses their prey, disorganizing and preventing them from mounting an effective defence. The Polyergus then steal their pupae and larvae to raise them on their own as slaves, consuming some of them along the way as they travel in columns back to their colonies.

Ants have yet to develop a governing moral character that, for instance, regulates the media, or prohibits chemical warfare and kidnapping, or condemns slavery, cannibalism, and colonialism.

Nature’s dystopian brutality unfolds for ants with quotidian banality.

Yuki Isami, Club Montréal TD, 1 July 2024

The only time I was ever in prison was to visit and interview the author and famous Canadian bank robber, the late Stephen Reid. I somehow knew or at least suspected that he smoked cigarettes, so I brought a few packs of American Spirits as a gift. Even if he didn’t smoke, I thought, he could at least trade them for something else he was addicted to.

Of course he wanted them, and over four of the most interesting hours of my life, the two of us chain-smoked one after another after another in the yard of the William Head Institution on the south-westernmost coast of Vancouver Island. “Doing time is easy,” Reid wrote in his 2012 book A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, “quitting cigarettes is hard.”

One of the most surprising things Reid told me was that he wasn’t unhappy in jail. He rather preferred its routine to the chaos of civilian life.

The Persian-born autodidact Doris Lessing observes in her Massey Lecture, broadcast on the CBC in 1985, “We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in.” Some forms of brainwashing are benign, while others can manifest in innocent people confessing to crimes they never committed, and even killing in the name of cult, country, or king.

“The best we can hope for,” says Lessing, “is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”

Angela Grauerholz, Ellipses, Blouin | Division, Until 31 August 2024

“It’s a little bit of a thing that I have,” the photographer Angela Grauerholz tells me behind the scenes at her exhibition’s vernissage.

“Doors and windows, the scrim or screen that sometimes happens, the blur gives a veil to what you’re looking at. I do like that. I do like putting some kind of device between the viewer and the actual image, to just give a moment of arrest.”

Joep Beving, Le Gesù, 30 June 2024

In the third episode of the classic British series The Prisoner entitled “A, B, and C,” the character known as Number Six, a former spy-turned-inmate, is administered three doses of a powerful drug that allows his controller, Number Two, to view and manipulate his dreams on a TV screen.

For three consecutive nights, Number Six dreams of attending a garden party where he encounters three of his former colleagues, each of them a potentially suspect collaborator, while Number Two seeks “information” on the reason behind Number Six’s resignation.

A doctor called Number 14 delivers this experimental truth serum via injections to Number Six’s wrist, which he eventually discovers, replacing the purple drug with water on the third attempt, finally thwarting the mind-control experiment.

In each episode of the psychedelic drama, which plays out something like Gilligan’s Island on acid, Number Six attempts to discover who is ultimately in control of the island-prison, called “The Village.”

He repeatedly asks Number Two, a character played by a different actor in each episode: “Who is Number One?” And over and over, the answer he receives is a cryptic non-sequitur: “You are Number Six.”

In the end, just a slight change of inflection, a strategically placed comma, reveals a clue to the riddle’s solution.

Biennale Elektra — Illusion, Arsenal, Until 21 July 2024

Then the proud waters had gone over our soul. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. —Psalm 124:5-7

Amidst this year’s assemblage of ultra-contemporary, technologically assisted, and artificially intelligent art, which gives a cumulative affective impression approaching Homer Simpson’s website, is a thoughtfully produced and quietly executed video entitled Slow Track by the young artist Timothy Thomasson, an infinite scene which recedes deliberately and hypnotically through familiar-feeling tableaux representing, as the accompanying text aptly describes, “nowhere in particular.”

This gently profound work is a welcome exodus from the hyperactive and overstimulating tendencies characterizing digital art today.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Angela Grauerholz, La Compteuse 2/5, 2018, Inkjet prints, 45 1/4 x 65 1/4 in. Photographed for NicheMTL.}