I’m Megan, a writer and editor living in London. Below is a list of selected texts I’ve written. Let’s talk about art.

It feels a bit sad, I said to Briard during our November Zoom call, to feel unable to trust the very instruments which guide us through the world. But as in Second Sight, Briard pointed out, it’s all about perspective: like using night vision, infrared, or prisms, those things long familiar to us become strange, new vessels of potential. Like double vision, our senses multiply; a challenge to the way we see only invites openness to new ways of seeing.

– Insider Series: Annie Briard, Burrard Arts Foundation, bit.ly/AnnieBriardBAF

That these perspectives undermined the capitalist, apathetic rigidity created and perpetuated by Leon Ladner’s investment—a Clock Tower that he named after himself, which, if we may be colloquial, totally sends us—demonstrates how such ways of knowing and being expand far outside Western ontologies. Thinking of the many ways to be and to know, not from hours carefully spent at university but from cultivating an embodied sense of presence, like so many dots in a matrix, draws out Strata as an act of protest, seeking an intervention in “progress” and its accoutrements, and agency restored to our bodies in space.

– Affective Disruptions: Embodiment and the Leon Ladner Clock Tower, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, bit.ly/AffectiveDisruptions

Borrowing from the Impressionists, Milne abandoned local colour in service of a more subjective form of perception, as in his Interior with Paintings (1914). Like Henri Matisse, he embraced colour over line and, in 1913, five of Milne’s paintings were included in the Armory Show, which also included Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911). After that exhibition, Milne’s work continued to develop in lockstep with his artistic contemporaries, celebrating an increasingly fractured, frenetic style of painting that wasn’t bothered by mainstream conventions of a work’s beauty.

– David Milne, Canadian Art, https://bit.ly/DavidMilneMJ

This notion of the vessel is fundamental to approaching the exhibition in relation to the institutional mission of the gallery. Access is its own vessel. Chinatown is its own vessel. Within the confines of its borders, people, politics, ideas, and energies mix and ferment, passively and actively, often specifically through the cultural experience of shopping, making, eating, and sharing food. As new restaurants move in and old businesses close, the landscape of Chinatown is in a near constant state of change.

– Fermenting Feminism at Access Gallery, Simon Fraser University Comparative Media Arts Journal, bit.ly/FermentingFeminism

For centuries, art historical frameworks assumed that influence flowed in one direction like salt in the blood, from a site with a high concentration of genius and innovation to a weaker artistic economy. Now, though, we recognize that “influence” can be a dangerous term. Innovation isn’t unilateral; ideas and idioms are exchanged at all angles and from all directions. What we once perceived as the blind imitation of influential figures, we now recognize as adaptation to one’s specific circumstances and needs. Often times, as in nature, it is a matter of survival—in this case, survival of the artistic praxis.

– Bobbie Burgers: Blurred Edges, Montecristo Magazine, bit.ly/BobbieBurgers

Plus “Artists Against Precarity” in Canadian Art and “Thinking continuity in the works and milieus of Fahrelnissa Zeid” for the University of British Columbia, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. That last one there is literally my thesis. Enjoy!