Annie Canto is a visual artist and educator living on the unceded homelands of the hənqəminəm and Skwxwú7mesh speaking peoples in Burnaby, British Columbia. The underpinnings of her socially engaged art practice use critical race theory and women of colour feminist theories to question the complex systems that govern our relationships. Despite the rigorous critical and theoretical framework lurking beneath her work, Canto comes at these weighty issues from the side, with an irreverently serious playfulness. In her comic, installation and print-based practices, Canto shepherds us away from the more attention grabbing instances of othering and alienation; towards the quiet moments, those slippery experiences of social rupture and its flipside of kinship and belonging. With a surrealist's cheeky flippancy, she turns our gaze towards the moments that normally slip under our radar; the misconnections, the halting attempts, the fault lines, the absurd, all those unintentionally telling moments that expose the things we simultaneously fear and long for. Canto teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and supports the creation of co-ops by and for racialized/migrant communities at Solid State Community Industries in Surrey, BC.

by Nura Ali