DAYNA DANGER is a queer, Two-Spirit, Métis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist based in Montreal. Danger’s medium shifts to capture her ideas, whether that means hand-beading leather fetish masks or photographing naked subjects holding animal antlers. Always striking and highly erotic, the artist’s work addresses power and intimacy, explores the line between objectification and empowerment, and creates space for underrepresented bodies to fill. Danger creates with femme, butch, trans, and gender non-conforming folks in mind.

Toronto-based writer and performer CATHERINE HERNANDEZ stunned readers last year with her debut novel Scarborough, an extraordinary portrait of intersecting lives in the community in Toronto’s east end. A self-described “Filipina Femme, Navajo wife, and radical mama,” Hernandez is also the author of multiple plays and M is for Moustache: A Pride ABC Book, a gorgeous celebration of diverse lives, chosen families, and queer histories for children. On top of literary brilliance, Hernandez is the director of b current performing arts.

New Brunswick’s PARTNER is one of the most exciting bands in Canada— and they’re making the lesbian garage rock of your dreams. Fronted by best friends Josée Caron and Lucy Niles, Partner is loud, intimate, and unapologetic. Tracks like “The ‘Ellen’ Page” and “We’re Gay (But Not for Each Other)” have earned them a cult following and made Partner the most beloved lesbian Canadian group since Tegan and Sara.

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT’s debut poetry collection This Wound is a World, released late last year, established the queer Cree poet as an essential voice in the literary landscape. Writer Gwen Benaway called the work “the best of the Queer NYC poets meeting the best of Indigenous poetry.” Belcourt’s words are a revelation, challenging—among many things—gender roles, racism, and the colonialism of queer spaces, all the while crafting visions for possibilities of decolonial love.

VIVEK SHRAYA is a force to be reckoned with. In the past year alone, she released her musical debut Part-time Woman in collaboration with the Queer Songbook Orchestra (an album by a brown trans girl about being a brown trans girl) and Angry, an EP she made as one half of the duo Too Attached (a musical project with her sibling Shamik Bilgi). No matter the medium, the writer/musician/publisher/educator’s work is striking, honest, and unapologetic. Shraya’s next book, I’m Afraid of Men, will reflect on toxic masculinity, homophobia, and transphobia, and will hit shelves fall 2018.

CRIS DERKSEN is a Two-Spirit Cree cellist and composer originally from Northern Alberta. Now based in Toronto, Derksen has received critical acclaim for their albums, including the most recent, Orchestral Powwow—a powerful blend of electronic cello and powwow music. Derksen’s masterful creations as a composer accompany performances by artists like Tanya Tagaq, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Derksen will premiere new work at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity this summer.

For a peek into the worlds of urban queer youth, look no further than the work of Montreal-based writer CASON SHARPE. Our Lady of Perpetual Realness & Other Stories, Sharpe’s chapbook of short stories published by Metatron Press, follows six gay men of colour as they come of age in Toronto and Montreal. Sharpe’s characters navigate gender norms, racism, sexuality, conflicting identities, and capitalism. The author also co-hosts the intimate and binge-worthy experimental podcast Two Hungry Children with best-friend and artist Kalale Dalton-Lutale.

SULTANA BAMBINO is a creator whose work celebrates and uplifts queer lives and talent. As an artist, Bambino is known for her pastel-palette drawings depicting the universes of “supernatural queers” in her community, including the cover art for Kai Cheng Thom’s brilliant novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. Bambino also co-founded Slut Island, a feminist-queer summer music festival in Montreal for underrepresented performers and audiences. Through words, performance, textiles, photography, video installation, and more, femme supreme

KAMA LA MACKEREL explores resilience, resistance, and healing for marginalized communities. Among her many projects as an arts facilitator and educator, she hosts Gender B(l)ender, Montreal’s only queer open mic, and is the artistic coordinator of the Our Bodies, Our Stories, an arts mentorship program for queer and trans youth of colour in Montreal.

CORRECTION (06/11/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Catherine Hernandez was still a part of Sulong Theatre. This regrets the error.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

In Canada, a lot of work has been done to develop two great organizations: There’s the Canadian Actor’s Equity Association (CAEA or Equity), an association that operates not unlike a union; and the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), a union with a 70-yearplus history in Canada—anything that happens on TV, film, or radio falls into its territory. Both of these acronyms do tremendous work for artists of almost every discipline, ensuring they get treated fairly and compensated accordingly. However, there is a grey area of non-union work.

When it comes to dance in Canada almost everything else falls under non-union work. A lot of stage productions and film work identify themselves as non-union, generally because their budgets are not large enough to accommodate and abide by the standards set by ACTRA or CAEA. That is totally understandable. We need these smaller non-union jobs to help artists gain the experience and momentum to go from their humble beginnings to the expert professionals who can create the shows and music we love.

The issue presents itself when a huge company, brand, and/or musician puts a call out for non-union work. In most cases the wage is nearly non-existent (or actually non-existent). For example, at Toronto’s 2015 Pan Am games, the opening ceremonies featured many dazzling acts and 60 local professional dancers. These dancers had nearly 150 hours of rehearsal. How much were they compensated? A transit pass for the month of June—valued at $140. You can’t make this up. Surely somewhere in the $2.5-billion dollar budget (that had room for Cirque du Soleil, international choreographers, Kanye West, and a second fully compensated cast of dancers) there must have been room to pay the opening ceremonies cast—and if there wasn’t, maybe they shouldn’t have been hired.

Many dancers are routinely hired by big name acts for far, far less than minimum wage. Artists create culture, and without culture who are we? What would life be without arts and entertainment? There are many groups, individuals, and organizations fighting to improve conditions for dancers, but we can’t do it alone. We need the public to support our goals. The harder it is for artists to get paid properly, the harder it is for them to create. A great number of dance artists vacate Canada because they know they can be better compensated abroad. We need to fight for our artists so they are fairly compensated at home and feel valued here in Canada. We need to stand by them so they feel supported when they tell these offers of opportunity and exposure: “I’m worth more.”

Photo courtesy of Thomas L. Colford/Instagram

“Having a message should be cool,” says Toronto hip-hop artist Rich Kidd on the power of rap. Kidd hosted First Out Here: Indigenous hip-hop, a documentary by Noisey, in which Kidd visited Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto to meet with Indigenous hip-hop artists. Kidd, born to Ghanian parents, says he drew a lot of parallels between Black and Indigenous communities when it comes to the social and political issues both face. “I don’t enter things with expectations,” says Kidd, ” but I knew that anything I would encounter would exceed what I thought just because there’s a lot of history.”

Audio engineer David Strickland was one of the Indigenous artists featured in the film. Strickland, whose clients include Drake and Jamie Foxx,  says he doesn’t like the terms “native or Indigenous hip-hop.” He’s proud of his indigenous culture, but adds that he’s not limited by it because he tries to avoid being pigeonholed. “There are a lot of people who don’t know that we have that quality of artists. We are not all a certain way—so I say, be subjective.”

The film focuses on artists such as Drezus, Winnipeg Boyz, and T-Rhyme all reflect on the issues that surround their culture and community, from missing and murdered aboriginal woman to discussing the challenges they face trying to earn respect and popularize their music outside of the indigenous community. Strickland hopes the film helps shed some light on the artists’ talent, not just the Indigenous struggle. His advice to emerging indigenous hip-hop artists in transcending stereotypes and reaching mainstream success is simply: originality.

“Don’t just talk about the girls and the bling,” says Strickland, “that’s the problem in hip-hop, everyone is trying to cover everybody else, but back in the day we had 20 different flavours.” Kidd is also reminiscent of  mainstream hip-hop—even referring to Tupac as sort of the “Che Guevara of hip-hop” of his time. “There was a point in rap where it was cool to be militant about what you believe,” Kidd adds, “and to stand up for your culture, beliefs and rights – that focus is so far off now.” Kidd believes that those that control mainstream and commercial music aren’t interested in promoting songs with strong messages, largely because they have the power to affect change.

“If we are told that this f**kery is going on day after day,” he says, “then we’re going to want to change it.” Kidd adds that the hip-hop community has the opportunity to watch these issues like “eagles” and to “intercept the path of where our generation is headed by leading them to the right direction and using our voice for positive change.”

The film was screened for the public by the Regent Park Film Festival in April and is available on YouTube through Vice’s sister channel Noisey. 

I moved to downtown Hamilton, Ontario, in 2005. We bought our three-storey Victorian home near Copps Coliseum at a price that would have been unheard of in Toronto. The corner we lived on had been labelled “the most dangerous corner in Hamilton.” But my shaved head and tattoos stood out less here than in the fashionable, gentrified neighborhoods of downtown Toronto.

I noticed that a) there were lots of sex-trade operations near our house— for instance, massage parlours and the Hamilton Strip strip club—and b) there were also two anti-abortion establishments nearby. Our neighbourhood was like many other Canadian neighbourhoods: some people believe sex is for fun and pleasure, whereas others believe sex is specifically for making babies.

That’s why I’m so proud of Big Susie’s. Big Susie’s is (to quote their website) “a working group by and for sex workers in Hamilton and the surrounding area.” Their purpose is to “fight back against the stigma and silence that degrades, devalues and dehumanizes sex workers and their work.”

The organization was born because of an odd and somewhat unfortunate intersection between politics and art. In 2009, a small local art gallery featured a series of photographs the artist had taken from the window of his studio, which was near a notorious alley used by hookers. The photographs were explicit and voyeuristic and—most importantly—were taken without the consent of the subjects. Trendy artists and people from the suburbs who visited the little gallery seemed entertained by a scandalous glimpse of Hamilton’s sexual working-class underbelly. But local sex-trade workers were angry. Weren’t they people too? Did someone have a right to photograph them and make an “artistic statement” about their bodies and their lives, without their permission? The protest against this exhibit led to the birth of Big Susie’s. Is all art political? Definitely, yes. Should artists be challenged when they consistently make work they characterize as apolitical, when in fact it is not? I (not to mention Bertolt Brecht!) would say yes.

As an out gay man and a drag queen, I have always been proud to be promiscuous. It makes me feel safe to have an organization in my town that is sex-positive and defends the rights of women to use their bodies in any way they wish in consenting sexual situations. Some feminists assume all prostitutes are victims, and proceed to speak for them, as if they didn’t have a voice of their own. But, lo and behold, they do.

'Moral Hazard' (2009) by Michael Lewis. Image courtesy the artist.

The hotel hallway is empty, save for trays of dirty dishes stacked on the muted blue carpet and on a room-service cart along the beige walls. A man in a loose tie bends over the cart, holding a glass of red wine and stooping tentatively over a half-eaten plate of food. He reaches for a chicken drumstick, hazarding a bite from the refuse pile before his colleagues discover his secret indulgence.

The guilty pleasure, intense privacy, and mounting tension of moments like those depicted in his darkly funny 2009 piece “Moral Hazard” underscore Michael Lewis’s large-format paintings. He skewers every office worker’s dream to get away from the grind of daily life in his 2010 piece “Options,” a satirical depiction of a man attempting to escape his office by climbing head first through a ceiling vent. Lewis hasn’t worked in the cubicle farms he documents prolifically in his work, but for the 41-year-old Toronto artist, the feeling of being in a workplace mirrors the experience of living in a society where everyday life is subject to the surveillance, homogeneity, and private crises of business culture.

His paintings aim to capture the experience of living in the past decade: the postmillennial, post-9/11 era where right-wing politics took centre stage in North America.

Many of those works are appearing this spring at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, where Lewis’ paintings form part of a touring group show, Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control.

“Something really fell off of reality when George W. Bush came in, for me,” he says. Conservative notions of “the good war” and our cultural obsession with commercial and consumer life are more overt than ever, Lewis says—a troubling context for an increasingly uncritical society.

“It’s quite apparent that this is not freedom that they’re pushing,” he says. “My work has addressed the kind of psychology that will allow for acceptance of these extreme messages.”

Lewis explored the Wall Street financial crisis in Purge, a series he began developing in 2008 during the crash. At the time, the global economic crisis was presented to the public as though it had spontaneously erupted out of the blue, but Lewis’s paintings explore the culture of complacency and denial in big businesses that foreshadowed the collapse. “It seemed to let people off the hook for not really having the foresight, when it was definitely out there,” he says.

Purge is anchored by Lewis’s ironic depiction of office workers literally collapsing in offices and at trade shows. His choice to blot out the eyes of his subjects and almost exclusively paint in the dark, drab tones of traditional office environments lends a sinister quality to his paintings. Their surreal, often embarrassing subject matter explicitly interrogates the nightmarish aspect of office life.

'Options' (2010) by Michael Lewis. Image courtesy the artist.

The stuff of nightmares, perhaps the very dreams of the office workers featured in previous works, was investigated in a January 2011 show, The Deformity Competition, at Toronto’s Meredith Keith Gallery. There, Lewis abandoned straightforward depictions of office life for the more macabre territory of skeletons and corpses.

While Lewis’s paintings deal with the political, financial, and mental fallout of a dark decade, his black humour introduces welcome notes of levity, too. “I know it doesn’t seem exactly funny, people collapsing everywhere,” he says. “Even though it’s a very serious time period and very serious subject matter, I’ve been pushing toward bringing a little humour to it.”

After years of war, financial collapse, and social unravelling, the dark humour of Lewis’s paintings comes as a welcome relief.

Dancer Rebecca Halls pictured in stills from director Marites Carino's short film HOOP. Image courtesy Marites Carino.

Dance is an art form often discussed in terms of its complexity and mystery. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B. Yeats famously asked. One wonders, then, what he would make of dance film. For when you add a second layer—the dance of a director’s eye and viewfinder around the dancer—you get an even more elaborate set of artistic relationships. It’s in this genre that Canadian filmmaker Marites Carino is gaining national and international attention.

Also known as dance for camera, dance film “is two choreographies in one,” Carino explains by phone from Montreal’s Mile End, where she runs the production company Video Signatures. For example, in her most recent dance film, HOOP, which explores the relationship of a single performer with a seemingly simple child’s toy, dancer Rebecca Halls choreographed her steps while Carino’s task was to choreograph the camera’s movement around her, creating the composition of shots and the film’s overall structure.

“HOOP isn’t a normal kind of dance film compared to anything else I’ve seen,” Carino admits. “Let’s face it—contemporary dance, it ain’t accessible to the average Joe. I want to appeal to people not just with a dance background. I have a dance background, but I’m also trained to tell stories through journalism, and I’m interested in creating a more photographic kind of environment.” As a result, you could pull out any of HOOP’s frames and hang it on your wall, yet the film as a whole remains fluid and expressive.

Carino’s camerawork communicates the themes— disorientation, fragmentation, suspension, perception, progression—in how it reveals the dancer’s interaction with space, with the hoops, and with her own body within those elements. The film is playful, tender, sensual, ecstatic. Many scenes, like a suspended hoop tunnel or the dancer’s legs floating in mid-air, leave you wondering how the effect was achieved.

“I felt like a magician working backwards,” Carino says of the intense planning, noting it is something you could never replicate in a live show.

All of Carino’s experience comes to bear behind her cinematic composition. Trained in ballet and contemporary dance, she has a postgraduate degree in broadcast journalism and several documentary films, in addition to the dance films, under her belt.

Carino’s unique blend of talents has the Canadian and international dance film communities taking notice. Commissioned by Canada’s Bravo!FACT program in 2009, HOOP earned Carino an artist residency last year as part of the DANCE MOViES Commission at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York. It screened at the Cinedans festival in Amsterdam late last year, and will be at the Dance on Camera Festival at New York’s Lincoln Center this month. Heady stuff for a self-described ballet “bunhead” from Saskatoon.

“I feel like I’m finally going somewhere,” Carino says. “Doing this on your own can be very lonely, but at the residency I felt like an artistic princess!” Her experience of what’s possible with professional resources means she’s now hoping for a HOOP follow up. She’s shy with the details, but hints it will have to do with fire hoops and Iceland.

In the meantime, however, it’s a life of pitching and proposals, and waiting. “I want to do more,” Carino sighs, “but there are so many hoops to go through.” Pause. “I didn’t even mean to make that pun.”

Excerpts from HOOP

"Chickadeeday" (2010) by Stefan Thompson. Image courtesy the artist. Click to enlarge.

Pablo Picasso had his so-called blue period. Ottawa artist Stefan Thompson is exploring a green period.

Thompson first made a name for himself on the streets of the capital as a graffiti artist. Working under the pseudonym Maki, Thompson populated nooks and alleys throughout the city’s downtown with a menagerie of dazzlingly rendered and brilliantly coloured animal forms. It was as though the techno-coloured spirit-creatures painted by Norval Morrisseau had burst forth from their canvases and stormed the walls of the nation’s capital.

Stefan Thompson in his Ottawa studio. Image courtesy the artist.

But three years ago, as Thompson was emerging as an artist under his own name, this time working on canvas, his work took a radical shift. He tossed all of his solvent-laden spray cans and abandoned many of the brilliant pigments that had been central to his palette. The one-time environmental sciences student decided he couldn’t work in a poisonous medium any longer.

“It was guilt, and a certain degree of knowledge about the environment that I picked up in university,” Thompson says of his motivation. “I was reading the back of art supplies and realizing that I was washing carcinogens off my brushes and down the sink.”

Curbing that chemical dependency has had serious consequences for his art. Cadmium red was the first colour Thompson trashed, but he quickly recognized that most brightly coloured paints are a toxic soup tinted with dangerous metals. Giving up toxins literally drained the colour from his artistic world.

“I was really big into colour, so it was a huge shift,” Thompson says. “It was scary. At first I had no idea what to use with the materials. I was making my own paint[s] and they were really crappy. At first I thought that was it for art. I did my last couple of shows, paid off my debts and said, ‘I can’t make money anymore.’” But he didn’t throw in the painter’s smock. He persevered, experimented, adapted his style, and eventually developed a non-toxic palette.

"Hold You" (2010) by Stefan Thompson. Image courtesy the artist. Click to enlarge.

“The paints worked okay but they didn’t perform quite the same way, so I had to relearn everything,” Thompson says. The home-brew paint has limited the marketability of his work. Major galleries and serious collectors, who view art as an investment, tend to prefer proven painting methods. Thompson says his work also lacks the visual punch of conventional painting.

“It’s not oil paints on big canvases and it’s just not as lucrative,” he says. “There’s certainly a small group of people who appreciate what I am doing and for me it’s been good in that I’m still making art and scraping a living out of it.”

At the moment, Thompson uses beeswax crayon on recycled papers and reclaimed lumber to produce small relief illustrations that can be transported easily in a bicycle trailer. It’s part of ongoing experimentation that has led him to incorporate carbon, fabric, sewing, and even some doll sculpture into his artistic work. It’s also part of an ethic that has consumed Thompson’s day-to-day life. He’s in the process of building an all-natural home for himself in the hills north of Ottawa.

Thompson says everyone should be doing what they can to reduce their environmental impact, though he knows his choices may not be for everyone and certainly wouldn’t suit all artists.

"Waxy" (2010) by Stefan Thompson. Photo courtesy the artist. Click to enlarge.

“If a beautiful painting inspires someone to go out into the world and create things, that’s not a bad thing,” Thompson explains. “Art is just one little piece of the giant puzzle. Point zero one percent of the paint in the world is used for art and the rest of it is used for cars and houses. Every piece of equipment we have is covered by paint. It’s really just a little point in a big picture but I think it’s good as an artist to make a point of it. Because that is what art is about. To say things.”

Peter von Tiesenhausen with one of his sculptures. Photo courtesy the artist

As you walk through Peter von Tiesenhausen’s land, artwork emerges as if summoned from the ground up. Ships and nests made of willow branches appear along well-worn paths. Statues carved from logs stand watch from between the trees. In Tiesenhausen’s studio, small canvases that resemble the cracked earth of recent droughts are propped across the window sill and sketches of aspen trees (drawn with aspen ash onto aspen pulp paper) hang along the wall.

Philosophically and aesthetically, it’s clear that the landscape and the art are inseparable, and since 1997, the Alberta visual artist has pursued this argument legally as well, taking the unprecedented step of copyrighting his land as a work of art.

Tiesenhausen made the decision after years of legal battles with oil and gas companies that wanted access to the deposits of natural gas that sit just beneath his 800-acre plot of land. Under federal law, Alberta landowners have the rights only to the surface of their land. The riches that lie beneath are generally owned by the government, which can grant oil and gas producers access so long as the companies agree to compensate landowners. This compensation is usually for lost harvests and inconvenience, but, Tiesenhausen reasoned, what if instead of a field of crops these companies were destroying the life’s work of an acclaimed visual artist? Wouldn’t the compensation have to be exponentially higher?

“I’m not trying to get money for my land, I’m just trying to relate to these companies on their level,” says Tiesenhausen from his home near Demmitt, Alberta. “Once I started charging $500 an hour for oil companies to come talk to me, the meetings got shorter and few and far between.”

Tiesenhausen is in a unique position to understand both the realities of industry and the value of the natural world. As a young boy working on the family ranch, his daily job of surveying the cattle left him with an intimate understanding of the family’s land. He left school at 17 to work in the oil fields and eventually found himself in the Yukon in the early ’80s, digging away at surface gold mines. Before he committed to being a full-time artist in 1990, he worked crushing boulders in Antarctica while building an airstrip through the permafrost.

Today, Tiesenhausen is an artist, an active member of his community and a somewhat reluctant environmental icon. “I’m just a guy that likes to have an exciting life,” he says earnestly. “I went to the gold fields, worked in Antarctica, but what I found was that staying at home and making art was the most exciting my life ever got.”

In 2003, he presented his copyright argument before the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, which told him that copyright law was beyond its jurisdiction and he would need to pursue that in the courts. So far that hasn’t been necessary. The oil and gas companies have since backed off, even paying for an expensive rerouting of pipelines, and have yet to bother testing his copyright.

This fall, Tiesenhausen will get a chance to comment on the oil industry through his art, rather than the law. He’s been invited to the Gallery Lambton in Sarnia, Ontario, to create a yet-to-be specified new work in response to the 150th anniversary of North America’s first commercial oil well.

Prada Marfa, one of Marfa, Texas' notable artworks. Marfa became a modern art destination when Donald Judd opened a museum there in the 1970s.

When you drive into Marfa, Texas, from El Paso the first thing you come across is a tiny Prada store. No one works there and no one shops there—it’s a sculpture, built in situ by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Marfa, current population 2,121, became an unlikely modern art destination when the famous minimalist Donald Judd opened a permanent museum here in the ’70s.

I came to Marfa not for its art, but for its light. I’m interested in how we see light, how we think about light, and how light behaves. I’ve been working on a collection of poems that use light as their material, and that concentrate on proportion and balance.

About 15 kilometres outside Marfa there is a viewing station where, at night, light behaves in ways that can’t be explained. During the day, this field is flat and the grass is dried yellow. There is so much sky out here you don’t notice anything else.

But at night, balls of light come into this field. They split, hover, move backwards, flash. For decades, locals and tourists have come out here to look and to guess at what these lights are. Some believe this is what happens to lightning after it hits the ground. Others believe it is swamp gas or cars from a nearby highway. The lights look like circles. They flash for a few seconds, or bounce lightly off of each other, or hover by themselves. They pop up nearby or they get close together and split. I don’t know what this is and can’t reason this not-knowing with some theory or study. Were they fireflies? No. They seemed too big and too bright to be fireflies. Was it someone with a flashlight? There was one hovering close but no human figure near it. Was it light from a house far in the distance? Silly—a house wouldn’t move around like that. And the clusters? Are they from an airport? No. Airplanes don’t fly that close together and they don’t move backwards.

None of these things could explain what was out here. I turned to look at the other side of the viewing station. Here. This is light I know. The thing I felt most moved by. Brief flashes of thunder and stars sprinkled across a big dark beautiful wide sky. At first I could only see a few stars, but I kept looking, and in that looking tinier ones made themselves visible between the ones already there. After a while, the stars started to look like tiny needle pins that floated into the night sky, poking holes. Then they started to look like shards of the sun, if the sun could break and had broken into little pieces. The stars. I know what those are. A thin piece of light scrawled across the sky. Lightning. I know what that is too.

Sharon McKay in Afghanistan with the Canadian Forces Artist Program. Photo courtesy Sharon McKay.

Young-adult novelist Sharon McKay has visited some rough parts of the world in search of material for her stories. When she was writing War Brothers, a book that follows five child soldiers through war-torn Uganda, she travelled to that country to interview kids on the ground. For an upcoming book about girls in Afghanistan, titled Stones Over Kandahar and due to be released this year, McKay again went straight to the source—but the experience turned out to be markedly different.

She hitched a ride to Kandahar Airfield with the Canadian military in March of 2008, one of two artists— the other being Vancouver-based photographer Althea Thauberger—travelling there as part of the Canadian Forces Artist Program to stay with Canadian troops in Afghanistan for 10 days. But getting to interact with actual Afghan children proved more challenging than it had in Uganda.

“You want to see children around here?” a young soldier snapped at her one day, in response to her question about an approaching group of Afghan kids. “Come with me. They throw rocks at us,’” she recalls him saying. “He was angry.”

War artists’ programs have been around for more than 90 years, mostly focusing on visual representations of war. During the First World War, the Canadian War Memorials Fund commissioned a number of artists— mostly British—to paint evocative scenes that illustrated the horrors of war. Those works now hang on huge canvasses in the Senate chamber on Parliament Hill. Various programs have existed throughout the intervening decades, among them the Canadian War Records Program during the Second World War and the Civilian Artists Program from 1968 until 1995. Famed Group of Seven artists A.Y. Jackson and Frederick Varley participated during the First World War, as did renowned Maritimer Alex Colville, who captured the Juno Beach landing at Normandy in 1944.

The current program was launched in 2001 with an expanded mandate: Instead of recruiting painters alone, the program’s website says it’s “open to all forms of art and all artists, from painters and sculptors to writers and poets.” Is the military simply looking for more creative ways to spread its message? Are artists being co-opted as propagandists? McKay thinks not.

"Somalia 2, Without Conscience" by Gertrude Kearns. From the collection of the Canadian War Museum.

“There was one war artist that I really admired,” she said, pointing to Gertrude Kearns’ famous depiction of a Canadian soldier, Master Cpl. Clayton Matchee, torturing a Somali teenager. That painting was funded by the War Artists program and hangs in the Canadian War Museum—over the objections of many veterans who found the painting offensive.

In Kandahar, McKay chafed against the military’s restrictions. “I was born asking questions,” she says, “and you can’t ask questions. That’s hugely annoying.” She became frustrated by the blank stares she sometimes received when she revealed her occupation. Many troops just didn’t understand her interest in Afghanistan as a writer of young-adult fiction.

Even in the life-and-death context of an Afghan combat zone, McKay found herself laughing from time to time: she recalls a soldier sitting on a Hercules aircraft who had misplaced his earplugs and was trying to block out the noise of the plane’s engines by sticking a couple of vitamin C pills into his ears. They melted into place, prompting a visit to a medic. “Next time you do that, put bullets in your ears,” was the medic’s advice. “They’re easier to remove.”

Does the Forces’ artist program really bring the grim realities of war home to the Canadian public? McKay admitted it’s hard to do in only a few days. She wasn’t able to travel very deeply into Afghanistan, and was usually only a stone’s throw from Canadian soldiers. But she still met Afghan children and got a taste of the country that she otherwise couldn’t have seen first-hand. McKay says that while she thinks Canadian troops should get out of any combat role in Afghanistan, she came away impressed.

“I think Americans talk a lot about nation-building. I think Canadians are serious about it,” she said. “I think the Americans are over there to kill themselves some Taliban.”