Momus

Momus is a digital art magazine that champions the revival of thoughtful art criticism. It aims to be evaluative, responsible, and courageous, offering a refreshing alternative to the extremes of elitism and populism that dominate much of today's dialogue. Over its initial four years, Momus has fostered a sense of skepticism that avoids cynicism, promotes accessibility without talking down to its audience, and encourages a deeper engagement with cultural works from both artistic and political perspectives. As a publication, it commits to the essential, challenging task of art criticism during a period when such analysis is often lacking.

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We Are the Same Thing: The Sutured Selves of María Magdalena Campos-Pons

1 week ago | momus.ca | Allison Noelle Conner

For the past few weeks, I’ve been mulling over an image from a single-channel video by interdisciplinary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons. In Baño Sagrado (Rite of Initiation, Sacred Bath) (1991), an extreme close-up of a bare stomach, brown and downy, occupies most of the wall it is projected onto. Soil scatters across its surface and a single root seems to be growing from the figure’s navel, creating a visual rhyme between skin and earth.
Lineage and Light: Rose Marie Cromwell’s “A Geological Survey”

2 months ago | momus.ca | Monica Uszerowicz

In what ways is a mother like a tree? A mother—a caregiver, really, because lineages are built not merely by blood and biology but with tenderness and with time—nourishes and guards and shades the ones they love. Whether or not the “mother tree” theory is factual, the phenomenon of family is not specific to humans. A tree’s roots extend toward its kin, cultivating a clan of earth-tenders.
Monica Uszerowicz

2 months ago | momus.ca | Monica Uszerowicz

In what ways is a mother like a tree? A mother—a caregiver, really, because lineages are built not merely by blood and biology but…
Alexandra Méndez García

2 months ago | momus.ca | Alexandra Garcia

For five months I lived with open windows in a suburb of San Juan, air ventilating through my apartment on days of both intense…
Disposability, Divestment, and Action: The Palestinian Solidarity Movement and the State of Art in Toronto

Feb 5, 2025 | momus.ca | Tiana Reid

What’s left of art in Toronto? Since November 2023, four curators no longer hold their positions at contemporary art institutions in Toronto. Anishinaabe curator Wanda Nanibush’s “departure,” as the Globe and Mail put it, from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) that month was followed several weeks later by the resignation of Inuk curator Taqralik Partridge from the same institution. Their exits left the AGO with neither an Indigenous curator nor a specialist in Indigenous art.
Disposability, Divestment, and Action: The Palestine Solidarity Movement and the State of Art in Toronto

Feb 5, 2025 | momus.ca | Tiana Reid

What was the problem? I didn’t know and nobody told me and whatcould I do or say, anyway? Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet thatpaidfor the bombs and the planes and the tanksthat they used to massacre your family—June Jordan, “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”What’s left of art in Toronto? Since November 2023, four curators no longer hold their positions at contemporary art institutions in Toronto.
When Women Run the World: Gail Thacker's Queer Feminist Marvel

Jan 30, 2025 | momus.ca | Jane Byrne |Jackson Davidow

In late June 2024, a couple of weeks before Joe Biden withdrew his bid for reelection and Kamala Harris launched her campaign for president, the artist Gail Thacker sent me an email with the cryptic subject line “For your election time please.” Its body simply contained a link to a digital file, her video Devoted (1980). The eight-minute work begins with a lean, mousy man, practically a boy, clad only in diaperlike leather shorts that hold in place a comically pointy dildo.
The Wish in Yong Soon Min’s KISSSSS

Jan 17, 2025 | momus.ca | Summer Lee

“It is worth wondering, perhaps, what the wishes are in kissing,” Adam Phillips writes. In his readings of Freud, Phillips suggests that a kiss is the admission that the self cannot wholly, singularly satisfy its own desire—it is not sovereign. Instead, the self must turn toward other potentially unwieldy objects independent from the self, like someone else.
Prescient and Violent, Marisol Is Right on Time

Jan 6, 2025 | momus.ca | Sky Goodden |criticism. Goodden co-produces

Near the end of the definitive, long-overdue survey of the artist Marisol at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, after a parade of totemic sculptural portraits, a work of smaller stature turned the wrench. A self-portrait, titled Diptych (1971), this lithograph ruptures the boundaries between violence makers and their victims through an exquisite-corpse depiction of the artist’s naked body, prone and disjointed.
Prescient About Still-Active Threats, Marisol Is Right on Time

Jan 6, 2025 | momus.ca | Sky Goodden

Near the end of the definitive, long-overdue survey of the artist Marisol at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, after a parade of totemic sculptural portraits, a work of smaller stature turned the wrench. A self-portrait, titled Diptych (1971), this lithograph ruptures the boundaries between violence makers and their victims through an exquisite-corpse depiction of the artist’s naked body, prone and disjointed.