Vigilance

For Mexican director Iván Aguirre, barrios are the neighbourhoods that still exist with all of their unique traditions and communal pride, neighbourhoods that were once pueblos on the outskirts and have become absorbed by the sprawl of the city. Barrios are cultural oasis that resist gentrification by maintaining their essence and Aguirre’s 12-part series, Crónicas de barrio, celebrates just that.

As an activist, journalist, conservationist and artist who has been a forest defender in old-growth forest logging blockades like the Fairy Creek Blockades in 2020-2021, and now, with this new work, investigated sites of the endemic forest fires that have accelerated in his home province of BC and across Canada, Kyle Scheurmann’s artwork is passion and subjectivity built upon the bedrock of the painstakingly objective.

He doesn’t miss a beat. Kyle Scheurmann’s paintings of Eden Grove of the Fairy Creek Blockades in 2021 are obviously by an artist who lived it—both the beauty and the horror. And then Kyle's story of the Enforcement at Eden ...