Why the arts sector needs more jagged edges and fewer sterile brand strategies.
How long are you going to keep making stuff that looks like a corporate mood board? Do you actually like being this boring?
The creative industry in this city is acting like it’s scared of its own shadow. We’ve spent the last few years polishing the life out of every single thing we touch until it looks like a generic asset for a tech startup that doesn’t even exist yet. You see it at the pop-ups and the sterile gallery spaces where everyone is terrified to have a single opinion that isn’t pre-approved by a committee of vibes. Radical creativity isn’t about having a nice aesthetic or a cohesive brand. It’s about the raw, jagged edges of a project that might actually fail in front of everyone.
Look at the way the weeds push through the concrete near the Higgins underpass. Nobody asked them to be there, and they certainly didn’t wait for a grant to start growing. That’s the energy we need to be channeling into the arts sector right now. If the venues are too expensive, we go back to the damp basements and the living rooms. If the magazines won’t publish the weird stuff, we photocopy our own manifestos and leave them on the seats of the 18 bus. There’s a specific kind of dignity in making something that has zero commercial value but a hundred percent soul.
We’ve been conditioned to think that if something isn’t scalable, it isn’t worth doing. That’s a total lie designed to keep us small and predictable. Real radicalism is found in the hyper-local, the specific, and the messy. It’s the collaborative mural that some neighborhood kids painted over a weekend just because they were bored and had some leftover latex. It’s the community fridge that doubles as a poetry exchange. When we stop trying to impress the gatekeepers who don’t even live in our postal code, we finally start making art that actually matters to the people standing right next to us.
Maybe the reason you feel so stuck is because you’re trying to build a career instead of a community. The creative landscape in 2026 shouldn’t be about who can climb the highest on a pile of followers. It should be about who is holding the ladder for the next person. We need more collective experiments and fewer solo exhibitions. We need to be loud, inconvenient, and intensely focused on mutual aid within our creative circles. If the system is rigged to favor the “mid” and the “safe,” then we have an obligation to be as weird and experimental as humanly possible.
This isn’t about being perfect; it’s about being present. Stop worrying if your work is “professional” enough for some imaginary jury. Professionalism is often just a code word for being easy to ignore. Lean into the discomfort of an unfinished idea or a project that doesn’t fit into a tidy category. The most interesting parts of Winnipeg have always been the bits that don’t make sense to outsiders. Keep it strange, keep it loud, and stop asking for permission to disrupt the status quo.
Thoughts on art and the state of the world!
These fragments trace the rhizomatic flow of thought through art, life, and place — scattered impressions from studio corners, fleeting ideas scrawled in notebooks, whispered exchanges at galleries, and observations picked up on quiet northern roads. Some fragments linger on technique, intuition, and doubt; others drift through community, culture, and the subtle poetry of everyday moments. They offer no conclusions, only openings, inviting readers to follow connections wherever they emerge.
Wandering laterally between process, memory, and environment, these pieces map associations across creativity, identity, and belonging. They intersect with humor, failure, resilience, and collaboration, and trace the ways artistic thinking seeps into gardens, small-town rhythms, friendships, and civic life across Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario — and further afield. Each thought functions as a node, part of a living network of reflection, expanding and branching with possibility.
Discover more associative fragments, conceptual wanderings, and artful reflections on our thoughts page.
