What you missed in the newsletter: See a few thousand years into the future

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Hi, art lovers!

How are you liking In the Making and Exhibitionists and This Ink Runs Deep? (To send hot takes, click here.) Fall premiere season might finally be behind us, folks! For the first time in weeks, I don't have a fresh CBC Arts series to plug — so settle in, press pause on all those shows I've been asking you to stream and click through some of the stuff I've been reading this week.

Absolutely everyone seems to be running an interview with Elton John this week. The Guardian had him answer a bunch of questions from other famouses — stars ranging from Bob Dylan to Billie Eilish — and the mind boggles at that kind of access to A-listers. The story's basically a champion feat of celebrity name-dropping, one almost on par with any page out of John's new memoir.

Curiously, absolutely no one asked him why the world (or at least my local HomeSense) is suddenly riddled with terrazzo tchotchkes. (This is the answer, btw.) I might have to update this list of incredible artist residencies now that Stephen King's turned his house into a writers' retreat, though nothing written there could ever be more blood-chilling than this news: Clueless is getting a "dramatic" TV reboot. (Cher is a missing person...who wears flats. As if!)

Also re: Clueless, history has clearly taught us nothing, so here's a stop-motion short about just that. Take a gonzo look at the next few thousand years of human evolution. Watch Kirsten Lepore's Natural History Museum.

And because we promised you eye candy

Forget fall — I am very into this wintry colour palette. The artist is Sarah Cannon. (Find more of her work at Toronto's Samara Contemporary starting Oct. 26. She's included in their upcoming group show Present Being.)

Too wintry? (Image from Mark Mahaney's new photo book Polar Night.)

So...when was the last time you cleaned your fridge? Kathleen Ryan's bedazzled sculptures of rotten fruit got just about everyone in the office talking this week. But pics of her work don't always capture their surprising scale. Just look!

So...when was the last time you borrowed an industrial sander and turned it into an xxxtreme paintbrush? Yeah, me neither. But it sounds like something Thomas Trum might do.

You've got to see this

What's in a No Name? - Have you been seeing a bunch of No Name ads recently? The first time I saw one, I immediately remembered this 2017 video by Toronto artist Tobias Williams. (It's pretty much his version of a No Name spot. The thing even drove around Toronto on an ad truck!) But he's not the only artist who's referenced the blandest of brands, and as you'll see, a yellow package means wildly different things to different people. Read how it became an unlikely Canadian icon — and a muse to many.

Before Jeremy Dutcher, there was Maggie Paul - In 2018, Dutcher won the Polaris Music Prize for Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, an album sung entirely in his ancestral Indigenous language — and it never would have happened without Maggie Paul. For more than 40 years, Maggie's been preserving the music of their people. In this clip from In the Making, the two meet up in New Brunswick.

New columnist! - Author Alicia Elliott is writing a new books column for CBC Arts (it's called Shelfies), and it launched this week with an essay on the rise of Indigenous horror in CanLit and film. (Think Blood Quantum, Moon of the Crusted Snow, Empire of Wild.) Watch for it every month.

Follow this artist

Anna May Henry (@annamayday) - When we shared Anna's work on Instagram, it immediately exploded, and while she tells us not to expect any more No Name-referencing stuff in the future, she says it's been a powerful way to make art about food scarcity and the shame of growing up poor. (She does ceramics, too. Give her a follow and see.)

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Until next week!

XOXO, CBC Arts