Community
- Diamond Zhou
- Jan 24
- 15 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
January 24th, 2026
By Diamond Zhou
We have become careless with the word community, perhaps because it makes us feel aligned without having to name what alignment costs. “The art community” is a phrase we say with affectionate certainty, as though it names something stable and benevolent, like a neighbourhood we can return to when the world feels unbearable. But community is not a mood, and it is not a social circle, and it is not proven by a crowded room; community, in the real sense, is an ecosystem. Ecosystems can fail through attrition long before they fail through spectacle. They fail when burnout becomes normal, when precariousness is treated as tradition, when the visible layer continues to sparkle while the supporting layer quietly thins out.
The proof of community is endurance. If an emerging artist, a mid-career artist with kids, and an elder artist with declining health cannot all remain in the field, then we do not have a community. We have a spectator sport. Though this may be a severe assessment, severity is sometimes the only way to rescue a conversation from sentimentality, because this is not a question of niceness or taste or even values, it is a question of whether an art world can sustain a life, and whether it can hold artists across time, when responsibilities multiply and capacity shifts, without quietly filtering out everyone except the most resourced.
This has been on my mind lately because the political weather beyond the art world is now openly rewarding the opposite of what community requires. We are living through a period in which belonging is increasingly being redefined as opposition, division is marketed as strength, and public life is trained toward the most emotionally efficient form of coherence: tribalism. A friend recently put the difference between tribalism and community in a way that clarified everything for me, because the two can look deceptively similar from a distance. Both gather people, both generate shared language, both offer the comfort of a moral home, but they run on opposite engines. Tribalism secures belonging by drawing a sharp boundary; it needs an “us,” it needs a “them,” and it becomes most coherent when loyalty can be proven through opposition. Community secures belonging through contribution, which is why it can survive difference without panic, and disagreement without exile; it has something larger to protect than unanimity, and it offers care not as a reward for correctness, but as the condition that makes honest participation possible. Tribalism is quick, bright, and intoxicating. Community is slower, quieter, and harder to fake.
The art world likes to imagine itself as a sanctuary from political simplification, a place where complexity can still be held, where a person can stand in front of something difficult without being ordered to turn it into a position. I want to believe that too, and sometimes it is true. But we would be naïve to pretend we are immune, especially because we work in the raw material of values: identity, history, power, symbolism, memory, truth. We are trained to read signs, to speak about stakes, to make ethical judgements, to notice what is urgent and what is being erased, and these are real strengths, but when the broader culture becomes addicted to moral theatre, those strengths can harden into something brittle, something that feels like virtue while quietly shrinking the room. It becomes possible to mistake intensity for care, performance for responsibility, and the pleasure of being right for the harder discipline of being useful.
From there, the question becomes practical: what does community look like when it is real enough to withstand pressure, and what does it look like when it begins to behave like it is fake? It is easy to claim community when the room is full and the calendar is generous, when resources are stable and everyone can afford to stay. The harder test arrives when money gets tight and people leave, because that is when the art world reveals whether it is an ecosystem that can carry lives, or merely a culture of visibility that consumes them.
Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth clarifies the difference with a kind of bodily authority. The crack she cut across the floor of Tate Modern is not an argument that lives safely in language, it is division made physical, something you cannot ignore because your body has to respond to it. The work is devastating because it mirrors how fracture often operates in real life: it becomes structural, normalized, woven into the ground, something you step over without thinking until you realize you have been trained into a choreography of avoidance.
Canada has always been skilled at making its fractures sound gentle, at translating power into politeness, and at letting the language of belonging perform a harmony that history does not always support. Community has sometimes been used as a language of assimilation, and unity has sometimes meant compliance. The national “we” has often been made through exclusion as much as through welcome, through policy as much as through care. If we want to speak honestly about community-building in Canadian art, we have to admit that communities are not merely found, they are built, and what gets built can shelter people or quietly control them.
So, what does it mean to talk about “the art community” in Canada, not as a flattering phrase, but as a living system with responsibilities? It means beginning with the truth that Canada is not held together by a single cultural centre that dictates taste to everyone else. We are a country shaped by distance and region, by multiple languages, by different histories, and by a complicated relationship between public support and private life. Because of that, our art world survives through networks: through people who make introductions, share knowledge, lend equipment, write texts, install shows, recommend artists, care about what happens after the opening night, and keep building even when attention moves elsewhere. Canadian community, when it is real, should not just be a scene, should be a chain of continuities.
N. E. Thing Co’s Reflected Landscape, is a record of perception on the surface, mirrored and documented, a landscape treated less as an object to possess than as something to observe with care (“Landscape has particular resonance for many artists on the west coast, and NETCO explored new approaches in works such as Reflected Landscape, 1968. They created this work by placing mirrors in the river near their home, making photographs at different angles and distances, and combining these images with other elements, such as drawings and maps, to challenge landscape art traditions.” An excerpt by Sarah Bassnett and Sarah Pardon on N.E. Thing Co. from Art Canada Institute). Beneath that, it models a deeper ethos: culture as method rather than proclamation, seriousness as attention rather than performance. It suggests that community can be built through shared perception, through the patient discipline of noticing, through the ability to return, to see again, to refuse the speed that turns everything into opinion. There is a kind of Canadian practicality in this, not sentimental and not modest, but precise, in the sense that when you cannot rely on a single centre to hold the story, you learn to build coherence through relation.
But attention, on its own, does not make an ecosystem liveable. An art world cannot be sustained by goodwill alone, because goodwill does not pay rent, does not create time, does not keep bodies well, does not compensate labour. Conditions matter, and conditions are never neutral. They are shaped by money, by space, by policy, by who is protected, and by who quietly disappears.
Stan Douglas’s Every Building on 100 West Hastings is an image of what it means to inherit conditions, not just aesthetics. It refuses the fantasy that culture floats above civic reality, that art can be discussed as though it were separate from housing, addiction, poverty, policing, and neglect. Douglas shows Vancouver with forensic clarity, and in doing so he makes one point impossible to avoid: community is partly what a city allows to exist, and partly what it refuses to look away from. If the city becomes unliveable for the people who generate culture, the culture will eventually become hollow, no matter how busy the schedule looks on paper.
When conditions get difficult, tribalism becomes seductive, because it offers belonging without the labour of maintenance. It offers coherence quickly: an us versus them mentality, a moral clarity that feels like strength. This is how tribalism can slip into the art world wearing the language of community. It often arrives as performative certainty, or fluent signalling, or an atmosphere in which people learn exactly what to say and what not to say, while the harder work of sustaining conditions goes untouched. The result is a field that can look ethically coordinated while becoming structurally thin, a place where everyone appears aligned, yet fewer and fewer people can afford to remain.
A community is not protected by avoiding difficult truths. It becomes durable by facing them. Kent Monkman’s The Scream refuses the comfort of national myth-making and the temptation to smooth catastrophe into civility. It confronts the history of residential schools with a scale and force that does not permit polite distance, insisting that any shared “we” built on erasure is not belonging at all, but coercion. What the painting demands is not shame for its own sake, but integrity, because integrity is one of the few materials strong enough to build a future.
General Idea’s AIDS offers a different model of communal responsibility; one built through circulation rather than consensus. It is not merely an icon, it is a public instrument, designed to move through culture as repetition, insistence, and refusal. By appropriating the visual grammar of advertising and turning it toward a crisis of stigma and invisibility, General Idea made an artwork that behaves like infrastructure, it refuses the privatization of suffering into shame, and it refuses the separation between “those people” and everyone else. It makes community measurable, not by warmth, but by what a culture will keep visible when it would rather look away.
Rebecca Belmore’s VIGIL carries that refusal into the body. It is not outrage as performance, but a witnessing as responsibility. The work asks for presence, and presence is costly, because it does not end when the moment passes or when the crowd disperses. In an era trained toward symbolic gestures, VIGIL insists on something older and harder: that grief be held publicly without being converted into entertainment, and that attention become an obligation rather than a fleeting mood. If tribalism is the pursuit of belonging through opposition, Belmore’s work offers a stark alternative: the discipline of remaining with what is difficult without turning it into spectacle.
And yet, no ecosystem can survive on crisis language alone. A culture that lives only in moral emergency becomes exhausted and brittle. Community-building also requires continuity, shared inheritance, images that carry joy without coercion. Kenojuak Ashevak’s The Enchanted Owl offers a form of common recognition that does not depend on an enemy, an iconic image that remains generous, widely loved. It reminds us that a community is also built through shared visual memory, through forms people carry across decades as part of a living emotional vocabulary.
Works like Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project gathered strangers into a temporary public through atmosphere rather than ideology, a room held together by light, reflection, and the simple permission to be together without being segregated. Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds complicates this further by exposing the paradox of mass culture: from a distance, the work reads as unity; up close, it breaks into countless singular objects, handmade, labour-intensive, irreducible. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party shifts the emphasis again, reminding us that community is also historical, built through recognition, through who is granted a seat, through the refusal of erasure. Together, these works describe community not as sentiment, but as structure: atmosphere, labour, memory.
Brian Jungen’s Prototype for New Understanding #2 exposes how smoothly desire and value travel through objects, how easily culture becomes commodity, how quickly symbols can be consumed as badges rather than understood as inheritances. It forces an uncomfortable question that the art world often prefers to keep implicit: what we circulate shapes what we become. In a Canadian ecosystem, where scale is smaller and continuity matters more, collecting is never only private pleasure, it affects careers, stabilizes production, and determines what can be risked, what can be preserved, what can remain. Stewardship is not virtue, it is structure.
Community is slow work, and it is not without fault, but it is shaped, when it is real, by patience, love, and a compassion. The most decisive labour of community is often invisible, in the way building a home is invisible once the walls are up, or cooking a meal is invisible once it arrives at the table, or installing an exhibition is invisible once visitors starts to flood the gallery space. That invisibility is part of what makes community so easy to romanticise, because we remember the atmosphere and forget what it cost to make it, we praise the glow of belonging while leaving unspoken the scaffolding that holds belonging in place. And yet the cost is the point, and community is the work that keeps recognition honest.
This has grown more clear while preparing our next exhibition, The Collaborators: Nettie Wild and Friends. We kept returning to those words, “collaborators” and “friends,” because they describe something more serious than warmth. They name dependence, shared authorship, and the practical fact that most work worth making cannot be made alone. Working through this exhibition with Nettie and her colleagues has reminded us that these films and installations were never the product of one person, no matter how singular the vision may appear from the outside. Each work is held up by co-creators, cinematographers, editors, composers, sound designers, and the many forms of labour that rarely receive the same public recognition as the director’s name, even though the work cannot exist without them. These projects do not arrive because one artist is talented enough, they arrive because a network of people is committed enough, skilled enough, and cared for enough to carry the work across the long distance between idea and form. Nettie understands this in a way that is both practical and deeply moral. For her, community-building is not a slogan, it is advocacy, alliances. the building of audiences and the securing of conditions, the writing of proposals, the negotiation of shared interests, and the steady insistence that the people who carried the work should not disappear once the work becomes visible.
Conceived and Directed by: Nettie Wild. Producers: Betsy Carson, Rae Hull. Editor: Michael Brockington. Director of Photography: Athan Merrick. Cinematographer: Nic Teichrob. Composer: Owen Belton. Re-recording Mixer: Daniel Pellerin. Chief Technologist (2017): Anthony Diehl. Soundscape Designer: Velcrow Ripper. Animator: Jay White. Research Camera: Mike McKinlay. VR Technology Director (2021): Elie Zananiri. Systems Architect, VR (2021): James Acres. Produced by Canada Wild.
It has also made us think more clearly about what it means, as a gallery, to build a community rather than simply benefit from one. We believe not every exhibition needs to generate profit in order to justify itself, because some works deserve to be seen for reasons that cannot be reduced to sales alone. They deserve to be seen because they carry forward a conversation, or dignify a history, or expand what can be felt, understood, and held together in public. We are not a museum. We do not have public funding, donations, or volunteers to soften the economics of risk. When we choose to install an exhibition like this, we do it by straining our budget, leaning on belief as much as on numbers, and trusting that the work’s life will not end at our door, that other institutions will take it seriously enough to extend the conversation, to carry the torch, to keep a vision moving forward once it has been lit. This is one of the quieter truths of cultural life in Canada: much of what matters begins as conviction long before it becomes recognition, and it is sustained, if it is sustained at all, by people who decide that what is necessary cannot always wait for what is profitable.
I have been thinking about this alongside the broader political climate, and the strange pressure it now places on public life. In a time when belonging is increasingly sold as opposition and division is marketed as strength, it becomes tempting to comply with whatever script seems safest, to perform whatever rituals are required in order to avoid trouble, to keep moving, to keep being seen as acceptable, even when acceptance is purchased at the cost of truth. In Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered in his speech at World Economic Forum in Davos he speaks of Václav Havel, who described this mechanism with devastating simplicity in “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel tells the story of a greengrocer who places a slogan in his shop window, not because he believes it, but because he wants to signal compliance and avoid conflict, and the system sustains itself, Havel observes, not only through force, but through the daily performance of people who privately know the performance is false. He called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth but from repetition and participation, and its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing, when one greengrocer removes the sign, the illusion begins to crack.
Community begins there. Not in grand declarations, but in the small refusal to keep acting as if something untrue is true. It begins the moment people choose reality over ritual, and participation over pretense. This is why a line from Nettie has stayed with me in such a quiet, persistent way. In a conversation, I mentioned that we sometimes walk the dog past her home at night and can see the back of the house lit up, and she said that next time, perhaps instead of passing quietly behind, we should come to the front door, knock, and come in for a visit. It was a simple and gentle invitation, but it contains the whole ethic. Community begins when people stop circling the edges of one another and choose, instead, to enter. Not to perform, not to posture, to participate. As Carney says: “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down”.
Tribalism is the opposite impulse, and it is not difficult to recognize once you have felt it. It is what arrives when a conversation stops being about the work and becomes about the correct performance of belonging, when criticism becomes a hunt for heresy rather than a search for clarity, when institutions begin programming by fear rather than curiosity, and when the room becomes more concerned with being seen as good than with doing good. It also arrives through exhaustion dressed up as tradition. The romantic myth of suffering for art is one of the oldest con jobs in culture, because it allows exploitation to masquerade as seriousness: precariousness becomes proof of purity, burnout becomes a badge, underpayment becomes a rite of passage, and “paying dues” becomes a story that always seems to be paid by the same people. Tribalism arrives as gatekeeping disguised as standards. Standards matter, and expertise matters, but standards become weapons when they exist to protect status rather than protect quality, when “community” becomes a velvet rope and the ecology stops circulating. And it arrives, perhaps most insidiously, through moral branding replacing moral practice: a land acknowledgement spoken at speed, statements about care and inclusion, and then budgets that fail to pay artists properly, institutions asking for emotional labour as a substitute for material support. If care does not show up in the invoice, it is not care. It is theatre.
In real terms, community-building shows itself through habits that make staying possible: paying artists and paying people on time, crediting labour including the labour that happens in the dark, making room for parents and caregivers, offering mentorship that is real, and distributing opportunities with fairness. It shows itself through a culture of critique that assumes goodwill while still being unafraid of truth, through an ability to disagree without expulsion, and through the discipline of refusing to treat every aesthetic difference as a moral difference.
And it requires one further recognition, one the art world sometimes forgets: the exhibitions we love are not only experiences, they are agreements. A show is a temporary society, for a few weeks, a room becomes a small world with its own ethics, its own distribution of attention, its own decisions about who is protected, who is heard, and what kinds of labour are made visible. We can build that world carelessly, or we can build it with intention.
So perhaps the question is not whether we have an art community. The question is what kind of community we are rehearsing, quietly and repeatedly, every time we make a show.
CURRENT
GROUP EXHIBITION
UPCOMING
The Collaborators
Nettie Wild and Friends, Films and Installations
Opening: Saturday, February 28th, 2026
1:00 - 5:30 PM
Invitation forthcoming
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