Jordan Stranger got started by wheat pasting his art around Winnipeg because it was cheap, fast, and harmless. First came community, then came the city: people began to recognize his work, which led to new opportunities and contracts that displayed his art in a more permanent way. But is public art ever permanent? Today on The Artalogue, Madison Beale talks with Anishinaabe artist and graphic designer Jordan Stranger (@totemdoodem), originally from Peguis First Nation, about how those early street-level moves grew into iconic Winnipeg murals, major graphic design projects, and public art that people now instantly connect with places like The Forks.

We dig into early steps like drawing as a kid, unlocking new confidence through illustration and great teachers at Red River College, and learning how mentors can change the trajectory of an artist’s life. Jordan shares how community support helped him take the leap into self-employment, plus what it really looks like when “full-time artist” becomes "full-time everything", with administration taking up lots of an artist's valuable time.

Stranger explains how Ojibwe teachings and spiritual practice guide his choices, why he wants his art to encourage reflection as well as connection, and how public art can challenge the way people think about Canada’s history, truth, and reconciliation.

Jordan closes with hard-earned advice on vulnerability, honesty, and the business side of creativity, with his major takeaway being learning your worth as an artist.

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Today is the last day of Pride Month! To celebrate an excellent month of Pride programming on the Artalogue, host Madison Beale chats with photographer Wynne Neilly. Award-winning, Toronto based photographer Wynne Neilly talks about portrait photography as an act of care, and how his queer and trans identity shapes both what he photographs and how he builds trust with the people in front of the camera.

Neilly traces his path from a high school darkroom to art school mentorship and a practice rooted in relational intimacy. We get into why self-portraiture can be more challenging than traditional portraiture, especially while navigating aging, and the uniquely confronting experience of turning your own gaze back on yourself. He also breaks down what it means to treat the camera as a real tool, not just a content machine, and how the shift from film culture to smartphones changed the craft, the job market, and the pressure to define “success.”

We spend some time discussing Neilly's early project “Female to Male,” Neilly's long-running Polaroid and installation self-documentation project that captured early transition week by week, which then erupted online after it was picked up by a news outlet and pushed him into a public spotlight. He reflects on the double-edged sword of visibility, the way trans work can be flattened into spectacle and sidelined, and what it takes to reclaim your own narrative over a decade later.

Then we go behind the scenes of the Elliot Page Time magazine cover: the surprising email, the pandemic-era intimacy of a tiny set, the stress of shooting film under pressure, and the rare gift of creative freedom in an editorial context. We also discuss what it means to work in Canada today, and how some artists can find it rather stifling. If you care about LGBTQ+ art, trans representation, photography, and making images with real meaning, this conversation will stay with you. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review saying what part of Neilly's story resonated most with you.

HAPPY PRIDE!

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Today on the Artalogue, one of my favourite Canadian painters, Janna Watson, chats with me about her art career, being Queer and taking inspiration from nature. Janna Watson is a Toronto-based abstract painter whose paintings use colour, drag marks, contrast, and negative space to reframe spirituality as something embodied, flexible, and alive. She also intentionally avoids borders, letting the edges stay vulnerable and infinite.

We start with her earliest memories of art, shaped by two artist grandparents and a formative critique from her grandfather: “it needs to be wilder.” From there, Watson breaks down how intuition is built through repetition and risk, why “mistakes” often become the strongest moments in a painting, and how she sees herself in collaboration with her tools. We also talk about influences she returns to, what she chooses to collect at home, and how nature, especially the sky, becomes her favourite form of inspiration in abstraction because it changes constantly and belongs to all of us.

Because this conversation lands during Pride month, Watson shares her experience as a Queer artist raised in a Pentecostal church, including the being outed, and how finding queer community in Toronto expanded her sense of self, God, and possibility. She explains what it means to “queer the painting process” through working on the floor, building compositions with multiple orientations. We close with career highlights, discuss sobriety, her new book “Layers of Self,” and practical advice for emerging painters who want a sustainable studio practice. We also have a really great discussion about complicating the Canadian canon!

If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with an artist friend, and leave a review so more people can find these stories of art, identity, and creative freedom.

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Madison Beale, Host

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