Digital Guide: SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS

Douglas Coupland, Perfect World

2020  soccer balls, Plexiglas  Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery

“Soccer isn’t the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community’s fabric, a repository of traditions.” ― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

Fans of soccer often use the sport as a metaphor for understanding global and national politics, revolutionary movements, or even just family dynamics. Globally, soccer is a repository for dreams of personal advancement, and the FIFA World Cup is the most-watched sporting event internationally.Perfect World plays with the idealism with which people view the sport. The balls are turned inside out, appearing uniform and neutral on the floating plexiglass shelf. Douglas Coupland, an artist best known for being the voice of Generation X, has created a playful work that shows how uniform a perfect world might be, with all difference ironed out.

Douglas Coupland is a graduate of Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, as well as the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan. He also attended the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan, Italy. His work has been the subject of two major museum retrospectives: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum, and Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Munich’s Villa Stuck. His work has been included in numerous international exhibitions He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

Brian Jungen, Prototype for New Understanding #10

2001 Nike Air Jordans, metal stand Rennie, Vancouver 

“I want to impart inspiration to young, Indigenous artists and remind them that their voice matters, that it’s okay to cut up your shoes. It’s okay to do something that is experimental and challenging. A lot of young people, when they see my work in museums, they kind of lose it because at first all they see is that I cut up all these Air Jordans. There’s this kind of sacrilegious shock a lot of kids have. And then they see what it’s become. There’s this switch that happens. I like that. I like that it happens.” – Brian Jungen

Prototype for New Understanding #10 forms part of Brian Jungen’s series of the same title. With this series, the artist deconstructs Nike Air Jordan sneakers and reconstructs them into homages to Northwest Coast masks.

The inspiration for this series came when Brian Jungen went to a Nike flagship store in New York City and noticed how the glass-cased displays of sneakers resembled how museums display cultural objects. Like Northwest Coast masks, Air Jordans are meant to be worn and performed, and represent living, dynamic cultures. What new understandings might this prototype inspire?

Brian Jungen was born in Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada in 1970. He draws from his family’s ranching and hunting background, as well as his Dane-zaa heritage, when disassembling and recombining consumer goods into whimsical sculptures. Jungen transforms plastic chairs into whale skeletons, garbage bins into a giant turtle carapace, sewing tables into a basketball court, golf bags into towering totem poles, and collectible Nike Air Jordan shoes into objects resembling both the ceremonial masks of British Columbian coastal tribes and abstract modernist sculptures. At once direct and disarming, Jungen’s sculptures are entirely familiar in their material and assembly and yet still trick the eye through complex and deft illusions. He has created many works involving animals, from habitats and playgrounds for household pets, to paintings and drums utilizing stretched and tanned hides—demonstrating an interdependence between people and other species as well as between aesthetic form and function. While exquisite for their craftsmanship and graphic use of pattern and color, Jungen’s works also contain subtle critiques of labor practices, global capitalism, and cultural stereotypes.

Astria Suparak & Brett Kashmere, GOALS

2015—2025, vinyl. Courtesy of the artists 

“There is a longstanding idea that the worlds of sport and art are mutually exclusive, but there have always been artists interested in the political and aesthetic valences of sport. These artists approach the subject from a position immersed in sports culture and critically aware fandom, rather than cynicism. I think the combination of deep investment with a willingness to raise questions and challenge commonplace assumptions distinguishes this work from mainstream sports documentaries and fiction films, which are ultimately produced to serve corporate interests and generate money. On the other hand, artists can also bring forward the creative, communal, and utopian potentials of sport. Play for the sake of play and non-zero-sum games. Reimagining what sports can do and be, and who they can serve.” – Astria Suparak

GOALS layers field markings from six sports—football, hockey, basketball, lacrosse, soccer and baseball—across the gallery floor, the end zones of each game converging at the entrance to the space. Each of the fields are at their actual scale, extending beyond the gallery. Baseball’s home base, hockey’s net, football’s end zone, and others, meet in one place.

Viewed from within the gallery, the coloured lines resemble something you might see in an abstract painting. Abstract painting—like sports—are often considered apolitical, or neutral. However, abstract painting was promoted by the American government during the Cold War, with the CIA sponsoring international exhibitions of abstract art in the 1950s and 1960s. These shows presented a vision of America as a cultural innovator, with full freedom of artistic expression, in contrast to the more rigidly controlled Soviet Union. Just as you see in Brett Kashmere’s Valery’s Ankle, also on view in SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS, sports can be nationalistic, acting as a kind of proxy war for other political conflicts. More recently, the 2025 Canada-US 4 Nations Final showed how sports can carry increased meaning in difficult political moments.

With GOALS, we invite viewers to consider how sports can be a non-zero sum sport. Zero sum refers to conflicts or disagreements where there can only be one winner and one loser. What kind of sport allows for many winners? How would you imagine that they would use this new field below you?

Astria Suparak’s cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Suparak co-curated the exhibition Whatever It Takes: Steelers Fan Collections, Rituals, and Obsessions with Jon Rubin at Carnegie Mellon University, which reframed sports fanaticism as a significant form of cultural production. With frequent collaborator Brett Kashmere, she curated The Game is Not the Thing, a film & performance series at the Walker Art Center, and edited the Sports issue of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media . Suparak’s creative projects have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the Walker, Minneapolis; and ArtScience Museum, Singapore. Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award.

Myfanwy MacLeod, Flagspreader

2016, digital print on nylon fabric, wooden flagpole, brass acorn finial. Collection of Art Windsor-Essex; Gift of the artist, 2024

Flagspreader by Myfanwy MacLeod offers a playful yet critical lens on athletic culture and its relationship to gender and performance. The composition’s red flags are designed in “Canadian red,” although the red of the flag and the brass finial resemble authoritarian flags. Printed with photographs taken at the Vancouver Sea to Sky Cheerleading Competition, this work contrasts stereotypes of the high-energy cheerleader against the subtle disinterest of the cheerleader’s expressions.  

 Modern cheerleading teams originated from all-male “yell leaders,” who would lead audiences in cheering for their preferred teams. Over time, cheerleading became a feminized sport, with majority woman cheerleading teams energizing crowds at male sporting events. Women’s attitudes—in life, as in sports—are often heavily monitored, with expectations that women perform happiness, enthusiasm, and support for men and male institutions. In this context, what does this cheerleader’s boredom mean? Can her lack of interest be seen as a quiet rebellion?  

Flagspreaders invites audiences to explore themes of gender, dominance, and the cultural rituals embedded in sports, delivered with MacLeod’s signature wit. 

 —Zoe Port, Curatorial Intern 

Myfanwy MacLeod (born 1961) lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Her work has garnered national and international recognition, including pieces in the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and various private collections. She was inducted into the Royal Canadian Art Academy in 2023. MacLeod’s work operates at the intersection of personal and political, challenging cultural assumptions reflecting broader social narratives. It offers a feminist critique of conventional notions of mastery, creative genius, and power, subverting these ideas by embracing qualities often dismissed in traditional art narratives, such as awkwardness, emotion, and doubt. This approach undermines rigid hierarchies and opens space for more inclusive and nuanced understandings of creativity and artistic worth. She uses humour and pathos with incisive criticality to examine the roles of gender, class, and power in both public and private spheres. She has exhibited throughout Canada, Australia, the United States, and Europe.

Hazel Meyer, Muscle Panic

2014—2025, multi-media installation. Courtesy of the artist.

“For a long time I would always point to sports and movement and stamina and the abject and the queer body within sports, but it never really worked so well… [with Muscle Panic] I’m performing with four or five other folks and we’re sweating together and we’re moving together, and we’re not just pointing to these things—we’re actually being these things.”—Hazel Meyer 

Muscle Panic is an installation and performance project about queer desire, tenderness and basketball. It takes its title from “moral panic,” or the widespread belief that a group of people present a threat to society and its values. By focusing on queer and disabled bodies in sports, Muscle Panic takes this fear of difference and translates it into one of honour. With Muscle Panic, we celebrate how queer and disabled people find freedom and expression in basketball and basketball culture.  

Muscle Panic has been shown at multiple venues, in Canada and internationally, since 2014. Part installation and part performance, Muscle Panic changes each time it appears. At AWE, Muscle Panic is an installation using industrial scaffolding as its platform, as well as a performance on September 18, during AWE at Night.   Until September 18, Muscle Panic is like a set before the actors have emerged from backstage. Banners, pendants, coats, and t-shirts lie in wait for the people who will wave them and wear them, sweating together in their shared performance. What objects do you see, when you look at the scaffolding? What do you recognize from your own life and experiences? How do they make you feel? And what can you imagine about the people who will use them?  

Hazel Meyer, The Marble in the Basement

2024 – Super8 transferred to digital, 2min 30sec, silent – Courtesy of the artists, with special thanks to: Vanessa Kwan  Cait McKinney  Regie Concordia  Western Front 

Hazel Meyer works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work recovers the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics, and chronic illness. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, incontinent-queers, gender-outlaws—into a performative space that centres desire, world-making, and sweat.  Recent activations of her work have taken place at Copenhagen Contemporary (DK), Libby Leshgold Art Gallery (CA), Tale of a Tub (NL), Lowe Art Gallery (US), and at the BFI’s London International Film Festival (UK). In 2023 Hazel was the recipient of the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award.  Hazel lives in Vancouver, on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations with her frequent collaborator and partner Cait McKinney, and dog Regie.

Esmaa Mohamoud, Double Dribble

2021, basketball hoop and extended chains. Courtesy of the artist and Olga Korper Gallery

Esmaa Mohamoud (Canadian, b. 1992) is a Brooklyn based, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist. Mohamoud’s studio practice is an examination of the gap between contemporary culture’s oversimplification and diminishment of Black people, compared to the complexity, richness, and diversity of their actual lived experiences. Esmaa Mohamoud’s upcoming solo exhibition COMPLEX DREAMS serves as the Broad Art Museum’s inaugural Signature Commission Series, where internationally renowned artists are invited to respond directly to the iconic architecture designed by Zaha Hadid. Mohamoud has also staged solo exhibitions for Georgia Scherman Projects (Toronto), Arsenal Contemporary (New York), Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago) and across Canada through her touring museum exhibition  Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat.   

Esmaa’s work has been featured in group exhibitions including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), Museum of Art and Design, (New York, NY), Albright -Knox Museum (Buffalo, NY). In 2021, Mohamoud was an Artist-in-Residence in Kehinde Wiley’s renowned Black Rock Senegal residency program in Dakar, Senegal. Her work is held in both private and public international collections including: Musee des Beaux Art, (Montreal), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton), The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and Weatherspoon Museum Art Museum (North Carolina).

Wendy Red Star

Walking Weasel, Bad Eye, Dúusbachee (Kiowa), 1873, Fairbanks Museum, “In the Spirit of Green Skin”, from the series Brings Good Horses, 2021  -acrylic, graphite, kitakata paper, marble paper  -Gochman Family Collection: GC.NA.2021.9999d

Spotted Arrow, Dúusbachee (Kiowa), 1881,   Walter Lowrie Finley, “In the Spirit of Green Skin“, from the series Brings Good Horses, 2021 – acrylic, graphite, kitakata paper, marble paper – Gochman Family Collection: GC.NA.2021.9999 

Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star’s Brings Good Drawings is a series of 90 drawings, of which two are on view in SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS. The drawings are taken from 19th century ledger books used by Cheyennes, Crows, Kiowas, Lakotas, and other Plains peoples to make drawings that reflected their everyday life in the mid-19th century. In recent years, these ledger books are often taken apart, with images sold individually on the market. The sale of individual drawings has a negative impact on Plains peoples to capture their histories, as these drawings often end up in private collections or remote museums. 

With Brings Good Horses, Red Star brings together ledger drawings held in different collections, making drawings of horses along with the horses’ names. Red Star’s family history reflects the broader Crow Nations’ emphasis on horsemanship and horse ownership, with status given to tribal members who were able to capture horses from rivals. Her great-grandfather, Red Star, was shot by cattle rustlers while protecting Tribal cattle, and later retaliated by taking the cattle rustlers’ horses. An act that was once considered fair in Crow life was illegal by that time, and Red Star’s great-grandfather was prosecuted in court for his actions. With Brings Good Horses, Red Star symbolically frees horses held captive in settler archives, continuing the good and necessary work of her great-grandfather.  

Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) lives and works in Portland, OR. An enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe, Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Drawing on pop culture, conceptual art strategies, and the Crow traditions within which she was raised, Red Star pushes the conversation surrounding Native American perspectives in new directions.

Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad. Her work is in over 60 public collections. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She served as visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University (New Haven, CT), the Banff Centre (Banff, Canada), National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia), Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), and CalArts (Valencia, CA). In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2022, Red Star was an Anonymous Was A Woman Grant recipient. Red Star was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.

Joanne Tod, Organizing Principle

2018-2019 – Oil on canvas , 17 paintings – Courtesy of artist -( each painting will be identified with the player’s name)   These portraits represent players on the roster of the Toronto Raptors 2018-19 season- Photo Credit : Frank Piccolo

I’ve always enjoyed basketball as a sport to watch and was excited to receive tickets to see a live Raptors game. The sport of professional basketball, I subsequently realized, is all about spectacle. I was astonished at how little time the players seemed to be on the court, then suddenly there’s a break in the game. Simultaneous to the players leaving, the cheer leaders are out. And the MC interacting with audience members, and the t-shirt launchers. The mascot. And the level of sound! AND the $17 can of beer!! Over the top.  But when the game was on, it was quite riveting and beautiful to watch. The athleticism and strength was impressive. And the sheer size of these guys! Afterwards, I started researching the individual players and their stats. It was interesting to realize just how tall they are, most around 7’. I decided to paint each according to their height, and to paint them on correspondingly proportioned canvases. It was also an opportunity to really look at each of the players, to “immobilize” them, and to paint them at a slightly oversized, exaggerated scale.  

An Organizing Principle is a guiding idea used to direct a society, organization or initiative. This certainly pertains to the sport of basketball, or any sport. The way the game operates on a business level is extremely complex. It is a franchise which distributes “products” and owners grant licences. Players get enormous salaries, but are also subject to being traded and immediately relocated to a different city to be on a different team. Or being traded and then “waived” in the transaction, and left a free agent. (as was Greg Monroe, whose portrait I painted before the trade). That is why the backgrounds of the portraits are unpainted – it symbolizes the lack of context, of uncertainty. And it’s also somewhat poignant that images of these massive men are depicted on vulnerable, unpainted grounds. 

Joanne Tod is a Toronto based artist that has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past forty years. Her work is included in the collections of many museums including the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Tod is widely known for her subject of social commentary in the guise of high realism. In addition, Tod has received commissions for numerous official portraits. She is Professor Emeritus from University of Toronto where she taught in the Visual Studies Department for twenty years.