François Boucher's toilette scenes explore the complex gender and class anxieties that connect the hyperfeminine aesthetics of the Rococo style and its modern counterpart, the coquette aesthetic. 

In cultivating a multisensory environment of sounds, scents, and sights, the early modern apothecary functioned as a proto-sensorium not dissimilar to contemporary immersive retail spaces.

In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, The Overlook Hotel is more than an inanimate structure. Rather, it is a malevolent presence with a mind of its own, emerging as one of the film's most compelling characters. 

Weaving together affective, visual, and social power, Byzantine Floor Coverings demonstrate a rich artistic tradition which underpins the craft of modern rug-making. 

The EZLN’s struggle reveals how creative media are re-appropriated to denounce and disrupt the status quo, illustrating the possibilities for political mobilization in the new age of communication.

Baltrop’s photographs capture and preserve the beauty and secrecy of queer experiences that took refuge within the decaying architectural milieu of Manhattan’s piers in the 1970s and 80s.

Dutch artists contributed to the commodification of Black bodies in colonial Brazil by employing cotton as a visual signifier of enslaved status

Sugimoto's photographs disrupt perceptions of linearity by conjuring nostalgia for a bygone era of American cinema.

The painting affixed to the ceiling of India’s Rashtrapati Bhavan holds a complex history of hidden meanings and reappropriations over time.

Dutch portrait artists in the seventeenth century carefully selected clothing as a statement of class and social attitudes to reflect the nation’s ideals.

In the seventeenth century, Dutch women turned to unusual dollhouses as vehicles of personal expression and self-fashioning.

Canvas sits down with McGill’s Visual Arts Collection to learn more about what they have to offer.