This second issue of Parallelogram addresses the theme of “presence”: how we situate ourselves online and offline, and how these spheres overlap to shape our experiences of the world. If Parallelogram is imagined as a virtual space that departs from The Polygon Gallery’s physical platform, itself situated on colonised and unceded territories, how do we situate Parallelogram on the internet? What does it mean to parallel a place sited on ancestral lands, using a medium that can potentially be accessed anywhere?

Where are you present as you access Parallelogram’s site?

Volume II: Presence brings together works by Indigenous artists from across the territories now known collectively as Canada, in response to these questions. Making most of visual media and text, video and poetry, these artists link the immanent, tangible reality of land, place, and context with immaterial, expansive ideas of belonging, kinship, memory, and futurity. Here, the screen provides a critical threshold, while also reorienting the viewer back to the world beyond it.

Notably, a number of these new commissions were developed out of The Polygon Gallery’s Response Program. Structured around Indigenous-led workshops for, and public screenings of, emerging Indigenous filmmakers, Response is in the care of artist and curator Serena Steel. Presence online is conceived to coincide with Steel’s curated exhibition Traces, featuring artists Catherine Blackburn and Jeneen Frei Njootli, on view in The Polygon’s Ground Floor Gallery from September 25th, 2026 to March 14th, 2027.