I gave my design students a simple assignment: name an invention, find out who made it, when, and why. Three of the women on the list — the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie, a Shaker who may or may not have invented the circular saw, and the woman behind the cold-handle sad iron — sent the whole thing sideways. The internet had given one of them another woman's face. Untangling it turned into a better lesson than the assignment itself: how to read an image like evidence, and why the panic that AI killed our thinking gets the history exactly backwards.

You're reading this because you're trying to figure out your taxes as an artist. Really, when was the last time you felt good about doing your taxes? Doing my taxes for my art business used to freak me out. But 2025 was different—because I had been taking annual notes (I'm a teacher). Here's what I learned about filing as a registered sole proprietorship in Alberta, tracking expenses across multiple platforms, and using that crucial nil inventory election that most visual artists don't know about.

Type "a dragon eating ice cream on Mars" into an AI image generator and you'll have a photorealistic rendering within seconds. But is this sophisticated collage — or something else entirely? The research reveals a far more nuanced picture than most public debate allows.

I come from people who chose to step back from technology to stay pure. I chose differently. After a decade in Alberta classrooms — and a lifetime watching what avoidance costs — here's what I've learned about fear, the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics, and what the TQS actually asks of teachers right now.

Every time you hit generate, something invisible happens. Power flows. Water evaporates. Servers hum in facilities you'll never see, in communities you'll never visit. I started researching the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure. I was using the exact technology I was investigating to do it.

Edmonton artist Vanessa Corrigall reflects on her years exhibiting at the Strathearn Art Walk — a free outdoor art festival where 160+ booths sold out in days. Find her at Booth Red 1, September 11–13, 2026, with her underwater swimmer paintings.

In 1906, Alberta teachers earned just $614 a year—yet land and homes were often within reach. This post explores what teachers could actually afford, how government policy shaped land access, and why affordability looked very different for Indigenous communities. It also compares what has changed—and what hasn’t—about the kind of life a teacher can realistically build today.

The part nobody talks about with AI art tools: the rejection. Before I find one image worth keeping, I generate dozens. That's not a failure of the tool. That's the work.

Both images in this post were made with AI. One works. One doesn't. The difference has nothing to do with the tool.