critical writing | inner life | arts and culture
ABOUT
The Secret Door is a Toronto-based online critical arts and culture publication that prioritizes meaning, individualism, and accessibility. The articles and art we publish focus on authenticity, relatability, critical conversations, lived experience, and the sometimes veiled aspects of art and culture.
The publication was founded in recognition of the need for critical arts writing that subverts popular, exclusionary, and surface-level discourse. We view art through a curious and exploratory lens. We treat artists as people, not products. This is a place for art lovers to examine, appreciate, analyze, and engage with art as a form of sincere personal expression.
The Secret Door leads to the strange and unfamiliar, to hidden passages and buried treasure.
Founder and Editor-in-Chief - Laura Thipphawong
Laura Thipphawong is a Toronto-based contemporary artist, writer, and historian. She has exhibited art and presented her research internationally in commercial and non-profit galleries and various academic forums. Her surreal and narrative style of highly detailed and imaginative compositions is inspired by folklore, literature, history, science, and psychoanalysis. These various elements are pieced together to create dream-like images and hallucinatory tableaus that symbolically reflect Laura’s interpretation of emotions and experiences.
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As a self-taught artist, Laura made her way from a small town in northern Ontario to Toronto to pursue a career in the arts. She now holds a medal and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical studies from OCAD University and a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Toronto.
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Laura’s work has been featured in several galleries, exhibition spaces, and publications such as CBC Arts, New Visionary Magazine, the Lieutenant Governor’s Suite in Toronto, and the National Gallery of Canada.
