BlackFlash 39.1: Spring/Summer 2022

Editorial Note by Maxine Proctor, Managing Editor

In December 2021, Christina Battle joined BlackFlash as our new Online Editor. In this role, Christina has been developing and managing BlackFlash Expanded, a virtual platform that parallels and broadens the magazine’s editorial program. I’ve worked at BlackFlash as the sole employee for four years, and I am incredibly grateful to now share the masthead with such an exceptional colleague. Her creativity, insight, and expertise has already been invaluable to the organization and our publishing program. 

Christina has created a multi-streamed program under the themes Adaptations (to circumstances, to models, to systems, and to practice); Sustainability (both relationally and environmentally); and Speculations (imaginings, and reflections that move us collectively toward the future). BlackFlash Expanded will feature a program of discussions, responses, and artists projects that grapple with the complex and often difficult circumstances that we are confronted with. With specific interest in collective experiences, Christina has commissioned projects that speak to online community building, communal reading and publishing, as well as “how-to” guides that offer action items to circumvent traditional models of responsibility. 

Building on the programs of BlackFlash Expanded, our spring issue celebrates and explores moments of collectivity—sharing spaces, experiences, and knowledge. I have long anticipated honouring the legacy of Saskatoon’s The Red Shift Gallery in the pages of BlackFlash. Founded by Felicia Gay and Joi Arcand, Red Shift was an Indigenous-led space that exhibited an incredible roster of emerging and established artists. Michael Peterson has spent the last six months interviewing the many people who constitute the gallery’s story. These conversations reveal the many ways Red Shift impacted and emboldened the community that gathered there. 

In this issue, Winnipeg-based artist Christina Hajjar begins a three-part series about the importance of collective experiences, particularly during the ongoing grief and anxiety of 2020. Hajjar shares how these last two years have shaped her artistic practice as well as her relationship with tradition, language, and her familial country of Lebanon. Subsequently, she will be interviewing a selection of artists and curators whose work considers hookah lounges, memory, identity, and alternative futurisms—themes also explored in her own work. Chicago-based photographer Leonard Suryajaya uses his practice to engage and memorialize his family, friends, and neighbours, in what Luther Konadu describes as “an unguarded communal activity of play.” Suryajaya builds immersive sets that guide his participants to enact a utopian fantasy of unwavering love and acceptance. 

From planting seeds to setting the table, preparing a meal is perhaps one of the most expressive human experiences and is often a relational practice. In partnership with Public Art Mississauga and Mississauga Parks and Forestry Division, Diane Borsato planted an orchard of extraordinary apples and, over the last four years, has patiently watched the trees grow. Her text “Orchard: Field Notes for a Public Sculpture, Permanently in Progress” explains how this living project requires a special commitment from the community to sustain the trees through their natural lifespans and fruit harvest. As an extension of her recent project The Artist Cookbook: Vol. 1 (2019) and 2 (2021), Carrie Perreault shares an intimate conversation with artists Todd Gronsdahl and Kuh Del Rosario about how their relationship with food has been shaped by family dynamics, friendships, and most recently, the pandemic. Borsato and Perreault both showcase how feeding yourself and your community is an extraordinary and gentle feat that cannot be undervalued. 

Since the pandemic began, travel has been limited and we have relied more heavily on technology for shared experiences and interpersonal connection. We have had to be innovative in the ways we gather, express ideas, and deliberate. We Are Here FM (2021) is a sonic landscape project by Betsey Biggs and August Black that provides users around the globe with an other-worldly encounter through a real-time audiovisual broadcast. In her text about We Are Here FM, Cléo Sallis-Parchet inquires why sensory listening is valuable at this moment in time and how navigating a shifting virtual environment can bring a new awareness to the listener. 

Lastly, our spring issue profiles two artists whose practice showcases the breadth of materiality in contemporary painting. Both artists embrace their audience, encouraging an intimate experience with the painting’s character. Preston Pavlis paints larger-than-life figures on raw unstretched canvas, incorporating layers of quilting, embroidery, and grommets. In an interview by Farid Djamalov, Pavlis states that his “motivation in approaching the canvas as a textile first is to lend a certain potential for intimacy that is not necessarily present in painting otherwise.” Sean Weisgerber’s painting practice also encourages a close reading, but this is in part due to the work’s painstaking repetition of pattern. Weisgerber’s Price Per Square Inch series uses a grid of price stickers reflecting the market value of the work (per square inch) as a nod to the debasing structure of the art market. Cole Thompson thoughtfully points out, “what makes Weisgerber’s work a gimmick of admiration and not one of disdain results from its intensive materiality.” 

Seeing BlackFlash Expanded actualized and witnessing Christina’s work deepen our engagement with our contributors and readers incites a feeling of endless possibilities for our organization. Sharing a platform with Christina has reminded me how important it is to value opportunities for collectivity—working together on shared goals and a collective future from our individual positions and experiences. I’m incredibly excited to see the future of BlackFlash take shape and am hopeful that we are building something good. 

BlackFlash is grateful to Canada Council for the Arts and SK Arts for the production and dissemination of this issue. BlackFlash Expanded is generously funded by Canada Council for the Arts: Digital Now.

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