Editorial Note:
Off Leash

So begins my first editorial note unbound by thematic framing. Coming together for the first time in my tenure without a prompt, the following issue nonetheless feels as though it is circling something specific, even if that something is difficult to name. 

In my time at BlackFlash, we’ve persistently renegotiated the magazine’s identity, careening between vestigial past eras while plotting a future course, all during the long middle of an epic decline in print publishing. We’ve chewed over the very real limitations of print and sought to reconcile these drawbacks with our desire to hold the magazine in hand. These internal questions are curiously echoed across this issue, suggesting a collective unease around the dematerialized present. What are we to make of this desire to reverse course, to put up fences, this drift towards intimacy over scale? 

Edmonton-born, Berlin-based artist Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw engineers sculptures, brushed with a rustic patina, that recall industrial forms. In her profile on Shaw, writer Lauren Lavery frames his practice as a way of “understanding the evolving abstraction of material and technology in these times.” Shaw’s work carries a cool sentimentality, industrial objects softened by the touch of time. A similar feeling surfaces in the work of Winnipeg artist Tobin Rowland. Through image transfers on canvas and wood—trinkets, keepsakes, treasures in a minor key—their artist project, contained in these pages, is like stepping into a childhood bedroom decorated with sunbleached wallpaper, at once warm and a bit melancholic.

Sharing Rowland’s penchant for collecting, Vancouver-based artist Khim Mata Hipol draws on patriotic souvenirs and cultural exports from Canada and the Philippines. In a profile of Hipol, writer Nawang Tsomo Kinkar examines this diasporic lens as an interrogation of the symbols that bolster national identity. In Backroom, an artist project with an expanded AR component, Moni Omubor constructs a surreal museum space populated with sculptures echoing forms from Yoruba culture. The details of this landscape remain deliberately ambiguous, but recall a Freudian-esque “memory palace,” only here, instead of storing memories, the oneiric architecture sheds the weight of colonialism and the history of cultural looting.

In a profile of Lebanese-born Montreal-based artist Joyce Joumaa, writer Michael Davidge observes a common thread across her work, an approach which strategically estranges complex historical narratives in order to find a critical vantage point. Arriving in Edmonton as an outsider to its art scene, writer Yaniya Lee documents her effort to situate the work of local Black artists within a broader canon, ultimately finding her footing through their shared attention to material and history. In turn, writer and curator Julia Eilers Smith considers how two recent biennials (Bonavista Biennale in Newfoundland and the Bienal das Amazônias in Belém) trade cosmopolitan sprawl for hyperlocal attentiveness.

There are moments across this issue that return to the question of what we can actually hold onto, perhaps including faith in art itself. In conversation with artist Annie MacDonell, writer Lodoe Laura asks, “What does it mean to remain unjaded when the conditions for making and showing work feel increasingly compromised?” It’s a question I’ve heard echoed with disillusionment lately. And yet, the works in this issue lean toward a different mood, the quiet pleasures of contact, attention, and shared memory. MacDonell’s recent work (including the image which graces the cover) looks to the history of psychedelics as an off-ramp from the rut of capitalist realism. I keep coming back to the idea that much like psychedelics, art is hardly utopian, but at its best, it’s a hell of a trip.

This article is published in issue 43.1 of BlackFlash Magazine. Subscribe to get this issue.