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June 2025
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Editorial Note: Traces (Source Material)
The theme of Traces emerged as an open-ended prompt, inviting contributors to pursue connections between thoughts and follow their own observed patterns across artistic practices. The trace is a vital force in art history: Walter Benjamin conceptualized it as the tactile counterpart of the aura, while Rosalind Krauss outlined how the index signaled a postmodern shift away from traditional practices. Hal Foster layered psychological and political implications onto Krauss’s structurally oriented index, and Hito Steyerl coined the term “poor image” to describe how digital media has altered the circulation of images. All of these theories rely on the enigmatic duality of a trace, which hovers between presence and absence, marking the shifting nature of one era as it gives way to the next. The residual impact of these texts is apparent throughout this issue. There is a noteworthy emphasis on citation, which traces an idea back to a source and recontextualizes it. Traces act as evidence of repression, dispersion, unlikely affinities, secret histories, kinship, and artistic lineages.
“What is a trace but the persistence of something in the context of its own erasure?” asks Luis Jacob in his essay “To Speak & Spell When You’re Up Against the Wall.” This succinct framing carries through the entire issue. In his article, Jacob explores the phenomenon of latent presence by examining Canada’s colonial haunting, the city of Toronto, and the recent departure of Indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush from the AGO due to her pro-Palestinian activism.
This notion of persistence takes further shape in Jaime Black-Morsette’s artist project “presence.” Throughout her work, Black-Morsette has explored the interplay of absence and presence as a means of reclaiming space for Indigenous women. As the founder of the REDress Project, she has established a powerful and enduring symbol of MMIWG2S. The images in this project extend that legacy, subtly tracing the outlines of bodies to evoke both what has been erased and what endures.
A conversation titled “Sanctuaries, soup, snakes, and soil” between artist AO Roberts and curator Zoe Cinel unfolds across a series of correspondences through which the two discuss magic, Medicare, and sorrel soup. Through these exchanges, they reflect on the nature of care and healing, contemplating how these concepts are historically entwined with faith, power, and capital, and envisioning what they might look like when emancipated from these structures. Such a vision is realized in “PPE (rituals)” Roberts’ digital “sentient crip landscape” which is featured as the digital artists project in this issue supported by EQ Bank as part of an ongoing partnership.
The residual traces of power surface again in a conversation between writer Lodoe Laura and filmmaker/photographer Clare Samuel titled “To Behold and To Appear.” Throughout their discussion, which touches on the dynamic between emotional intuition and intellectual rigour in Samuel’s work, the artist reveals a striking sensitivity to the complexities of the gaze and the paradox of visibility, particularly in relation to women, who frequently serve as her subjects.
Like Roberts and Cinel, writer and curator Lindsey Sharman maps a history of medicine, alchemy, and power, this time through the use of scent in the work of artist Elaine Cameron-Weir. In the profile, titled “Sticky Meanings,” Sharman remarks how scent emerges as an evocative, irrepressible force in Cameron-Weir’s practice, which Sharman frames as a historically charged tool capable of conjuring the “psychological debris” of “systems of power.”
“Each time you remember a past event, new neural connections are made that change how you recall it next time. We remember our memories, which become copies of copies,” writes Rose Bouthillier in her profile of artist Hazel May Eckert, “Never Created or Destroyed.” Eckert’s photographic work often features enigmatic, ethereal images that hover on the edge of abstraction; a simultaneous meditation on media and memory that recalls Hito Steyerl’s concept of the “poor image.”
Navigating a similar line between legibility and opacity, writer Jennifer Lee Smith explores the practices of three contemporary Métis artists: Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher, Rhayne Vermette, and Robyn Adams, who weave their culture into their work in nuanced and sometimes oblique ways. In this essay titled “Embodying Our Ancestors,” Smith notes that traces do not always follow direct lines, making room for the idiosyncratic expressions of Métis contemporary art.
This notion of non-linear influence surfaces again in a conversation between writer Laura St. Pierre and artist Nancy Lowry, sparked by St. Pierre’s surprise at how prominently the Emma Lake Workshops reverberate through Lowry’s recent work. The conversation, “Emma Beyond Myth,” reads as open and exuberant dialogue among friends, as the two artists reflect on how the workshops shaped their practices in different ways, opening up a broader understanding of how memories become enshrined as myth and vice versa.
These eclectic pieces have come together to form an extraordinarily intimate issue. I’m especially grateful to the contributors for sharing such personal and profound work. Several writers have offered additional readings, shedding light on the texts that have influenced them. I invite you to consider this issue not simply on its own but as part of a tangled, ongoing web of ideas: a long, polyphonic conversation which neither begins nor ends here.
~Madeline Bogoch, Guest Editor BlackFlash 42.1 “Traces”
Cover: AO Roberts & Zoe Cinel, ‘u/t (snake)’, 2025. Watercolour monoprint, linocut. 23 x 16.5 in. Image courtesy of the artists.
BlackFlash is grateful to Canada Council for the Arts and SK Arts for the production and dissemination of this issue.
To be distributed in June 2025. Consider gifting a subscription to yourself or a friend.
