Blackflash 41.1

BlackFlash Magazine is a platform for contemporary visual art. BlackFlash is dedicated to presenting critical opinions, urgent issues, and innovative ideas about divergent artistic practices from across Canada, the United States and beyond. Each issue includes feature articles, profiles, interviews, and artist projects from a diverse selection of artists, writers, and curators. 

In this issue: 

Our Spring 2024 issue considers the theme of surface in relation to artistic practice, criticism, and writing. Planning of this issue began in the autumn of 2023, when BlackFlash extended a call for pitches with the following prompt:

What kind of boundary is the surface? The notion of a surface or the surface suggests delimitation, an outside or uppermost layer. But as a verb it also implies a movement, surfacing out of water and towards air. As a durable layer of our everyday surroundings, it might mean texture, plastics, wood, or other human-made or extracted materials. Hands plunged beneath the surface of the earth to push plant roots down or knees abraded on concrete sidewalks. How does the surface shape engage with the material world? How do some surfaces come to be considered permanent while others permeable? How does the idea of a surface translate to the digital realm? How did the surface become understood as a metaphor for a (lack of) profundity of knowledge? How is the surface implicated in the status of the image itself, as a support or as a medium? 

Saskatoon, Canada; 275mm x 210mm; 64 pages