The title of our Fall 2024 Issue is inspired by a conversation convened last year honouring the life and legacy of Ann Rosenberg, Editor of Visual Media at The Capilano Review from 1974 to 1986. A respected art historian and faculty member of Capilano College’s Fine Arts department, Rosenberg’s editorship ushered in a uniquely art-driven decade of the magazine during which issue-length artist features and eclectic spotlights on underrecognized figures of Vancouver’s art scene took centre stage. Discussing the many ambitious special issues that Rosenberg directed during her tenure, founding editor Pierre Coupey noted: “We wanted the magazine to go deeper into the material, deeper into what artists and writers were making.”
With Rosenberg’s legacy in mind, Issue 4.3: Real Materials is the first art-focused issue of The Capilano Review in nearly a decade, re-upping this ethos of deep thinking, close making. It engages a variety of artists working today to ask: What are the real materials with which you work? What material conditions guide, inform, or sustain your making?
The works collected in this issue centre materially embedded forms of knowledge, speaking through such media as drawing, painting, printmaking, weaving, and writing to honour the kinds of esoteric sensibilities and covert intelligences that can only be developed through making. Anne Low’s artist project and accompanying conversation reflect on vernacular fabrication technologies and décor, challenging closed definitions of “craft” through the re-presencing of research as it magnetizes around the unexpected auras of objects. Laura Grier utilizes the immediacy of familiar consumer waste products to produce moving tessellations of resistance and ingenuity as experienced by generations of Indigenous peoples displaced to urban centres. In a conversation with curator Emily Dundas Oke, artists Atheana Picha and Aaron Nelson-Moody discuss the realities of “two-eyed” learning, teaching, and sharing for a new generation of Indigenous artists whose dedication to working in traditional cultural forms deftly reimagines the stakes for art-making from, and for, a place and a community.
Other pieces expand notions of “studio work” to reckon with the immaterial: those psychic, emotional, and/or imaginative labours that no less uncover, even if by sheer mystery, something of our very real conditions. Les Ramsay’s Landscape Paintings upend distinctions between high art and low, materials borrowed and collected, in a series of psychedelic settings left to unfurl in leftover paints and on bolts of thrifted upholstery. Nadya Isabella’s paintings consider the formation of narrative events and fantasies as they are manifested in the painterly image, evoking the material detritus of objects and relationships. Enlivened by Alison Bosley’s static “radio tunings” and the strange and wonderful movements of Lee Suksi’s ant-like “afterglows,” these artworks and textual responses together perform a fine-grained attention and attunement.
In a slightly different key, the issue also collects literary work that reflects on the circumstances of its production, considering the environments in which acts of writing take place, the physical body at work, and the communities of support and readership that help bring writing into the world. Rob Macaisa Colgate’s “The Softness of Language” invites us to take part in the small rituals and gestures of daily care that enfold intellectual and creative labour. Tina Do’s poems reverberate their affective resonance through networks of reference, from the pop cultural to the intensely personal, addressing the poems’ lyric voice to a group of contemporaries through opening dedications. Saif Alsaegh’s sensibilities as a filmmaker come to the fore as memories crystallize around objects and frame-like stills to unfold their significance in the present. Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora, in her essay on the collected writings of Liz Magor, contemplates the vital function of artists’ writing as a site of thinking and self-reflection, considering the longer- term effects of this inner and outer processing on both the development of the artist and the objects in their care.
It might seem obvious that we start by considering the material, prompting a return to the things we see or touch. Yet this focus on materiality is also a provocation to think and feel differently in these times about what is meant by “material,” or “production,” or even “presence.” The contributors to this issue centre modes of listening to and learning from materials, modelling how curiosity, humility, and sensitivity to those lesser determined, furtive forms of knowledge can serve to powerfully reorient our relationships to each other, our environments, and ourselves. As Cristina Holman writes in their opening sequence: “Something on the ground is warm and glowing [. . .] When I pull away I leave a hand- / shaped pool of warm, clean water.”
— Deanna Fong and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross
