Undoing Painting

In this issue, we are undoing. An undoing is a loosening, an overturning—it’s a way of making space for new things to emerge. Its temporalities are not set; it can be a quick correction or a process of trial and error, a distillation or a reconfiguration. To undo is to recognize that the canons, legacies and histories of art that so often feel entrenched can shift, can be let go. And painting—well, what is painting? Everyone who contributed to this issue, and likely everyone reading it, will have a different answer. It’s bound to be personal; painting brings with it such formal, conceptual and political baggage. But that’s a generative point from which to start: not to ignore painting’s legacy but to unravel it, to pull at threads and see where they lead. For many artists, the question of how art can re-form and re-vision itself against the crises of our time is paramount.

It’s a question for this magazine too. Ebbing and flowing with changing conversations around art, magazines are a persistent forum for asking what art is, and what it can be. We’ve been thinking about how a 21st-century print publication can be a channel, a platform, for contemporary art first and foremost. You’ll see more artists contributing, and more artists’ voices speaking to their practices and the stories behind them. We’ve been rethinking our institutional structure too, expanding our advisory committees to bring in different perspectives, and seeking new forms of accountability to multiple publics.

For the first time, an issue of Canadian Art has two distinct covers—both are works by Sonny Assu from his series of comic book collages. Taking the superheroes of a beloved art form and intervening by painting formlines directly on the pages, Assu reimagines what such stories can be. For us, the multiple covers are a way to break form, giving a nod to the comic book, arguably the most widely distributed kind of art book. Part of this “undoing” issue is about questioning what we do as an art publication, and inviting artists to help us do that. The covers are a response, and they’re just a beginning.