Invisible Landscapes
Detail. 2017. Conte on Japanese Obonai paper, 63.5 x 48.3 cm.
Available from December 15, 2019, to March 14, 2020
We’ve taken some interpretive, some poetic liberties in considering antimatter as a concept. Antimatter is weird. It presents a mirror world of abstract phenomena: time reversals, mutual annihilation, cosmic rays, cloud chambers, an infinite sea of sub-atomic particles that parallels our “real” world of matter. Alongside physicists and researchers, the artists in this issue are thinking about systems, ecologies, erosion, alchemy—the changing forms of matter that reveal visible and invisible worlds, tiny details and wide vistas. For many, exploring dark voids—or what Quinn Latimer calls “the glittery political-ecological apocalypse all around us”—is a feminist, or feminized, practice.
From landscapes of extraction mined for pleasure rather than capital (New Mineral Collective) and the spatiality of Indigenous presence (Sky Hopinka), to the sensuality of systems (Azza El Siddique) and collaborations between particle physicists and artists (Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig), this issue explores what’s possible when artists and scientists think together about the beyond-visible world. And as the earth’s troubled systems continue to trouble us, there is some urgency in evoking the mysterious, dark matter of the universe.
Features
Searching for the Language of the Universe
What happens when physicists and artists collaborate on some of science’s biggest questions? A unique project reveals surprising affinities
An Alchemy of Remains
Azza El Siddique’s sensory environments are part scientific process, part aesthetic ecosystem
Myth and Matter
Sky Hopinka speaks about moving on the land, Indigenous presence and relations that collapse time and space
If the Body Is an Assembly, How Does It Assemble?
In a personal account, an artist, runner and scholar considers space and the everyday, in theory and creative practice
Core Desires, Counter Prospects
New Mineral Collective finds alternatives to mining, through pleasure and passive resistance
No More Words, Words, Words
For both Hanne Darboven and Madeline Gins, a kind of personal mathematics became a method of reading and writing their art
Cover
Invisible Landscapes
Detail. 2017. Conte on Japanese Obonai paper, 63.5 x 48.3 cm.
This Issue
Preview
Conversations with artists and curators on upcoming projects
Fiction
Legacy
Free Radicals
The Centre for Experimental Art and Communication was both the darling and delinquent of the 1970s Toronto art scene
Dialogue
Spotlight
Bending the Light
A national survey of 10 artists who are reforming material practice
Artist Project
Ironwork for Dirac House
Reviews
Eric Mack
Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto, September 19, 2019, to January 25, 2020
Wild
Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, October 2, 2019, to March 15, 2020
Creation
Sylvia Nickerson, Drawn & Quarterly, 192 pp., $24.95
Moyra Davey
Greengrassi, London, UK, September 5 to October 26, 2019
Black Quantum Futurism
During their solo exhibition at Vancouver's Western Front last fall, Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips's cross disciplinary approach drew on deeply entangled histories, elevating and echoing the voices and actions of prominent Afro-diasporic thinkers and artists
Overheard