ISSUE 41.2

Editorial Note: Labour

This issue of BlackFlash comes into the world at a time of transition: the departure of previous Managing Editor Jasmin Fookes and the entrance of Interim Director / Publisher Travis Cole (Travis was previously BlackFlash’s Managing Editor from 2013–17). As a contract editor brought on board to support the substantive editing phase of this issue’s production, I’ve had the privilege of working both with members of BlackFlash’s board (special shoutout to Neil Price!) and the incredibly thoughtful contributors for this issue’s multivalent essays and artist projects on labour.

Labour is a well-explored topic in contemporary art—it is the subject of annual festivals, the dedicated focus of art centres, and the premise of exhibitions, performances, and documentary projects. But it is also a tricky topic. Representations of labour often risk falling into ideological traps and tropes—from poverty porn to heroic romanticizations of the worker, to depictions that humanize workers while eliding the structural conditions of their labour. Increasingly, artists who deal with representing labour also have to navigate the dematerialization of work, and find ways to bring the often-invisible aspects of contemporary labour (from technology to resource exploitation to gendered and racialized work) out into the light.

In this issue of BlackFlash, contributors reckon with these varied dimensions, tropes, traps, and gaps in the representation of labour from multiple perspectives. An artist project by Anahita Akhavan and an essay by Neil Price both focus on individual labour—that of the artist and the art critic, respectively—as a way of channeling curiosity and connection in their practices of making and writing about art. But in navigating their own labour, each bring into view a much broader constellation of practices. Akhavan uses her own work as a jumping-off point to explore the role of craft and technical labour in Islamic art, while Price touches on the precarity of art writing, and the cultural resilience, diversity, and reckoning with colonial violence that animate Caribbean and Caribbean-diaspora art.

The conditions of artswork are a major theme throughout the issue, as contributors consider systemic barriers artsworkers may encounter throughout their careers. An essay by the Aisle 4 Collective shares findings from their ongoing research project into the role of non-disclosure agreements: legal agreements designed to protect intellectual property and trade secrets that are increasingly leveraged to silence employees from speaking about workplace conflicts or misconduct. Sarah Cullen of MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Network shares an experimental text about the residency she hosts for artist parents and their children, braiding together a tour of the residency’s facilities on Toronto Island and an essay on reconsidering the status of carework and conditions of inclusion for artist parents.

Material and de-material work are central to an artist project by Matt Nish-Lapidus and a conversation between Siobhan Angus & Louie Palu. While Angus and Palu explore the centrality of mining processes to photography through an exploration of Palu’s long-running and comprehensive photo-series of Canadian mines, Nish-Lapidus addresses the data processes that run nearly seamlessly throughout our interactions with social media—participation and verification mined for the development of AI and Machine Learning tools. You will see Nish-Lapidus’s project here in print, as well as an online version at https://release.emenel.ca. 

A poetic text by Crystal Mowry on the work of Laura St. Pierre interweaves many of this issue’s themes, with St. Pierre’s haunting photographs becoming the basis for a meditation on environmental destruction, social collapse, human- and non-human kinship, and the generative potential of creative labour both as a technology for better seeing our world, and as a world-making technology in its own right. 

As a contract editor, I arrived to this issue to an inbox full of contributions—each already solicited, selected, and shaped by the BlackFlash staff and board. While it’s been a joy to work with each contributor to strengthen the structure and arguments of each piece, I can take very little credit for the compositional magic that happens between these pages. It’s been a delight to see some spark or kernel from one piece taken up in another, some resonance or interplay between images, arguments, and reflections. My hope for you, reader, is the same: that each project activates some linkup the next—a living, moving cluster of perspectives on labour.

~ Alison Cooley, Substantive Editor, Issue 41.2

Editorial Note – above

Artist project:
Reimagine: Narratives
Anahita Akhavan

Artist project:
Hardly Working
Matt Nish-Lapidus

Feature:
All That You Change
Crystal Mowry on Laura St. Pierre

Feature:
Silencing in the Sector
Aisle 4

Feature:
MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project
Labour and Love
Sarah Cullen

Feature:
Nice Work If You Can Get It:
Reflections on Writing My First Art Review
Neil Price

Conversation:
Mining Materials: A Conversation with Louie Palu
Sioban Angus