thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Feb24_SizeB.png

WorkmanArts_Feb24_SizeB.png

md_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

sm_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

Workman 1

thumbnail_CMAG - web banner (mobile) (300 × 250 px).jpg

CMAG - web banner (mobile) (300 × 250 px).jpg

lg_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

md_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

sm_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

thumbnail_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

Plural

thumbnail_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeB.png

Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeB.png

md_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

sm_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

thumbnail_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

Mackenzie

lg_C159_Cover.jpg

md_C159_Cover.jpg

sm_C159_Cover.jpg

thumbnail_C159_Cover.jpg

C159_Cover.jpg

Letter

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer and editor based on the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and səlilwətaɬ nations. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism have appeared in _BOMB, The Ex-Puritan, Fence, Mousse,_ and elsewhere, and she is currently the Art Editor at _The Capilano Review_. Her debut fiction collection, _The Longest Way to Eat a Melon_, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2025.


Fan Wu is a semi-oceanic species of octopus jumping up and down. He works in performance, poetry, and the ecstasies of collective action. You can read his work in _Feeld, The Flaherty Film Seminar, The Vermin,_ and _C Magazine_. 

##### Dear C Mag,

Thank you for highlighting so many smart, alternative design practices that have nothing at all to do with that already mile-high stack of slick-looking photo-lifestyle magazines that drain my soul and make me question the role of publishing. 

In respect to Chris Lee and Ali S. Qadeer’s question, “how graphic design as a visual practice gives form to power,” I couldn’t help but think of the many artists and micro-publishers I know working around me today (many of them, internet-savvy millennials) whose practices are similarly involved in calling out the design industry’s obvious complicity with the status quo. What’s different about these practices, though, is that most often they take a playful and/or ironic approach to this warfare—one that, in its _self-consciously_ “bad” design, takes into account our own roles as consumers and purveyors of trends.

The bad design that I am referring to looks rather amateurish, and intentionally so. It crowds information rather than communicating it clearly. Its graphics are clumsy, noisy, awkward. It has no message, or at least not one that’s literal or straightforward. Sometimes it has the look of a zine you put together with friends one night while drinking heavily, with pages so ephemeral that they may not exist tomorrow. Sometimes it has the look of a website from another century, an overly personalized Myspace or Geocities profile. Or maybe it is a painting that uses an ironically airbrushed effect, or a piece of video art featuring a poorly rendered three- dimensional object (in spite of all the technology that typically makes this kind of thing easily avoidable). Almost always, bad design embraces a quality of effusiveness, of too-muchness, and what I would argue is our long overdue rebellion against that rather boring _minimalist_ design trend. In short, bad design is everything that no _real_ client (outside of the art world that is!) would ever, ever want.

Sadly (or not), even the bad design I am describing here has been catching on as a trend in recent years (just take a look at any number of contemporary art museum websites these days, designed with the same _so bad it’s good_ aesthetic), something that David Schnitman’s “Now in Circulation” addressed in the issue. Just like any other anti-trend-turned-trend, it will finally face its decline. For now, though, I’m happy to support whatever it is that it’s doing—at least until Kinfolk is off the rack for good.

##### Jacquelyn Ross

##### Dear Ms. Bruneau and Ms. Cynwar,

Issue 141 elucidates, examines and interrogates design and power’s vine-like entanglement and moves the discussion forward with timely regard for a particular manifestation of this coupling: design as resistance.

In his interview with Winona Wheeler and Joi T. Arcand, Chris Lee asked Wheeler if her partiality for paper is linked to its ease in securing institutional approval. Wheeler asserts “I’m a little too rebellious for that,” and explains, more specifically, that she operates unfettered by dominant or prescribed forms of academic legitimacy. This lack of concern with being _recognized_ (as Glen Sean Coulthard would likely articulate it) and valued by the dominant group is brave. However, her familiarity with creating academically sanctioned knowledge, which, with its standards of production and presentation, could be considered a graphic form in its own right, is an advantage. She is able to reap the benefits and presumptions of legitimacy and intelligibility afforded to academia while embedding it with alternate narratives that challenge colonial myths, like the missionary James Evans’ establishment of the Cree syllabary. Wheeler’s academic work offers a form of resistance that facilitates a broad engagement and support in a diversity of communities, an important step in building networks of care and action.

Arcand’s resistance work in her _Here on Future Earth_ series, takes a less accommodating approach by comparison. The images—bridges between speculative futures and ancestral tributes—demonstrate how design can help to legitimize and create oneself. The Cree syllabic signs in Arcand’s work are meant to be understood, meant to designate places of community, commerce, nourishment—but only to those with a particular knowledge or understanding. Arcand resists colonial intelligibility in her work and in her choice to not translate the text within it (sometimes to the disdain and discomfort of her audience). This resistance is in service of giving autonomy to the community of people who do understand syllabics and concurrently, teaching those who don’t to eventually discern the visual poetry of this typeface and link it to the Indigenous communities that established it.

##### Salena Barry

##### Hello,

I’m a graduate student and graphic designer at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. I did an archival research project last fall examining the logo and graphic design of a 1970s Asian American magazine called _Bridge_. In it, I argue that the evolution of its logo from the Chinese character for “bridge” to a more inclusive English text reading “BRIDGE: An Asian American Perspective” demonstrates the entanglement of ideographic and political concerns. I find that graphic design’s built-in concern for legibility and efficacy (political or otherwise) are powerful lessons for the present world of contemporary art. Controversies like Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till or Omer Fast’s installation in NYC’s Chinatown stem, in my view, from clinging to the dated notion that authorial intent trumps actual reception. It is 2019, and yet artists and curators seem to continue to struggle to shed Alfred Barr’s treatment of viewers as “idealized, atemporal” (and most definitely white and able) bodies.

So, my answer to Chris Lee and Ali S. Qadeer’s question “What does design _do_?” is this: design is intrinsically attuned to audiences in a way that I think artists, curators and critics must be in order for their work and their shows to not only aspire or proclaim to do such and such, but to _actually do it_.

To acknowledge that our work, our art history, our exhibition frameworks are mired in an “unjust epistemology” is to acknowledge the need for more diverse and direct ways to speak through art. This requires systemic changes to bring marginalized voices into the fold, and demands that critics understand that art must acknowledge the physical, cultural, sociological specificities of its viewers. No clever design will resolve all of our problems, but absorbing design’s intrinsic creative attentiveness to audience and specificity, I think, can be part of the answer.  

##### Muhan Zhang

##### Dear Abby,

I swallow graphic design subliminally. Because I am ignorant of its histories and techniques, and know only its effects on me, graphic design moulds the geometry of my unconscious. It blends into the worldhood of the world as such, much like the forbidden Pop-Tarts that Tucker McLachlan—writing about “incidental design” in issue 141—snuck onto his parents’ grocery list.

While I’m reading C Magazine in a Parkdale waiting room with its carefully arranged new layout, I’m surrounded by hideous yellow posters in a clinical incidental design; CP24 hisses out a continuous stream of drivel; the baseball-capped boy beside me (whose hat reads “McCheezus”) plays Bejeweled. Graphic design always takes place in a dynamic scene; because I’m poor at boundary-crafting, I cannot see design apart from the sensual complexity of each moment. What comes into focus is not the design of things themselves, but spider-webbing relationships that draw across scenes of attraction and repulsion, reality and fantasy, the arrangement of text on a bag of beans and the way a lover flicks back his hair. It is my desire, with its frazzled attention span, that designs the graphic world for me, intention extracted from the picture.

McLachlan outlines four categorical quadrants of graphic design, in the vein of Rumsfeld’s famous schema of “known unknowns,” which are: expected content- expected form, expected content-unexpected form, unexpected content-expected form and unexpected content-unexpected form. Both design and desire are, it would seem, haunted by two extremes: a totalitarian conservatism where only the same repeats itself, and an apocalyptic radicality that swivels reality into an utterly new arrangement.What would it mean to never think about graphic design as an art or skill or disciplinary object, but instead as an element in the singular, unique, unrepeatable scenes of our lives?  

##### Fan Wu

Writer

Monument

issue-142-p6-8.pdf

Four letters reflecting on the spring ‘Graphic Design’ issue.

Letters

Review

**Kate Kolberg** is based in Toronto, and is the co-owner of Sibling. [@sibling.to](http://www.instagram.com/sibling.to)

By the time I reached the final room of the gallery, my mind had begun to bob away with the visual tides of the videos before me, yet my body persisted to interrupt. It nagged me with reminders of its existence through fidgety hands and hastened breath; in lifting my finger to check my pulse, I confirmed that it was noticeably high. Though I had tried to move beyond it, I had not fully recovered from the threat of moments prior—or rather, from what I had _perceived_ as such. 

It is rare to confront a threat or fear in art, but this is exactly how I would catalogue my experience of Tbilisi-born Vajiko Chachkhiani’s _They Kept Shadows Quiet_. This sense of fear was also countered by one of security, and in this oscillation between comfort and dread—imposed through both material and conceptual gestures—I began to recognize the influence that expectation and perception have on feeling secure. This wavering exists within Chachkhiani’s implicit narratives around the histories and mythologies of his home country of Georgia a country that has been marked by numerous wars, revolution and social upheaval during his lifetime. What surfaces is a view into what seems to be a conflicted relationship to home and a more universal call to reconsider how notions of home are framed. Milena Tomic, in her exhibition essay, briefly suggests how the show might be read as an interrogation of “the mythology of home as a refuge from the geopolitical upheavals that define the present time.” Put otherwise, how reliable is home as a site of security if located in a place marked by unrest? 

Throughout this exhibition, there was a balanced dispensation of the aesthetically pleasurable or familiar with the rigid or unanswerable. The installation, _Endless Ends_ (2018), consisted of a series of thin twigs emerging from several of the gallery’s walls, as if somehow growing in from the outside—a rather innocuous gesture, though still one that draws musings over the alignments between the physical and psychic deterioration that seem to be at the core of Chachkhiani’s quandary. This idea was similarly taken up in the single-channel video playing immediately at the entry, _We Drive Far, You in Front_ (2016), which showed an unending loop of large stones falling, one at a time, from an unknown height and then proceeding to break over a pile of alike stones. Whether you see the broken stones as new stones or as mere fragments of old ones, there is another ambiguous comment on degeneration—or rebirth—by way of a familiar, natural material. 

The titular work was a domineering installation consisting of two large, enclosed structures set in the middle of the gallery. They were unwavering, both constructed out of cinder blocks and painted an institutional white with a grey dado, all of which contributed to their appearance as detainment cells. The enclosures sat side-by-side and spanned almost the full width of the gallery, with only narrow hallways on either side and in between. Walking through the centre, the viewer is flanked by two-way mirrors mounted horizontally at eye level. Either because art is conventionally a voyeuristic practice, or because the structures appeared to be designed to contain someone, I expected to be able to look inside. To my surprise, all I immediately saw was myself. 

I stood there looking longer than I should have, a little enchanted by how my reflection was cast back and forth between these mirrors _ad infinitum_. That was until I was suddenly caught off-guard by an obscurity forming around my reflection, a shadow not belonging to me but aligned with me. I moved to the left, it tracked my shuffle. In a bout of denial, I leaned into the mirror but then couldn’t find the courage to look directly at what I grasped might be a person. In fear of my anonymous spectator, I abruptly walked to the back room. Here, the films _Cotton Candy_ (2018) and _Winter Which Was Not There_ (2017) played, which at first offered some relief with their oddly pacifying and beguiling imagery. 

I remember having a similar experience when I encountered Richard Serra’s archetypal installation _2000_ (2000) on permanent display at Dia:Beacon in New York. Completing the walk through the tall, inward-spiralling hallway as it slowly decreased in width induced a mild panic in me. Yet, upon discovering the large open core, I welcomed feelings of tranquility, relief and awe. Serra’s work had effectively played on my emotions (and I would argue the same for the couple I found making out there). It had demanded my brain tell my body that this wasn’t a trap, so that, when standing in the suggested climax of safety, my physical vulnerability was made plain to me. 

With Chachkhiani, however, rather than a sort of safe haven, I began to recognize this screening space more as the eye of the storm. As the narratives of the two films slowly untangled, their increasingly macabre implications forced me to reconcile with the fact that a sense of security is no more dependable, material or permanent than a sense of fear. I realized then how _They Kept Shadows Quiet_ employed my bodily instincts as a medium. How could I forget that, like with Serra’s _2000_, I would have to pass through that which had scared me again in order to leave? And that the refuge I felt in the core of _2000_, and initially felt in Chachkhiani’s screening room, was largely rooted in my plain desire to perceive them as safe, as if they somehow shielded me from their surrounding structures. In engendering an oscillation between comfort and unease, Chachkhiani faced the audience with the materiality of their perception, to question their own sites of refuge and to better understand that, for many, the idea of home as an actual refuge is only a myth.

lg_142-KOLBERG

md_142-KOLBERG

sm_142-KOLBERG

thumbnail_142-KOLBERG

142-KOLBERG

issue-142-p70-72.pdf

Kate Kolberg reviews Vajiko Chachkhiani’s solo exhibition _They Kept Shadows Quiet_ at Scrap Metal, Toronto. (October 11, 2018 – March 30, 2019).

Vajiko Chachkhiani: They Kept Shadows Quiet