Winter 2024
The winter 2024 issue of C Magazine, C156 Craft, connects artists with their materials, focussing on the relationships among craft and ideas such as lineage, identity, embodiment, function and survival. Thinking across and beyond media and genre, the artists and writers in C156 offer an expansive and elastic understanding of craft that embraces embodied contexts, the consequences of making, and the meaning objects assume as they circulate in the world.
Features, interviews, and experimental texts in this issue follow craft as it moves within families, across diasporic journeys, and through local and global markets. Contributors consider what is at stake as the fine art market embraces craft, explore how the movement of objects and people stitches Latinx identities together, weave myth, memory, and music to observe patterns between art and life, and engage vernacular photography to elaborate craft-as-vessel for holding and defining individuals and communities alike.
The cover for this issue is a behind-the-scenes image from the filming of Akash Inbakumar’s Era of the Moon: Phases. In their interview with Holly Chang, Inbakumar describes their practice as building worlds with material kin. Conceiving of a dynamic in which artist, materials, and equipment are all active agents, Inbakumar tells Chang, “It’s up to the maker to develop a […] vernacular of working with something over time, to understand the language of that entity or being.”
Specially commissioned as the Artist Project for C156, Trevor Novak’s Exploratory Touch animates the first six pages of the issue, casting the classic nude subject in what guest curator matt lambert describes as cheerfully abject “surrealist predicaments and colours.” The bodies figured in Exploratory Touch recall the entanglement of the artist’s own body-as-maker, and rely on “the elasticity and metaphors of the word ‘craft’” as they shift in medium from ceramic to digital rendering.
Read the editorial for C156 Craft, by C Magazine’s Editor Joy Xiang, check out select additional articles available online, and preview the features in C156 below.
Letters:
Responses to C Magazine Issue 155 “Codes.”
—from Marcus Prasad and Vanessa Maria
C155 Features:
The Moon and Material Kin: Interview with Akash Inbakumar
—Holly Chang
Marking Time Spent Absurdly
—Anni Araújo Spadafora with contributions by D. St-Amour
Love Made Object
—Amanda Shore
Mercado de Artesanías: Crafting Latinx Identity
—Javier Fuentes Martinez
Weaving Through the Binary: Qualeasha Wood’s Textile Inheritances
—Salena Barry
Different Things in Different Scenes: Encountering Ichi-go Ichi-e in Tea
—Jasmine Gui
Reviews:
Woojae Kim: With a heart that sings the stars, I will love all things dying
—Francesca Bennett
Columns:
Tilling: The Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practice: In Conversation with Luther Konadu
—Shalaka Jadhav and Suzanne Morrissette
All reviews and columns for this issue are listed in the table of contents.
Subscribe now to read all of C156 “Craft” online. All subscriptions include unlimited access to the latest print and online-exclusive content at cmagazine.com. Want to read C156 in print? Find a store near you or order yours online.
Readers and subscribers are essential to our work at C. Your support helps bring new voices, critical insight, and creative ideas to readers at a time when rigorous, challenging, inclusive art writing is more important than ever.
C Magazine, established in 1984, is a contemporary art and criticism periodical that functions as a forum for significant ideas in art and its contexts. Each issue explores a theme that is singularly engaged with emerging and prevailing perspectives through original art writing, criticism, and artist projects. Our content focuses on contemporary art in Canada and the activities of Canadian practitioners living abroad—with an emphasis on those from equity-owed communities—as well as on international practices and dialogues. We are committed to facilitating meaningful, pluralistic, interdisciplinary, historically-engaged, and imaginative conversations about art.
