Letter from the Editor – Issue 14
2023: No thank you! Institutionally and geopolitically: all very mask off, to say the least, and not just because the pandemic is “over.” In the art world, it was the year of the…what? The year of the meh market? The year we tried to forget about NFTs and cryptocurrencies? The year of AI angst and elation? More broadly, it felt like the year of the unlearned lesson, the year of giving in, the year of nothing to see here, the year of staring into the abyss just to stare at what stares back.
It is one of the noble lies of the contemporary cult of the artist that artists know what we’re making while we’re making it. We do not. It is only after a work is done that we really have any idea of what to make of it at all. A work’s completion changes its process, gives literal shape and form to the moments of its making. Art writing and critical theory, too, can necessarily only be done in reflection, post-event, after the party. But in describing the party, the party is changed, and in changing the past, we retroactively change our idea of how we got here, and so then of what’s possible for the future.
So let’s look ahead, please, to 2024, not to ignore the bare horrors of 2023, but to see how what we learn from the future might change how we understand the past, and maybe make for ourselves a slightly better future again. In this issue of Cornelia, Stephanie Cristello and Angel Callander take on the question of nostalgia’s role in ideological formation for both right and left through recent exhibitions in Buffalo and Toronto. M. Delmonico Connolly profiles Max Collins and how his relationship with death and grief have shaped his thinking of artistic possibility and process. Alana Traficante looks into Toronto-based artists’ return to the anachronistic process of cyanotype, one now shot through with novel implications economic, communal, and technological. And Ashley Culver brings us their second Alt-Arts column from Toronto, highlighting the work of Ginette Lapalme and her Toutoune Gallery and Shop.
A huge thank you again, as we start this new year, to our many sponsors, our writers, our designer Mark Yappueying, our copywriter Emily Mangione, our wonderful printers at Orffeo Printing, and, of course, our dedicated readers, who just keep making those magazines disappear from their locations all over town!
Happy New Year and see you in the real!
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Editor-in-Chief
Published by
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
Editor-in-Chief
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Executive Director
Emily Ebba Reynolds
Copy Editor
Emily E. Mangione
Design
Mark Yappueying
Production Assistant & Photo Editor
Way2wavybaby
Contributing Writers
Angel Callander, M. Delmonico Connolly, Stephanie Cristello, Ashley Culver, Alana Traficante
