Editorial Note: Pattern Recognition
This issue marks a transition for BlackFlash. We’re sunsetting thematic framing (for now) and moving toward a less categorical way of assembling each issue. Accordingly, our final theme, “Patterns,” is an apt pivot point: a flexible prompt that gestures toward a way of seeing that tracks subtle links.

Because production schedules often overlap, themes tend to persist into the following issue. There is almost always a hinge piece; here, it’s Jon Davies’ joint profile of Kyle Alden Martens and B. Brookbank, written in the wake of their exhibition at C’cap (Winnipeg), your voice, my throat. Situated between “Domestic” and “Patterns,” Davies traces how the couple’s distinct practices converge around questions of intimacy and shared space.

Nic Wilson’s artist project, Index for Holding, examines contronyms, words that carry opposing meanings. Borrowing from the visual language of concrete poetry and graphic scores, Wilson assembles a sequence of silhouettes that embrace the ambiguity inherent in life and language. The piece strikes an uncanny affinity with Gabrielle Willms’s profile of artist Anna Binta Diallo, who also adopts the silhouette as a versatile icon. Willms traces Diallo’s shift from collage to sculpture and her ongoing return to eclectic archives—encyclopedias and folkloric texts, among others—to explore the roots of how knowledge is expressed through visual culture.

A common line of inquiry coheres around the politics of comfort and leisure. Writer Kat Benedict coins the strategy Crip The Script in their feature essay about artists Jamila Prowse and Finnegan Shannon, whose practices interrogate ableist norms. In a conversation between Letch Kinloch, Car Martin, coyote/Jason Aune, and John Fiddler—all collaborators and members of the Devious Plot collective—these artists and writers engage in a compelling discourse on what it means to undertake community- led creative initiatives that are, in Kinloch’s words, “entangled, risky, and accountable. The politics of land and leisure are again evoked in curator and writer Katie Lawson’s essay reflecting on her time spent at No.9 Gardens, a rural residency, with artists Holly Chang and Teresa Chan. Lawson uses the dramatic fluctuations in weather to reflect on the stakes of courting unpredictability in artistic practice.

Two projects in this issue reflect how the digital era has accelerated our pattern-seeking instincts. A reflection on recursive mortality and agency unfolds in Amelia Wong-Mersereau’s essay Agency and Aesthetics in Lu Yang’s DOKU The Self, which observes the appeal of video games in contemporary art spaces.

“I’ve been thinking about collections,” writes artist Shaheer Zazai in the text accompanying his artist project titled A Collection, Notes on Attention, A Pause. Built from a stockpile of screenshots that mark the beginnings of individual artworks, the project celebrates these subtle “acts of noticing” in both print and digital form.

In turn, this wide-ranging issue offers a snapshot of the contributors’ inclinations and preoccupations. In his novel of the same name, science fiction author William Gibson once described pattern recognition as a “gift and a trap,” which is a generous way of saying we search for meaning even when it may or may not exist. Think of this final (for now) theme as an invitation to indulge that impulse, to look a little too closely and take pleasure in finding a signal in the noise.

-Madeline Bogoch, Editor BlackFlash 42.3 “Patterns”

Cover: Anna Binta Diallo, Peaks of Sunlight and Frost from Topographies/Perforations, 2024. Digital collage printed on Japanese paper. 92 x 100 cm. Photo by Denis Ha. Image courtesy of the artist.

BlackFlash is grateful to Canada Council for the Arts and SK Arts for the production and dissemination of this issue.