Letter from the Editor
The 2021 film Free Guy, starring the inimitably unlikable Ryan Reynolds, follows a non-player character through his repetitive, Groundhog Day life in a Grand Theft Auto-style video game. The titular character, Guy, is a bank teller whose role is to be held up at gunpoint in a recurring mission for the game’s players, all made into aggressive criminals by the totalizing demands of the gameworld. Through a quirk in the AI programmed into the game, Guy gets hold of a player’s glasses that allow him to see and take advantage of the hidden infrastructure of his world. Suddenly he has easy access to cash, power ups, the gaining of experience points, etc., and through the demonstration of his new powers (basically just being a really nice guy so that he can meet the girl of his dreams) he leads a revolution in the gameworld, organizing the NPCs into a general strike against the game’s players.
Having overturned the hegemony of violent repetition, the film ends with the main characters walking into the sunrise of a waterily conceived, virtual anarchist’s utopia – somewhere between a Moebius comic, Dinotopia, and Animal Crossing – but it nevertheless contains some neat images of dialectical inversion. Guy’s best friend Buddy, for example, a security guard at his bank, unstraps and drops his gun belt before dropping to the floor in fear whenever confronted by players in his role in the bank robbing mission. At the end of the film, newly liberated (both by collective action and, naturally, by Reynolds’ Great Man heroics) Buddy drops his belt, recognizing in the object not his fear, but his novel sense of freedom. It is a dumb reminder that any dream of the future will necessarily be made from the nightmare of the past; that’s all the material we have to work with.
This issue of Cornelia (our tenth!) consists of many such dreams. From mutual aid to free education to DIY initiatives, to cope and create new communities, artists are sifting through the bone pile of history to find the tools with which to make a future. In Buffalo, musicians Way2WavyBaby and Chango4 have a frank conversation about the dos and donts of doing it yourself; William Brereton talks with Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo about his transmutation of symbols of horror into critical images of regeneration; and Paul Knopf interviews Emily Reynolds and me about a new art education project at BICA. North of the border, Jacob Broussard addresses the subtleties of Paul P.’s paintings in a quiet and unexpected exhibition at the Oakville Galleries, and K. MacNeil provides practical, personal insight into forming a supportive artist cohort through virtual connections. As we reach the end of this summer, the energy and positive vibrations pulsing through our community are palpable.
Thank you to our many supporters: our advertisers, our donors, our readers, and especially our writers, without whom Cornelia would literally be nothing. Thank you, as well, to our designer Mark Yappueying and copy editor Emily Mangione, who have both been an integral part of Cornelia’s voice and vision since the very first issue. This would be a much shabbier endeavor without their keen sensibilities.
– Nando Alvarez-Perez
Editor-in-Chief
Published by
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
Editor-in-Chief
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Producer
Emily Ebba Reynolds
Feature & Copy Editor
Emily E. Mangione
Design
Mark Yappueying
Interns
Lydia Kegler & Way2WavyBaby
Contributing Writers
William Brereton, Jacob Todd Broussard, Paul Knopf, K. MacNeil, Way2WavyBaby & Chango4
