Letter from the Editor – Issue 20

Issue 20

Jan 30

2025, ha ha! Let’s face it: it sucked!

As I sit down to write I’m having a very hard time articulating exactly what it is that I want to say. This is 20 issues of Cornelia! Of course I want to celebrate that. But, yikes, celebration seems tough right now. What I want to say might not be possible to say yet, living through the cuspy times that we are: I think our sense of ourselves, our sense of our place in the world, our feelings of autonomy, self-determination, and agency — the major mental underpinnings of the modern mind — are radically shifting. We are all living through a collective contradiction between our long treasured sense of freedom and a sense of being utterly trapped, hemmed in by the inarticulable, inarguable horror and rank stupidity of it all. Multipolarity, the death of liberalism, the end of the postwar order (a historical blip!), the necessary conclusions of German Idealism…whatever it is, the old stories we tell about ourselves don’t seem to be holding up in the face of reality.

Art is a wonderful place for these energies to diffuse themselves, where expressions of individual agency supposedly still play a prized role. This year, though, it’s obviously kind of cringy to see the mainstream art world proceed apace, following the only old ruts in the road it knows: best of lists, is the market up or down, who’s hot and who’s not, and, wouldn’t you believe it, everyone did great at the fairs this year too, so, don’t worry, the avant-garde ever advances upon new ground. Like, it is 2026, and I say again, ha ha!

As much as we, artists, might like to pat ourselves on the back about our technical processes or artistic research or cultural inheritance, one of the things that we continually face in the history of art—one of the things that makes art enduring and mysterious and endlessly unsolvable and beautiful—is that artists, in a deep sense, do not know what we make or why we make it. It’s not reducible to our backgrounds, or to vulgar economic forces, or to the merely describable. The art work is only ever the reflection of a blind stumbling towards a thing we can intuit, but not grasp, sense, but not see; it’s that thing out there that we’re all working towards, infinity drawing the finite towards itself, the universal unveiling itself in the particular, the unthought thought, the future coming at you, the beautiful, the good, whatever you prefer to call it.

So, anyway, I’m here to celebrate that, because, twenty issues of artists making art and writers writing about it and readers reading it! Twenty issues of cross-border collaboration and connections! Twenty issues containing some two hundred thousand (paid!) words! Forty thousand copies distributed across our region and available for free, for everyone! Five more years of Cornelia please!

And what a bunch of great articles we have in this issue: Tiffany Gaines writes about Granville Carroll’s recent exhibition, Black Serenity, at CEPA Gallery; Namah J. brings the spice with a survey of young artists in Toronto; Alexa Kanarowski looks back at the legendary New Topographics exhibition on its 50th anniversary; Andrea Mancuso reflects on Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal’s Silk Road Songbook at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center; and Alana Traficante looks at Annie Macdonell’s Interior Life at gallery two seven two.

As always, none of this would have been possible without Mark Yappueying’s design vision, Emily Mangione’s editing assistance, wavy’s production support, and the interest and ideas of the many writers we’ve worked with in the past five years. Even more so, this wouldn’t be possible without the support of our advertisers! And, of course, you, dear reader. Thank you for your support! See you in twenty more issues!

Nando Alvarez-Perez

Editor-in-Chief