BlackFlash Magazine

Picturing the West

Sheila Spence’s portraits of cowboys & cowgirls. An interview by Wayne Baerwaldt Wayne Baerwaldt: You’re well known for your photographic examination of inner city working families in Winnipeg but I feel you’ve re-established your vision as an artist over the last two years or so. Do you consider your 21st-century large-scale portraits of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan [...]

The Dice that are Thrown and the Dice that Fall Back

A Conversation with Dustin Wilson, Futurologist. David LaRiviere speaks with Dustin Wilson: artist, scientist, futurologist. Dustin Wilson’s Futurology is an ambitious hybrid investigation that draws on the future by way of wormholes and throwing dice. Now, some confusion may arise in the course of what follows   pertaining to the question of where Wilson is an artist [...]

Warblers

work by Kara Uzelman and Jeffrey Allport, at AKA Gallery, Saskatoon, SK. By John G. Hampton AKA Gallery’s recent summer exhibition, Warblers, debuts the first collaborative installation by Nokomis-based artists and partners Kara Uzelman and Jeffery Allport. Allport, an accomplished sound artist who extracts uncanny acoustic anomalies from familiar places; and Uzelman, an internationally exhibited [...]

Oh, Canada : Amalie Atkins

By Leah Taylor Exhibition curated by Denise Markonish, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MASS, USA On a warm weekend in May hundreds of artists, curators and critics descended onto the city of North Adams, Massachusetts to take in an exhibition that caused a flurry of excitement within the Canadian art community. “Oh, Canada” at the Massachusetts [...]

Foregrounding Background

By Christopher Olson Four listening instances in reverse chronological order: I. 2011. I’m at the kitchen table in Nara, Japan for my weekly headphone session with Framework:Afield, a radio show and podcast “consecrated to field recording and it’s use in composition.” It’s been a vital weekly ritual for a few years now. Instead of the [...]

Sounding Spaces, Listening Bodies

By Ellen Moffat How listeners experience reverberation depends on whether the environment is primarily a social, navigational, aesthetic or musical space. Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter[i] Sound moves through the body as a physical vibration and a tangible felt experience that brings us back to our corporeality and reminds of our connectivity to our world. [...]

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson

A Q&A between Amy Fung and Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. By: Amy Fung Fung: Your collaborative team appears aware of problematic representation and dominant/centralized discourses raging in the field of animal studies surrounding moral authority, how do you think art methodologies, especially photography/video works, can steer the discourse into alternative ways of relating with animals/nature/Other? Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson: In the [...]

Politics In Sound; Politics Of Sound

By Tom Kohut Christof Migone, Hit Parade (Winnipeg), 2011, performance, courtesy of the artist. That sound art should have a politics is something which is not immediately obvious. Nor is it a claim that is often made by its practitioners. Of course, it would be too sweeping and implausible a claim to assert that all [...]

Improvising Sound Art

By Jesse Stewart Over the past half-century, there has been a strong connection between musical improvisation and the visual arts in Canada. Numerous creative practitioners in this country including Michael Snow, Nobua Kubota, John Heward, and John Oswald (to name only a few), have had successful parallel careers as both visual artists and improvising musicians. [...]

A Critical Perspective on Circuit-Bending

By Jeff Morton “Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumptruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup!”  – James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake That might sound to you like a cappella noise music, or you might find a few recognizable words and get some sense of what it can mean. The similarity to noise music, and more specifically to the sounds we might associate with circuit-bending, is only superficial, but [...]