CMA Journal
Issue Four: Slowness
Letter from the Editor
We blush as we slowly release Issue Four: Slowness. None of us a stranger to the effects of time and the trials of developing completed work – we are proud to at last publish our fourth issue of the Comparative Media Arts Journal. When the editorial team developed this theme, we were experiencing a collective feeling of political emergency as we coped with rapidly developing cultures of populism in North America and beyond. Contemporary art criticism increasingly characterizes the twenty-first century as a period of emergency, and writers, theorists and historians are working fast to uncover modes of being in new states of precarity.
As a counter-strategy, our aim with this issue was to look to writers who slowed to the present moment. We ask what may accumulate in moments of pause, delay, or introspection. In these pages we look at slowness across the arts to recast the present as an interval of generative duration.
This issue once again bridges the work of graduating students from the Masters of Comparative Media Arts at the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. Our feature essay by scholar Michelle Martin develops upon the theme of slowness as contemporary aesthetic revealed through durational form. We also publish an excerpt by graduate Minah Lee whose work explores the effects of embodied slowness in the migrant body. In addition to these graduating works we look to study from emergent scholars and artists, offering explorations of slow time through art historical study, original art work, book review and exhibition critique. We are excited to share the work of these emerging scholars and artists.
We are grateful for the continuing support and mentorship of Dr. Laura Marks and to our home in the School for the Contemporary Arts. This issue was produced with editorial direction of Mallory Gemmel, Micaela Kwiatkoski, Logan Williams and myself, with assistance from Rose Anza Burgess and Diego Slosse. Michelle Martin’s work shaped our theme for this issue and she crafted the call for papers and wrote the Frontpiece.
Yani Kong
Managing Editor
F T I