Fraktur Fire & Elemental Inventories at Atelier Circulaire, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. All works are digital print on handmade paper, UV print on aluminum, UV print on polystyrene vacuum formed on reclaimed foam, and acrylic. [Photo credits: Jean-Michael Seminaro]
From folklore and superstition to organized religion and spirituality, magic’s divine power can often be harnessed through the use of rock and minerals- such as crystals, hag stones, or pi stones. This elevated use of material stands in stark contrast to Western culture’s history of exploitation and extraction of natural resources, many of which are mined to power our digital devices.
For Fraktur Fire & Elemental Inventories, the artists have created a series of talismans for our precarious times from handmade neon-pigmented abaca paper, collaged digital prints, and blackletter hex devotions. Speculative geo-forms are grouped in UV printed organic grids akin to natural coral structures or virtual gaming inventories, organizing combinations of charged rocks and minerals to create hopeful intentions and actions. To accompany the paperworks and prints, speculative rocks and minerals have been hand-carved from reclaimed foam and UV printed with colorful textures as highly stylized plastistones arranged into several magical divining grids.
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JULM Fraktur Fire & Elemental Inventories
An exhibition essay by Chloë Lum
Magic is the process of making hope. Something from something. Something of word, something of thing. Art is alchemy. Through assembling interests, processes, material, and knowledge artists can create meaning. Collaborative practices bring in more threads of obsession and method, weaving them together with deft attention to detail, making something complex and strong and often strange. Something from something. Even when not engaging with magic as subject or process, art is a form of magic, the studio a site of ritual. Process, a spell.
Aluminium, paper, pigment. Printed words.
Read them aloud, and once more under your breath.
Move the air, displace it as you speak.
(Pause.)
Breathe in this place.
(Hold.)
(Release.)
A collection can be assembled, a collection can be also made. Objects that mirror objects. Yes, real fakes. The systems create and they link, amplify power, tell stories, let us glimpse the secret life of the thing. Keep them in place, just so.
Ordered. Arranged.
When artists set out to create magical objects and incantations, the result is magic on magic. It’s louder, brighter. Jason Urban and Leslie Mutchler offer this, using the visual language of a natural history museum, an archive. They offer access to their shifting inventory of talismanic objects and spells, purpose-made for today. We need this kind of magic.
The life cycle of things? Magic. Being together? Magic. Making sense of the world? Magic. What is magic other than putting objects, ideas, situations together, remaking the world; one gesture at a time?