Vol. 2: Flights of Fancy

Summer 2021 — Flights of Fancy

Over the last year—amid isolation, disruption to our routines and priorities, and a crisis of misinformation—it’s been more difficult than ever to stay tethered to what’s “real.” Balancing physical reality, virtual reality, and the unrealities unfolding on our screens and in our newspapers, we’ve found that we really live in separate worlds.

On the dark side, we live in a moment riddled with information silos, blatant disregard for fact, and rampant confirmation bias—where even events of the “real world” have required suspension of disbelief. On the bright side, we could all benefit from a healthy dose of escapism, an injection of magic into our locked down lives, and ideations of a better future.

From the concepts raised at the outset, a range of layered themes and concerns surfaced while we worked on bringing this issue together. The mind-numbing, time-killing “social media scroll” raises its ugly head more than once in these pages, as do concerns around mass media, belief systems colliding, and a pervading interest in the diverse contexts of our upbringings and how they shape our perspectives. Throughout this issue, our own visions of reality are called into question as we are prompted to consider the slippage between direct experience, memory, visual representation, and artifice. That said, you will come across flights of fancy of a more delightful nature as well—a testament to art’s enduring power to act as salve and comic relief.

Edited by: Lauren Tresp.
Contributing editors: Daisy Geoffrey, Angie Rizzo.

Contributors: Annie Bielski, Sommer Browning, Daisy Geoffrey, Maggie Grimason, Natalie Hegert, Steve Jansen, Tamara Johnson, Lyndsay Knecht, Krittika Ramanujan, Lynn Trimble

Cover art: Jenny Day, A horse for Greta, 2019, acrylic, colored pencil flashe, paint pen, ink on canvas, 30 x 30 in.

Featured artists

Michelle Rawlings, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Santiago Perez, Christian Cruz, Joanna Keane Lopez and Helen Levine, Johnny DeFeo, Ranran Fan, Carissa Samaniego, Sarah Lasley, Erika Wanenmacher, Jenny Day, Enrique Figueredo, Marcus Fingerlin, Lex Gjurasic, Loc Huynh, Chaz John, Mike Marchant, Tigre Mashaal-Lively, SV Randall, Sanna Stabell, Douglas Tolman, Chelsea Wrightson.