Dainesha Nugent-Palache’s photography-based practice is concerned with visualizations of Black diaspora across pasts, presents, and speculative futures. Dainesha’s investigations into the various facets of presented and perceived identities have been exhibited through her portraiture and more recently created body of still-life based works.

Through still-life, Dainesha explores how interaction with apparently ordinary objects, plants and other household items informs her daily life experiences. Her 2022 Smokestack Quarterly spring issue, “Enduring Ephemeral (the last bouquet)” exemplifies this new direction of her practice. In response to the subject portrayed in this work, she writes:

The last remaining flowers from my garden before all the colour starts to fade—a vibrancy that’s perennial and also cruel.

Not long before the first frost hits, grounds grow dormant spirits dim.

If it’s not possible to suspend a moment let it be memorialized while becoming vapour.

Libby Hague fosters a multi-media practice with particular focus on video and print installation. Her recent endeavours have incorporated exploratory translation of augmented reality (AR) based visual vocabulary into analog artistic disciplines. When presented with production of a new print edition for the 2022 Smokestack Quarterly, Libby took the opportunity to further experiment with these investigations. Describing the creative process of her sugar lift aquatint Conga, Libby shares:

[Through my participation in a recent project*] I was introduced to AR – a strange and slippery 3D world where solids move through one another with the ease of imagination. The profound strangeness of AR inspired a series of watercolours (a more agile medium than the woodcuts I usually do). I painted with a quick brush to keep pace with the small dancers, blending the naive and the erotic, exploring  ideas of transformation and sexuality.

Having worked on watercolours  for several months, when the opportunity arose to work with Laine on a small etching,  I was happy to agree. I wanted to  discover how my ideas would transform in intaglio [printmaking]. As a printer, I also wanted to  see what it’s like to work with another. I was lucky;  I found it to be both a luxury and a lesson (I will now buy clean felts). Laine is a gifted, careful, focused and preternaturally optimistic printer.  The process has been a pleasure!

*MOVEMENT: Toronto < >  Vienna is an augmented reality, international collaboration between PIX Film Collective, Toronto and the ArtificialMuseum [ARM], Vienna. Libby Hague’s contribution to the presentation in Toronto indefinitely extends from November 2021 onward as long as the server is maintained. See the guidelines to interact with the Toronto presentation of the project HERE.

Jessica Thalmann works within the space between 2-dimensional representation and 3-dimensional experience. Through use of specialized paper folding methods, her photography-based works translate abstracted impressions of the light and colour relationships found within the structures of large-scale, urban architectural forms. Jessica’s 2022 Smokestack Quarterly issue, fiery pools reflecting in asphalt, presents a brightly colored, folded photographic print that continues these explorations. Describing the inspiration behind this edition, Jessica shares:

This photograph was taken at Highway 407 station, a concrete vision of cosmic futurism replete with cool curvilinear forms reminiscent of Zaha Hadid. As I descended the grand escalators into the abyss of the subway, I hardly noticed but the light slowly turned oxide yellow, cerulean and viridian. I started seeing colors reflected back on the shiny metal and concrete surfaces of these suburban stations. Here, the image was folded, flattened and held together to ultimately distort the pictorial plane to bring into focus the ways the camera can skew and alter reality.

Hamilton-based artist Andrew McPhail utilizes his artistic practice to express reflections on his personal experiences through considered application of multi-media materials. His 2022 Smokestack Quarterly edition, all my little failures; the wallpaper, expands upon a life-sized wearable garment work (2010) made up of approximately 70,000 Bandaids, presented for viewing in a gallery setting and activated as a worn garment for related street performances. Like the original piece, this print was created by direct incorporation of Bandaids as they were layered, inked, and imprinted directly onto paper through the press. Though each unique print in the edition is intended for individual distribution, the repeated pattern carried through the edition cumulatively creates one single, contiguous image. As Andrew further describes:

This print is a repeat pattern, so each print lines up on the edges with all the others. There’s something magical to me about the repeat pattern and the idea of an endless mass, both in the form and the content of the work. This iteration reaches towards recreating the experience of the original piece as interior design.