Manual / Issue 7 / Alchemy

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Alchemy. The seventh issue. Manual 7 (Alchemy) prompts the unexpected and emergent to manifest. To engage as an alchemist/artist is to be the perpetual student of the present moment, to synthesize culture, so-called science, and the implications of existential borders into a discipline that is repeatable, a practice. Art and alchemy are not singular, unified pursuits. Their practitioners are trans-disciplinary, disjointed, and solitary in their practice, and their labor and the ordering of their lives become porous, overlaid in the pursuit of other-than or beyond-dominant modes of understanding. Alchemy and art are not about finding resolution, but building the capacity for curiosity, formulating questions that invest fields of knowledge with possibility, prompting the unexpected and emergent to manifest. —Bryan McGovern Wilson, from the introduction to Issue 7: Alchemy Softcover, 76 pages. Published 2016 by the RISD Museum. Manual 7 (Alchemy) contributors include Markus Berger, Rachel Berwick, Stephen S. Bush, CA Conrad, Florence Friedman, Doreen Garner, Michael Grugl, Kate Irvin, Mimi Leveque, Dominic Molon, Douglas R. Nickel, Emily J. Peters, Elizabeth A. Williams, Bryan McGovern Wilson, and Diming Stella Zhong.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/risdmuseum_journals/1033/thumbnail.jp