Vol 3 No 2 | Spring 2022

Letters from the Editors

Map of ArtWorks in This Issue

The Artworks

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Bait/Switch Magazine: Vol 3 No 2

[Align] Spring 2022

Letters from the Editors

Can we talk?

I’m taking an online art class these days, the first art class I’ve taken in many years, and it’s a fantastic challenge for me. The other students are all very bold modern artists, creating works that are often conceptual, emotional, beautiful monstrosities. Materials are drawn on, torn apart, glued back together in a different order, burned, drowned, and thrown against a wall. Often, the visceral process of creation is more expressive than the finished product, and it’s not unusual for a meaning or message to be divined after the fact, rather than being the driving force from the beginning. I’m more than a little baffled by this practice. They all seem to “get it" in a way that I do not.

You know what my problem is? I struggle to give up control. In my own creative process, I feel compelled to have a Plan. There is an important, personal message I intend to convey, and all of my actions serve to create the precious something I’m picturing in my mind. But holding so steadfastly to the Plan is too limiting! Every creative person knows that truly remarkable things can happen when plans don’t work out as expected. This is why the great Bob Ross preached about “happy accidents.” In short, I do too much thinking and not enough feeling.

Bait/Switch is aggressively interdisciplinary. We deliberately reach to find wildly diverse means of creative expression. This issue alone features fabric arts, film, poetry, music, mixology, and so much more. As varied as these disciplines are, one common thread is the understanding that adaptation and improvisation are absolutely critical for growth. So while I’m learning to invoke some intuition, let’s see how this new crop of work handles that balance between thinking and feeling. Reading all these interviews is an art class unto itself.

Good talk, my dudes.

Cody VanWinkle, Art Director

Spring is probably my favorite season. The smell of the flowering trees in my neighborhood is intoxicating, and I constantly find myself in a state of childlike wonder at the immense beauty of it all. What a life this is.

When Cody and I were discussing a theme for this issue, we talked a lot about coincidence. When I was child, my definition of ‘coincidence’ was simple: it’s when you fart and sneeze at the same time. Even though I was very young, I don’t think I’ll ever forget how hard my parents laughed when those words came out of my mouth.

As I got older, I came to learn that the word coincidence has a very significant meaning in my family – it’s a kind of magic that is unquestioned and revered. And although I was essentially raised agnostic, the power of coincidence has always seemed to show off the bizarre workings of the universe. Seemingly unrelated things line up in the just the right way to speak to some larger meaning.

This kind of magic is very present in this issue, as contributors somehow picked up meanings of works two steps back, and even more wild, in different branches of the project. For example, multiple people in this issue talked about garments that hold specific meanings. Multiple people talked about mushrooms. One person received a prompt that was titled the name of a street that just happened to be the name of a street right near his house. These are weird and amazing coincidences, and they seem to speak to some greater idea of aligning. Of themes that seem highly specific coming forward to create something that, if viewed a certain way, looks like a pattern. I know that lots of people out there believe that these things are random, and I respect that perspective. But to me, the alignment itself feels like a humbling thing to witness, and that feels like the entire point.

There is so much amazing work in this issue, and so many wonderful conversations about that work. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

With love,

Lu Valena, Executive Director

Map of Works in This Issue

Bait/Switch is an interdisciplinary exquisite corpse project. Every work is a creative response to a piece made by another artist. The project is divided into three branches- cyan, magenta and yellow. This map/diagram shows how the works in this issue fit together, and what came before. You can see the entire corpus on our maps page.