Elastic #2
217 x 242 mm, 176 pages
Montreal, Canada
Annual
First published 2025
Editor-in-chief and founder and editor: Hillary Brenhouse
Creative director: Chloe Scheffe
‘The magazine of psychedelic art and literature’
Psychedelia has a problem: it’s stuck in a cartoonish bubble of sixties nostalgia that evokes, as editor-in-chief Hilary Brenhouse regrettably states, ‘little more than Day-Glo mandalas and contorted mushrooms—a narrow corridor’.
Elastic reminds us that psychedelia’s sixties heyday was more than these clichés, and actually a time of radical artistic innovation. This magazine isn’t looking back, but picking up the original idea of psychedelia and transporting it to the 21st century. Creative director Chloe Scheffe likewise reimagines the cultural parameters of psychedelic design, and in doing so, opens up a bridge from the sixties to today, offering a fascinating new angle on our times.
Themed ‘Interspecies’, this sophomore issue invites readers to step outside of the human experience in order to make sense of it, gathering boundary-expanding work from fifty-two contributors exploring the strange, porous ‘exchanges between humans, plants, animals, fungi’. Inside the issue are boundless stories of changelings, whispering forests, communicating cattle, alongside mediations on metamorphosis, alienation and personal tragedy. Throughout, an expansive selection of psychedelic art resists ‘a single aesthetic or approach’; instead, it emerges in the rupture between forms, species and ways of seeing.