Elastic #1
217 x 242 mm, 176 pages
US
Annual
First published 2025
Editor-in-chief and founder and editor: Hillary Brenhouse
Creative directors: Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields
‘A new magazine of psychedelic art and literature’
Psychedelia has a problem: it’s stuck in a cartoonish bubble of sixties nostalgia that evokes, as cultural critic Emily Lordi, quoted in Hillary Brenhouse’s introduction has noted, ‘images of young white people dancing lethergically to the Grateful Dead.’ It is easily dismissed as just another pop culture era, chronologically filed between rock n roll and punk.
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.
Themed ‘Dying’, this first issue treats us to pieces inspired by the infinitude of grief, the obliteration of the self through sex and childbirth, the weirdness of aging, the horrors of life in Gaza and Ukraine, and more. And just as the art and literature is recontextualised for now, so the visual representation of psychedelia is reassessed. Two of our favourite editorial designers, Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields, have been enlisted to imagine what psychedelic design might mean in 2025.
The result is a bridge from the sixties to today, offering a fascinating new angle on our times.