Issue Fifteen: practising flux

Call for Work
Issue Fifteen: practising flux
Deadline: 19 June 2026

Editor: Katie Belcher

We are now accepting submissions to be published in the fifteenth issue, practising flux (working title). We welcome texts of 500 to 5000 words, and half- to single-page artwork or works of poetry. For further details, please review the Submission guidelines and Review Guide. Contributions must be sent in DOCX or RTF format to cma_journal@sfu.ca.

This year’s CMA Journal issue invites contributions that consider the role of the unfinished, provisional, process-based, or unruly in contemporary art practice and theory. Does your research engage with shifting ecologies or geologic time scales? Do the theories you rely on have their roots in process philosophy. Is becoming a word you are drawn to? Is the aesthetic quality of non-finito present in your work? Is your artwork process-driven or materially unstable? Are you studying artists with slow, protracted practices or those who use rapidly changing technologies? Is mutability at the heart of your research topic or practice?

We welcome texts that question publication as an endpoint. Consider evidencing process in your submission, whether through notes, annotations, images, or embedding this reflection directly into your work. Published works, especially academic texts, often have lives beyond their initial publication, becoming chapters or introductions, conference presentations, course outlines, pedagogical methods. We invite you to reflect on how your text could expand, contract, or be revised in future iterations. Alternatively, is your submission itself already a revision or reworking? Reflect on how it changed, how the audience shifted, which darlings were dropped, what prompted its reworking. Propose to revise the submission in six months or pull it apart in a year. Propose to erase the drawing, leave your ceramic unfired, perform again differently, and on, and on, as the process continues.

“show your work”

Resisting the intellectual and artistic smoothing that results from large language models and other forms of generative AI, this issue prioritizes the process of writing/creation by also welcoming submissions that won’t be ready for publication for the 19 June deadline. In addition to our call for work, we invite notes of intent (250-500 words) that outline a work-in-progress. Send us a proposal for an impossible project, a text you’ve only initiated or one you’ve abandoned, a research statement you’ve redirected, a reflection on stalled artistic or scholarly practice, a proposed return to a past project, and so on. These will be considered by our editor on a case-by-case basis either for publication in this issue “as is” (in consultation with the contributor), or to be kept on file for next year’s editor to consider for future issues.

Reviews

As with all issues of the CMA Journal, we also accept reviews of art exhibitions and events on a rolling basis, to be considered for publication within future issues, or online. For these submissions, please see our call for reviews.