Elastic’s first issue challenges and reinvents psychedelic aesthetics

Elastic may be a brand new magazine, but its first issue is about dying. When Hillary Brenhouse, its founding editor, reached out to Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields for creative direction, she wanted to challenge the “historically narrow conception of psychedelic art” – curvy Art Nouveau-esqye shapes, vibrating colours, organic hand-lettering, human figures and flowing lines or simply “trip documentation”, depicting the fluorescent abstraction of drug experiences. The result, as evidenced in Elastic’s first issue, was a more nuanced psychedelic experience – the slightly-off, manipulated standards of printed pages, text as texture and “anthropomorphised letterforms”.

Elastic’s wordmarks are a tribute to text’s ability to locate the viewer in a certain time. Overtly referential to 60s gig posters and the psychedelic movement’s colour palettes, the wordmarks ground the viewer in the familiar, so that the rest of the design can break newer ground. “With death in mind, we wanted to emphasise the idea of phases, or life cycles, in the visual motifs,” say Chloe. “For Issue 1, the photo collages all deal with decay, evolution, or decomposition, in some way – from a melting ice cube to a decomposing peach, eggshell shards to shattered pottery to dehydrated ice cream.”

Designed to converse with the featured artworks and fiction pieces as well as disorient the viewer, Chloe and Natalie’s creative direction prompts feverish questioning, as every page is crammed with a literal nonsense, but an emotional sense. “Why is there a piece of cheese obscuring a pull quote?” asks Natalie, rhetorically. “In the world of Elastic, a beautiful wedge of cheese on the z axis (floating above the surface of the page) trumps standard magazine hierarchy. We want people to perceive and enjoy the tensions in our manipulations.”

Elastic, as described in Hillary’s editor’s letter, is interested in taking walls down. Or more so, demonstrating that the walls were never really there. The magazine brings the viewer as close as possible to a natural high, with gestures of misprinting (some letters repeat, or entire artworks) and colours that are expressed through glowing swashes. One page depicts a MS-Paint-esque drawing of a figure lying beneath a fireworks display of cosmic hallucinations, whereas another page will have a simple egg. “Elastic’s table of contents is sticky, carrying across the interstitials, repeating over and over – in a sense, existing through time. In these spreads, the magazine literally begins to disassemble, becoming illegible and interpretive,” says Chloe. “The interstitials are crucial to ensuring that reading the magazine from beginning to end is, itself, a psychedelic experience.”

Elastic’s abnormal aesthetic interests are set to continue with a second issue surrounding the theme of interspecies life, exploring intimate, hostile and even psychic connections between all sorts of lifeforms. Expect fungi and microorganisms along with a dose of functional weirdness as this promising team of creatives collide with the artistic climate of banality.