Inside the Toronto magazine shop Issues, the shelves are stacked with beautiful indie publications, the kind that are so artful they become permanent fixtures on coffee tables. In a few minutes, older editions of those magazines will be ripped, snipped, X-Acto-knifed and hole-punched, then Frankensteined into one-of-a-kind paper collages.
Fifteen women sit at a hulking cobalt blue table, covered with the magazines, as well as vintage books, postcards, jewels, stickers and other ephemera.
Alanna Chelmick, the multidisciplinary artist who is facilitating the event this evening, offers some guidance before the collaging officially begins: Don’t overthink it.
Alanna Chelmick, the evening’s host, looks over participants’ work at Issues Collage Night at Issues Magazine Shop in Toronto.
“Just pull what calls to you for some reason,” Chelmick says. “It might be a colour, an animal, texture or shape. Let it go, and just pull the page out.” With that parting advice, she turns up the music and a flurry of hands start grabbing magazines.
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Issues has hosted bi-monthly collaging evenings in its west-end shop for nearly three years, attracting a wide swath of avid crafters and first-timers, Gen-Z friends, mother-daughter combos, date nights and work colleagues. The workshops always sell out, and similar gatherings have popped up in cities across Canada – proof that while collaging may evoke middle-school sleepovers, it’s being revived as a creative outlet for a new crowd hungry for offline social interactions.
Collage nights are part of a larger rise of analogue, old-timey events.
Collage nights are part of a larger rise of analogue, old-timey events such as chess clubs, board game nights, silent reading clubs or speed puzzle competitions. The appeal is partly to meet new people somewhere other than bars, and partly as an antidote to infinite doom-scrolling. None require a screen.
“Often people say, ‘I typed all day’ or ‘I was at my computer all day’ and I just wanted to do something with my hands,” Chelmick says.
Nicola Hamilton, the owner of Issues and a magazine art director, dreamed up the idea with Chelmick after opening the shop in 2022 and witnessing the amount of paper waste accumulating every month. After a magazine’s sale date passes, many distributors require shops to destroy the issues. “It had been bothering me watching the pile of recycling and thinking about how much work and energy went into making publications, just for them to go to waste.”
Friends Ritu Kanal and Samantha Hansel originally tried out collaging, and crafting more generally, because they wanted to get away from their screens. “As we started hanging out more, we both realized that we’re on a screen so much and that we wanted to do tactile things,” says Kanal, as she cuts out a butterfly from a vintage nature book.
On average, Canadians spent just 18 minutes a day on “active leisure” in 2022 according to Statistics Canada, a category that includes drawing, painting, crafting, writing, dancing and knitting. In contrast, Canadians spent an average of 3.2 hours a day gazing at their smartphones.
Hansel, who works as a graphic designer, says she spends so much time in the digital world of software and apps, she notices it infiltrating her IRL (in real life) art practice. The morning of the collage event, she recalls working on a project and yearning for command Z, the computer shortcut for undo.
“I want to make a copy, shift it over, make a duplicate, and you can’t,” says Hansel. “So with this you have to force yourself to be uncomfortable a little bit.”
Jumping on the trend – and Gen Z’s penchant for nostalgia – both Pinterest and Instagram both have released features to create digital collages, while other design apps such as Shuffles and Zeen have been launched specifically for making collages to share on social media.
Catherine Lash (white T-shirt) and other participants share their finished collages with the group.
For others, it’s the constraints of making art in the physical world that brought them out. “I collage digitally, and I wanted to try the real deal,” says Catherine Lash, who uses the program Pixelmator to make her collages. “I can be really precise and what I love about this is, you can’t be as precise. I’m excited for that challenge.”
With around 15 minutes left in the workshop, Chelmick calls out the “glue warning,” an alert that participants should start actually pasting the clippings they’ve collected over the past hour and a half. A few exclaim how quickly the time passed.
For Hamilton, this time blindness has to do with not having any other distractions.
Nicola Hamilton, the owner of Issues Magazine Shop, explains that during the collage-making process, ‘there is no downtime to open Instagram or look at your e-mail.’
“I think there’s something about the making of things that requires you to use your hands, to busy your hands, that keeps you off your phone for a chunk of time. There is no downtime to open Instagram or look at your e-mail,” she says.
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After two hours, the big blue table has disappeared under layers of cut-outs, toppled towers of magazines and overturned glue sticks. The floor has grown a carpet of scrap paper.
Chelmick asks if anyone wants to share their collage with the group. Lash, the digital collager, holds up hers. “I was inspired by your words, just rip what feels good. That really authentic, visceral reaction,” she says, as she presents her collage, featuring a woman with a butterfly for a head alongside cut-outs of owls. “I don’t know what it means.”
The table erupts in “oohs” and “oh that’s beautiful” and “that’s so well done.”
Since the collage night, Lash has continued paper-collaging to get away from the computer, embracing the imperfections that come with it.
“I love the tactile aspect of the collaging and the messiness.”
