Jaleen Grove
Rhode Island School of Design
The White Page: Illustration Research and Illustration Studies Applied to Old Magazines
Panel: National Story
How do we navigate the heritage of legacy media? Following the prompt about the representation of collective social memory and ‘national story’ (Stuart Hall, 1999), I critically examine how Canadian citizenship and heritage was racially constructed in a vintage magazine. I participated in a project, Reading the Modern Magazine in an Interdisciplinary Humanities Lab (Simon Fraser University), in which scholars compared differing research methods in studying Western Home Monthly (1899-1932). What do we learn about western Canadian identity (my family roots) from WHM? My part was to evaluate illustration research methods and illustration studies, two overlapping yet distinct modes of inquiry, for what the magazine visually tells us about Canadianness. Humanities-oriented illustration studies uses archival research, factual documentation, established theory, and formal writing. But the multimodal, sensory qualities of magazines—juxtaposed editorial and advertising images, decorations, textures, removable parts, display fonts, fragmented readings, etc—may be underserved in illustration studies due to logocentricity, formal writing’s deficiency in representing the visual and haptic, non-practitioners’ ignorance of design and print technologies, or indifference to material-culture ‘things’. As an illustrator-researcher, utilizing embodiment and non-linear sketching and notetaking originates ways of critically articulating the magazine’s makeup and rhetoric in visual and haptic terms. Accepting WJT Mitchell’s 2002 invitation to ‘remove the veil of familiarity’ from visuals by ‘showing seeing,’ I captured my research processes in a hand-illustrated, handwritten logbook tracking what my mind and body went through as I engaged with WHM, shifting back and forth between conventional ‘studies’ and illustrative research methods. Showing pages from logbook and magazine, I discuss how enacting, sketching, and diagramming can be used to expose intersections of illustration, print technology, media consumption, affect, and power, which helps us navigate the heritage of legacy media critically. The historic ‘white page’ tabula rasa of the magazine, like the supposedly ‘empty’ snow-covered territory of mythical Western Canada, enabled the inscription of white Canadian nationalism, but the white page can be reclaimed in illustrated research as a space of hopeful re-imagining of Anderson’s ‘imagined community’.
Dr. Jaleen Grove is an Associate Professor in Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. She co-edited History of Illustration (Bloomsbury, 2018), the first textbook on the topic; and she serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Illustration. Her most recent publications include chapters in Nineteenth-Century Women Illustrators and Cartoonists (Manchester University Press, 2023), and Magazines and Modern Identities: Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, 1880–1945 (Bloomsbury, 2023). Grove maintains a studio practice alongside research, writing, and teaching. Her artist’s book in progress, Timepieces, critiques Canadian settler legacies through drawing and cyanotype.