A new kind of psychedelic art: 5 Questions for Elastic Magazine founder Hillary Brenhouse

Brenhouse discusses what makes art psychedelic, and her vision for Elastic.

Think of the term “psychedelic art.” What comes to mind? If a Google image search is any indication, you might come up with brightly-colored mushrooms, swirling geometric designs, or even specific artists, like Alex Grey, whose work contains both those elements. Hillary Brenhouse first noticed this phenomenon – a sort of psychedelics cliche – at electronic music festivals she attended. “A lot of that art looked the same to me, a lot of fluorescent mandalas and Day-Glo mushrooms,” she said. 

Meanwhile, Brenhouse, former editor-in-chief of the literary non-fiction magazine Guernica and editorial director of Bold Type Books, said she’d come across immersive pieces of writing that weren’t explicitly psychedelics related, but evoked themes from the psychedelic experience in interesting ways: dreamlike, time-bending, genre-bending. 

To further explore that kind of psychedelic art, she founded the print magazine Elastic, which will debut in spring 2025. (The magazine is supported by the Psychedelics in Society and Culture program, a joint venture between UC Berkeley and Harvard.) The Microdose spoke with her about what makes art psychedelic, and her vision for Elastic.

How did you land on the name Elastic?

I thought about it for a very long time. I kept landing on things that felt a bit too complex; in the beginning, I wanted to reference work by the late artist Sam Gilliam, who is part of the Washington Color School. He wasn't properly recognized until his late 80s because he scrambled genre; he was painting these massive canvases that weren't framed, but instead hung from the walls and the ceilings. They're called drape paintings. There’s one installation that was displayed at Dia:Beacon in New York called Double Merge, and for a while, I thought I might use that as a name; it felt representative of what we're trying to do here with bending genres. But I wasn’t sure that would speak to a reader in the same way that a simple name like “elastic” would. That word evokes the mission of the magazine: the way that this type of art and literature expands the mind, that notions of time are extremely elastic, that we want to foster writer-artist collaborations with very fluid boundaries. The name Elastic gets at all that, all at once.

How’s the first issue shaping up, and what kind of work might we see in it?

Elastic is going to be a biannual print magazine. Right now, I’m putting together the inaugural issue with our senior editor Meara Sharma, and a really dreamy band of contributing editors and artists. The first issue is on the theme of dying, and it's shaping up to be extremely varied, and very strange. There are so many ways to die: there are little deaths, sudden deaths, slow dissolution. We might print an essay in which a biologist is decomposed by his fungi, or a short story on stellar death, or some kaleidoscopic meditation on decaying teeth or wilting plants. Or perhaps we’ll invite a series of artists to interpret The Hanged Man from tarot, or what a k-hole looks like. We're looking for work, both old and new, that interprets the theme really widely and playfully. 

The category of psychedelic art is hugely subjective, and our little team is having to make decisions daily about what we think counts.

How would you define psychedelic art?

The idea with Elastic is to start a conversation about that: what psychedelic art is and what it might be. We want to break open prevailing notions of psychedelic culture, which I think is every bit as expansive, inventive, and unrestrained as the mind is when you're on a trip. We need as much input as possible, so we’re reaching out to writers and artists and archivists and museum libraries and curators and really all kinds of people, to ask what strikes them as psychedelic. 

Before this, I was the editorial director of a publishing house. The writers I most admired wanted to break form and express something through the shape of their work and through the, you know, through the shape of the vessel and not just the contents of that vessel. That's what I'm thinking about as I browse through submissions and contact artists.

A psychedelic trip is often such a visceral and embodied experience. How does one go about trying to evoke the same feelings in a print magazine?

I'm glad that you said the word visceral; in reading and looking at the work we’re putting together for this issue, a lot of it feels extremely visceral. It feels immersive and dreamlike; it’s transportive, and brings you to that psychedelic state of mind. Mimicking how vast that experience can be is really what we're after. That's why we decided to create something that could live with you, that you can take around with you, that you can flip open and touch; there's that tactile element. For us, it felt important to, at the very least, get away from the screen and create an object that somebody can delve into. 

We also hope to use the magazine as a jumping off point, and to expand our activities. We’re thinking about having multi-disciplinary launch parties in several cities in the spring, and in the future, we'd really love to put together an event series bringing together the art and writing in the magazine with psychedelic music and performance. What would it be like to put on something that incorporates circus, for example? A writer could read their work while someone else is up there hanging from a trapeze. 

So much of the psychedelics media landscape — The Microdose included — focuses on news and politics. It sounds like the work in Elastic will take a different tack — might Elastic be a bit of a palette cleanser for people who are interested in psychedelics, but don’t want the news?

A lot of the conversation around psychedelics is happening in the sphere of legality and politics, and legitimizing psychedelics through the realm of medicine and therapy. This is a project apart from that, and I’m very proud that we’re putting the emphasis on psychedelic culture at a time when that’s just taking shape in this second psychedelic wave. I spent a lot of my career publishing very political work, work that aims to challenge power by expanding the possibilities of narrative. In a New York Times Style Magazine piece about Black psychedelia, the cultural critic Emily Lordi points out that frequently, psychedelic art isn't immediately legible as political art. But so much of what I think of as psychedelic art is very political. Even if we're not engaged in reportage on the issues, a lot of this is very political art because it pushes back against the shapes that the publishing and art industries are constantly trying to press authors and writers into. It refuses those shapes; it finds and embraces other shapes. A writer might play with time to resist the confines of colonial storytelling or to more authentically represent the workings of memory, or to capture alternate histories, to conjure other worlds, or to demonstrate the circularity of trauma and desire. So psychedelic art, as I've conceived of it, just really often demonstrates that tendency toward pattern breaking and that defiance of repressive cultural codes that are a part of psychedelic thinking. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

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