INFORMATION
Arts criticism that explores the personal.
An Inside Out explores the interplay between the personal and the critical. Meaning is built in the conversation between the work, its reader, its creators, and their intermingling contexts. We want to play in the uncertain spaces between those sources of meaning, to think about how the ideas contained in art relate to our lived experience, and to discuss how they shape our ideas of ourselves.
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SUBMISSIONS
An Inside Out will be open for submissions of essays under 2000 words from 20th December until 20th January.
We’re looking for arts criticism that incorporates a personal, emotional response to the subject matter. Personal essays that use critical rigor, critical essays with a personal throughline, or something experimental, there’s flexibility in approaches we’ll accept. What we want is essays that stand as artistic works in themselves. There is no limit on what can be written about, we’re open to writing about any aesthetic work. A book, a film, a painting, an event, a haircut.
Email submissions as an attachment to Contributing Editor Edward Haynes at aninsideoutEd@gmail.com ︎︎︎
CONTACT
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Sex Criminals Volume 1
Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s comics series Sex Criminals ended recently. It tells the story of Jon and Suzie, a couple who freeze time when they orgasm, throwing them into a lonely, liminal space that Suzie calls The Quiet and Jon calls Cumworld, in which they rob banks to get money to save a library from foreclosure. Or at least that’s how it started. A lot can happen in six years and thirty-odd issues.
Almost exactly three years ago, half way through the book’s run in terms of years, I wrote...
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︎ DEC 07, Edward Haynes
Minecraft
In the popular video game Minecraft, there are ghosts, and zombies, and living skeletons. You can step in and out of hell through a purple portal. It’s a procedurally generated haunted world, unique for each player’s world. There are a lot of ways to play Minecraft, but the monsters are rarely the point. They exist as background detail, you can farm them for resources, you can fight them in survival. But the monsters stand out in a game which is mostly calm and benign, nonviolent and constructive...
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︎ NOV 02, Edward Haynes
The Loneliness of Killing & Dying
Adrian Tomine’s comics are direct and affecting tales of minute moments in people’s lives, including his own life. In his latest memoir, The Loneliness of The Long-Distant Cartoonist he finds awkward, cringe-worthy humor and sentimentality in his long career and family life. The title story of his collection Killing And Dying shows a teen girl attempting to find comedy in a dire situation as her mother dies of cancer. Humor has a deep connection to emotion in Tomine’s work...
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︎ OCT 16, Edward Haynes
Boy Parts
The protagonist of Boy Parts, Irina, takes photographs of nude men. She finds ‘average’ men on buses and in shops and invites them to have their pictures taken in her garage studio. These images are inversions of the male gaze, a woman artist objectifying and sexualising her subjects through her lens, often using the icons of kink to cement an switching of the assumed power dynamic. The flipping of gender roles in art isn’t new, but Boy Parts does bring an interesting perspective...
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︎ SEPT 29, Edward Haynes
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Starting a relationship during a pandemic isn’t ideal. But that is what I did. In March I matched with someone incredible on Tinder, their make-up looks were really cool and we spoke about Talking Heads. I was excited and anxious.
And then everything stopped. The country was locked down, my work shut, everything was overwhelmingly still...
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︎ SEPT 02, Edward Haynes
DEVS/Ex Machina
Why am I making this website? Or should that be why have I made this website? I’m writing this before An Inside Out really exists (it will exist as a consequence of me finishing this essay). But by the time anyone reads this, the website will exist...
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︎ AUG 10, Edward Haynes
