Village Savant™

Berin Golonu, Assistant Visual Arts Curator, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

SAN FRANCISCO—September 7, 2005— Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies, running October 7 through December 30, 2005. The exhibition highlights three publications nationwide as successful models of collaborative activity. In these collaborations, the artists, writers, and designers come together and provide alternative avenues to distribute their artwork. The three zines featured are K48, based in Brooklyn, New York, Werewolf Express, out of Los Angeles, California, and Hot & Cold, published in Oakland, California. Selected art works from zine editors and contributors will cover the gallery walls, turning the exhibition space into a 3D text.

The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies is curated by Berin Golonu, Assistant Visual Arts Curator of Yerba Buena Center for the Art. This show is one of the four successive exhibitions at YBCA that highlight a growing trend in visual art—collaborative artist activity. The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies is also part of the Center’s “Future Shock” series, one of the Big Ideas that guide the 05-06 programming. Work associated with the Big Idea of Future Shock, investigates reactions to a hyper-modernized world. Some common strands that run throughout these works is the spirit of collaboration and artists forming microcommunities, intended to bring artistic activity and critical dialog back down to human scale. It is a move away from the object-based capitalist economy of the gallery circuit. “I find K48, Werewolf Express and Hot & Cold to be three of the most innovative zines currently being published by artists on the ever-expanding zine scene. Each of them is an exceptional treasure trove of artworks specially commissioned for the page.

The editors of each zine--Scott Hug, who publishes K48, Trinie Dalton, who publishes Werewolf Express, and Chris Duncan and Griffin McPartland, who publish Hot & Cold—are at the nucleus of networks of artists, writers and musicians who come together, inspire one another, and feed one another’s creativity. These creative exchanges have sparked new artistic endeavors that are beautifully manifested on the pages of these zines,” states Golonu. The three zines all employ multiple artist collaborations, but yet they differ greatly in their aesthetic. While still maintaining some of the low-tech, DIY elements, such as Xeroxed pages, they have grown to include a range of different formats, including professionally printed glossy covers and elaborate hand-printed silk-screened pages.

Werewolf Express, edited by Trinie Dalton, is a zine made of up illustration-heavy material accompanied by significant reading. Werewolf Express explores all things werewolf, with all of the writing and art in line with the theme. Complete with short stories, interviews, poems, and informative articles, it is inspired by the encyclopedic style of the editor’s childhood sticker collections. Previous zines by Dalton, are Unicorn Institute, Strawberry Shortcake Meets the Aztec, and Lost Kitten Saves a Nation. On view will be a selection of artworks by artists influenced by the horror genre.

K48 began as Scott Hug’s thesis project at Pratt Institute. While it employs slick graphic design work as a result of his formal training, it is still very much DIY, personal and expressive. Each issue has a different theme, and the exhibition at YBCA will be a site-specific extension of the most recent issue, K48 is an Animal, pulling artwork from the pages in a published format to translate it to gallery walls. Hug has collaborated with 48 artists to create an installation environment within the gallery that references a Boyscout encampment. Each artist has created a separate element for the installation from customized tents, to sleeping bags, to backpacks and bug spray.

Published by Chris Duncan and Griffin McPartland, Hot & Cold, is a true amalgam that has included over 50 artists to date. The editors assigned the zine its own expiration date, with a cap at ten issues, thus the first issue was aptly titled Issue #10. Hot & Cold emphasizes a hand-built quality and the spirit of community which the project is based on. It has come to incorporate an envelope stitched inside its back cover, filled with artist-made goods such as CD’s, DVD’s, buttons, calendars, cookbooks, wallets, and posters. Encompassing an entire community of artists, this goodie bag for Hot & Cold’s readers, is also essentially a way to make their art accessible. On view will be a selection of gallery-based work by thirteen of Hot & Cold’s past contributors.

The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies celebrates the creative and political spirit of independent publishing, showcasing independently produced artist publications as a model of collaborative activity as well as an alternative exhibition space and sometimes even as a vehicle to disseminate political messages. The exhibition asks us, what does this banding together by artists say about the world we live in? Does this movement reflect a greater need on the part of contemporary artists for connection and community in an impersonal world? Is resistance to commodification at the root of desire to create temporal artworks? In enlisting a wide variety of people in these projects, perhaps this form of artistic expression is a much needed intervention in our media saturated world.

Also featured in the exhibition is a historic collection of zines dating from the 1980’s to the 90s, from the archives of noteworthy gay fiction writer and zine publisher Dennis Cooper. The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies will be accompanied by a 93-page color catalog, independently published in true zine fashion by Hot & Cold editors Chris Duncan and Griffin
McPartland in Oakland, CA.

K48
Editor: Scott Hug
Artists:
Suzanne Ackerman
Carl D’Alvia
Shoplifter
assume vivid astro focus
Dan Attoe
Ben Beaudoin
Hisham Bharoocha
Olaf Breuning
Jared Buckhiester
Chris Caccamise
Peter Coffin
Ryan Compton
Ann Craven
Joanna Ebenstein
Franklin Evans
Brendan Fowler
Jay Foxx
John Hogan
Rachel Howe
Matthew Day Jackson
John Kleckner
Terence Koh
Oliver Lutz
LoVid
Noah Lyon
Michael Magnan
Ashley Macomber
Dominic McGill
Deborah Mesa-Pelly
Billy Miller
Mirror Mirror
Kenneth Andrew Mroczek
Mary J. Nicholson
Shay Nowick
PFFR
Phiiliip
Jon Rappleye
Theo A. Rosenblum
Justin Samson
Adam Shecter
Christian Siekmeier
Tracy Stewart
Scott Treleaven
Michael Wetzel
Grant Worth
Jeremy Yoder

Werewolf Express
Editor: Trinie Dalton
Artists:
David Altmejd
Sue de Beer
Matt Greene
Marnie Weber
Folkert de Jong
Adam Putnam
Sammy Harkham
Sean Dungan
Benjamin Weissman
Lorenzo de Los Angeles
Jesse Bransford
Francine Spiegel
David Hamma
Greg Dalton
Molly Dove Keogh
John Kleckner
Anna Sew Hoy
Nick Lowe
Thaddeus Strode

Hot & Cold
Editor: Chris Duncan
Artists:
Griffin McPartland
Mary Joy Scott
Rebecca Miller
Kyle Ranson
Chris Pew
Jen Smith
Ryan Wallace
Vic Blue
Crust & Dirt
Paul Yurich
Matt O’Brien
Laurie D.

Posted by Brian at October 3, 2005 08:01 PM

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