What I Got at Zine Fest 2018 In Order of Size

Robert Boyd

Zine Fest was held on November 17. I wanted to write about my haul, but it's taken longer than I hoped because I just got a new job which has sucked up a lot of my time. But here it is finally--everything I got at Zine Fest from smallest to largest. (I was mostly anchored behind my table where I debuted my new zine, Money, which can be purchased on my online store.)


Free Acid Lick Here sticker by Chris Cascio. 3 1/2" square. Chris took a photo of a patch and made a sticker out of it. It fits in with his oeuvre--druggy, nostalgic, low brow.



Some Truth About Depression by Chastity Porter (Dormalou Project) One page unfolded, 8 1/2" x 11". 2 1/2" x 4" folded. A collage of thoughts about depression. The words feel a little like a kidnapper's note from a Hollywood film--words cut out and assembled. They are layered over a dense doodle and a brown burlap-looking texture. It looks great but it makes me worried about Chastity. I hope she's not depressed!



  

Broom_Zine vol. 1 and vol. 2 by Jason Dibley. 3 1/2" x 5". 20 pages each. Black-and-white photos of brooms, mostly in situ. Staggeringly banal!







Robots in Ties by Hanna Schroy (published by Elefluff.) 4" x 5". 12 pages, full color. I saw the title and expected pictures of robots wearing ties. But even better--it's robots in bondage! The artist is from Fort Worth.






Badlands by Gabriel Martinez (published by Paratext, a collective of artists from Alabama Song). 4 3/4" square. 22 pages, black and white. A very oblique comics story by Alabama Song honcho and former Core Fellow Gabriel Martinez. Set in a trailer park, a bearded man notices a truck parked outside. "This truck's been here all week. Someone movin' out?" he asks his father.


SPOILER ALERT: In the end, we see in kind of an x-ray view that there is a man laying down in the tuck. Is he asleep? Dead? It's not explained and that lack of explanation makes it mysterious and intriguing. If that was the end of the story, it would be a very interesting, ambiguous end. But I asked Martinez and he said there are four more issues to come.



Thin King by Ruslan Kalitan (Mirchek Comics). 8 1/2" x 5 1/2". 26 pages, color. I don't know anything about Ruslan Kalitan, except that I suspect he may be from a country that uses a Cyrillic alphabet. On the Mirchek Comics site, he has this statement:

Привет!
Меня зовут Руслан Калитин и я рисую комиксы
Я не читаю и не рисую комиксы про супер-героев! Мои супер-герои — это обычные люди без спецэффектов, я прозвал их «серебряные седаны». В последнее время я рисую и издаю книги в США. Их можно купить с доставкой по всему миру — см. раздел shop

The comic is a bunch of short disconnected pieces, some having to do with travel. In one page, he writes that many of the stories were "created behind the bar counter of Molly Gwynn's, a pub in Moscow, Russia." I met the artist briefly at the end of zine fest--he came by the table and asked if I wanted to trade publications. He had an accent--Russian, presumably.


This is the last page of Thin King.



You Won't Be Seeing Me Again by Joe Frontirre. 6 1/2" x 10 1/4". 26 pages, black and white. This comic book has a highly traditional format as might be expected from a Marvel Comics artist like Frontirre.



The comic consists of a bunch of loosely connected vignettes drawn in a somewhat cartoony but likable chiaroscuro style. The drawing was why I picked it up--that ink-stained style has been one of my favorites for years. It is said to have been invented by cartoonist Noel Sickles, a newspaper strip cartoonist who shared studio space with Milton Caniff. Caniff basically adapted the style and because his comics were infinitely better than Sickles, he was really the one who popularized it. Since then, many of my favorite cartoonists have used variations of it: Frank Robbins, Alex Toth, Alberto Breccia, José Muñoz, and many others. It was interesting to see it used for such quotidian vignettes of everyday life. If there is a theme here, it is perhaps of various forms of toxic masculinity. I'd enjoy reading more. Unfortunately and unexpectedly, I can find nothing about this comic online so I don't know how you can get a copy if you're interested...



 Various Small Geological Controversies by Bill Daniel. 6 1/2" x10 1/2". 40 pages, 3 color risograph printing. Published by Port Aransas Press. Printed by Max Seckel.These pale photos are somewhat overwhelmed by the printing technique. They're printed on a risograph with a really coarse screen. The three colors make each monochrome glow with a particular pink or purplish or greenish hue. The effect is unlike almost any photobook I've ever seen. It looks really cool, especially with these desolate, lonely photos. Bill Daniel, whose photo work I published in EXU, is probably best known for his rock and roll photos.



Looking at this, I wonder about the nature of the collaboration between Bill Daniel and New Orleans-based printer Max Seckel.






Jazzland by Jamell Tate. 8" x 10 1/2". 36 pages, 3 color risograph. Printed by Max Seckel. Another photobook printed by Seckel. This time the subject matter is a little closer to home. Tate photographed the remains of a New Orleans amusement park called Jazz Land. In 2002, Jazz Land became part of the Six Flags chain of amusement parks, and it was closed down after Katrina in 2005. It has remained shut ever since.



Unlike the Bill Daniel photos, these were color photos. Again the screen used for the color separations is quite coarse, but they were printed in full color (presumably with a four-color separation, but I don't know that for sure--it may be three color seps). The printing makes them appear quite pale. Again, I have to assume that is a conscious decision on the part of the photographer in collaboration with the printer. Like the Daniel book, these images have a lonely somewhat-haunted look (hard to avoid given the subject), but Danial is a more interesting photographer.



Fields by Brett Hollis. 8" x 10 1/2". 60 pages, full-color. Hollis is another Exu veteran. This slick, shiny publication was published in 2017. It appears to be full of collages onto which captions were placed afterwards. My sense is that he did the collages first and came up with the captions next without knowing in advance what they would be. I may be way off base here, though.



The collages are full of elements that Hollis drew himself, although occasionally they include found images--photos or in one case a piece from a comic book. In the latter, he makes a joke about cutting up the comic in his caption: "The destruction of its relics is the new "American Passtime". Otherwise, the collage elements are drawn and painted presumably by Hollis himself. He uses airbrush a lot in these color-saturated images.


 Richy Vegas #15 by Richard Alexander. 12" square, 80 pages. This unusual item is by Richard Alexander, an Austin cartoonist who has been documenting his mental illness in comics drawn on paper plates. To call this comic disjointed would be an understatement, but the cumulative effect is to see that Alexander is someone who in the late 80s and 90s was pursuing various women and working various low-level jobs after getting out of college.



The format doesn't lend itself to clear story-telling, but clarity seems beside the point from the point of view of the author. The story can be summarized very briefly in this statement from Alexander's website: "He attended the University of Texas at Austin and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts there in 1988.  He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1991. In 1992, his quixotic pursuit of the wrong woman lead to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Three years later, another doctor amended the initial diagnosis to schizoaffective disorder." In the end, it's more interesting for its weird format than for the comics within, but I like the fact that Alexander has obsessively produced 16 volumes of this (over 1000 pages by my count).

Introducing Exu

Robert Boyd



A few months back, I wrote about my own personal writing crisis. Writing reviews of art shows just wasn't satisfying to me anymore. Obviously I haven't quit writing--I have written nine posts since then, but none have been reviews of art exhibits.

The problem is that I still see art in the galleries and artists spaces and museums that I love. I would like to share this love. I have an impulse to grab people by the lapels (even if they don't have lapels and even though I am opposed in principal to unsolicited lapel grabbing) and say, "Look at this!" People who follow me on Instagram know this. I frequently post photos of art I just seen and liked. (I'm ROBERTWBOYD2020 if you want to follow me there.)

Anyway, I think it was this impulse to share art I like that made me want to do my new project--a tabloid-sized newsprint art magazine called Exu. There are other things I could have done. I could have curated an exhibit, for example. But an exhibit lasts maybe a month, then it comes down, and not that many people see it--particularly if they live someplace else. I could have started a Tumblr. But while I look at images online constantly, there is something not quite satisfying for me about seeing them there. That was always a problem I had with this blog--I tried hard to show as many images as possible, but I wasn't particularly happy with the small, relatively lo-res images I reproduced.

My background is in print publishing. Before I started the job I have now, that was my profession. I still buy lots of physical books, especially books that have a visual component--art books and comics. I could get them on Kindle or another electronic delivery systems, but for the reasons above, I don't find that particularly satisfying. (I read plenty of all-prose books electronically, though. I'm not a luddite.)

So what I wanted to do was to publish something (IRL as they say) that would show the artwork I liked in a large format. I didn't want to do it the way art magazines like Artforum or, locally, Arts+Culture do--a small picture surrounded by type. I wanted the image to be everything. I wanted it to take up the whole page, or as much as it could. If there is a magazine that embodies this concept, I'd say it's Toilet Paper, the art magazine published by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari--page after page of images with nary a word among them.

I picked the newspaper tabloid format because it's large and because tabloids have a tradition of eye-catching graphics and, well, lapel-grabbing stories. That made me think I wanted there to be narrative content in my magazine. The pictures should tell stories, or at least imply them. So that ruled out abstract images (although in the end, I have one pure abstraction and one word-based image). Then I decided that the narrative could also be prose. I was specifically thinking about literary nonfiction and great magazine writing. So I contacted some writers I know and commissioned some prose. And since we're talking about narrative, the visual printed artistic medium that best exemplifies narrative is comics. I don't know that many Houston cartoonists--it's not a hotbed like of great cartoonists like Seattle or New York. But I contacted the ones I know for a few pages of comics.

The name Exu was inspired by a work of art I saw in Chasity Porter's Dormalou Project (a mobile art gallery). She had a show up of work by Anthony Suber called Archaic Habit. It was a cool show that mixed contemporary African-American pop culture and rootsy African culture seamlessly (and humorously in some cases). One of the works had the word "Eshu" in the title. Eshu is a Yoruban orisha, or deity. I was more familiar with the Portuguese spelling, Exu. In Brazil, Exu is in the pantheon of the syncretic religion of Candomble. He is the god of the crossroads--you invoke him to help you make decisions. I lived in Brazil for a while and I had a statuette of Exu. In Brazil, Exu is identified visually with the Devil. (All the other Orishas are identified with Catholic Saints.) My cheap ceramic statue was a rather old-fashioned representation of the devil--pointy beard, horns, all red.

I realized that Exu looked a lot like Pan. It's said that the modern image of the devil was a result of medieval Italian farmers plowing up old statuettes of Pan, becoming frightened, calling the parish priest who would then associate this horned, goat-footed idol with the devil. I don't know if this story is true, but the resemblance of Pan to images of the devil are undeniable. It pleased me to think that the visual image of Pan migrated to the visual image of the devil who then migrated to Exu, a god that was exported from Nigeria in the holds of Portuguese slave ships. It seemed to me that although Pan and Exu were too very different deities, they had a certain mysterious connection over space and time. (I also liked that they both have three letters in their names.)


A cover idea featuring art by Ike Morgan

So Exu it was. (Exu is pronounced "EY-shoo", by the way). My next task was to pick artists. I knew I wanted the art to be native 2-D art. No three-dimensional art (so no sculpture or installation) and no time-based art (so no film or video or performance). I wanted the transition from artwork to printed page to be as seamless and uncompromised as possible. But the world of 2-D art contains multitudes. The artists I chose had to be familiar to me. It would have been easy for me to simply pick my friends, but I wanted there to be an identifiable editorial vision here. Also, I wanted to pick artists from a variety of genres, styles, schools, media, etc. Many of these artists are unlikely to have ever met one-another, but here in Exu, they can share a space. I want Exu to be a kind of secular artistic sacra conversazione.

So we have street art next to "outsider" art next to MFA art. There's painting, drawing, printmaking and photography. I worked hard at being aware of various artistic traditions and looking at all of them. I'm haunted by the notion that there are great artists out there who I just don't know about. And there were people I wanted to include but for various reasons could not--I couldn't find a way to communicate with them, we couldn't agree on of piece to publish, or most often I just lost the thread as I got busy with other artists.

In the end, here's who is in Exu: Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kelly Alison, Seth Alverson, Debra Barrera, JooYoung Choi, Jamal Cyrus, Bill Daniel, Nicky Davis, Nathaniel Donnett, Matthew Guest, the Amazing Hancock Brothers, Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Perry House, John Hovig, Galina Kurlat, Emily Peacock, Fernando Ramirez, Sophie Roach, Christopher Sperandio, Jason Villegas and Inés Estrada. These are the writers I've included: Great God Pan Is Dead veteran Dean Liscum, Pete Gershon, John Nova Lomax, Jim Pirtle and a piece by the late, great Sig Byrd. And Exu includes the following cartoonists: Mack White, Scott Gilbert, Sarah Welch and Brett Hollis. And the cover is by Ike Morgan. Most of these artists are located in Houston and vicinity, with some from San Antonio, Austin, Waco and DFW (and two expatriate Houstonians in New York).

I'm running an Indiegogo campaign for Exu right now. The purpose is not so much to raise money (even though money is nice!) but to pre-sell copies. Please take a look. And scroll down to see some of the art that will be featured, much larger and in higher resolution, in Exu.



Seth Alverson



Nathaniel Donnett


Fernando Ramirez


Scott Gilbert


the Amazing Hancock Brothers


Hillerbrand+Magsamen


Galina Kurlat


Ike Morgan


Emily Peacock

Cardinal Points

Robert Boyd

A few weeks ago, I was at Scott Charmin Gallery, deep in the East End, and ended up in a discussion with Emily Peacock about whether or not Scott Charmin was the easternmost gallery or art space in the Houston metro area. While Houston is pretty sprawled out, most of the art is inside the 610 Loop is a few specific neighborhoods. But as I thought about it, I thought that Kallinen Contemporary, Randall Kallinen's home/law office/gallery space on Broadway was probably further east.


Unit K, Bill Daniel's studio and location of Cali Four Nication

Then a week later, I was at Bill Daniel's studio in Pasadena, and Emily Peacock was also there, and she mentioned that this surely had to be the furthest east for any art space in the Houston Metro area. Daniel was hosting a photo show of four California photographers (Eric Zo, Ralph Coon, Dave Schubert and himself) called Cali Four Nication in his studio, which for the night was being called Unit K. And if you count Unit K as an exhibition space--which it certainly was this night--it is easily the furthest east of all Houston area art spaces. That I know of, at least. (All the photos illustrating this post are from Unit K and Cali Four Nication.)


Bill Daniel, photos of bike messengers

That got me thinking, what are the furthest north, south, east and west art spaces here in the Houston area?


Eric Zo photos

EAST: To start with, I thought Unit K in Pasadena is the easternmost art space. As far as I know there is nothing in Baytown, and then you leave the city (and don't come across any more art spaces until you hit Beaumont). But there are two problems with this. First, Unit K is not really an art space--it's a studio that got temporarily turned into an art space. So if that disqualifies it, next up is Kallinen Contemporary on Broadway by the Ship Channel. But really that is a law office that sometimes doubles as an art space. So that takes us back to Scott Charmin Gallery on the East Side. Surely that is the easternmost of all the "full time" art spaces, right?


Eric Zo photos

Wrong. The problem is that while we think of Galveston as being south of town, it's really southeast--farther east than Pasadena. So the furthest east art space I could find is MíArt Gallery.It's a place that I've never heard of, and seems like a gallery that probably caters to the tourist trade, like so many other Galveston galleries.


Ralph Coon

SOUTH: So is MíArt Gallery the furthest South, then? Nope, because the east end of Galveston happens also to be its northern tilting side. I was hoping the southernmost would be the Galveston Art Center (a very fine institution that brings small temporary shows by some of Texas' best artists to the island), but instead it is Affair d'Art (which is a terrible art gallery in my opinion).


Dave Schubert prints at Unit K

WEST: the westmost art space is pretty unambiguous--it's the Katy Contemporary Art Museum. I've written about KCAM before and will probably do so again. They haven't been around all that long, but KCAM has already mounted several exhibits, including a very nice Ibsen Espada show. And KCAM is working hard to be an all-purpose community art resource, with classes and events in addition to exhibits.


photo by Ralph Coon

So it's definitely KCAM, right? Well, maybe. I know Blinn College has shown art at its Sealy campus and maybe in Brenham. Prairie View A&M also has an art gallery. Do we consider them in the Houston metro area? So the answer to westernmost art space depends on where we define the edge of town. Katy is obviously a part of the Houston metro. Sealy and Prairie View? I'm not so sure.


Unit K (with Ralph Koon in the blue tshirt  foreground)

NORTH: I mentioned this idea of finding the cardinal points to a group of artists I regularly have breakfast with, and they immediately nominated the Pearl Fincher Museum for northernmost art space. Not even close. Nor is the Lonestar Community College-Kingwood art gallery, which has hosted several notable exhibits and is slightly further north than the Pearl Fincher Museum. The thing is that the Woodlands and Conroe are significantly north of these two institutions but still decidedly part of metro Houston. The Woodlands has several art galleries as well as its own Art League.


Unit K's record collection

But even further north is Conroe, which also has an Art League. I have never been there, but it seems like it is worth a visit just to see its building. The Conroe Art League is located in the Madeley Building in downtown Conroe, a 100-year old office building. Who knew that Conroe even had 100-year-old buildings? I guess that should teach me to get off the interstate a little more often. There are apparently several galleries close by (including a Thomas Kinkade gallery, Gallery Off the Square), but as far as I can tell, the Conroe Art League is a little bit north of them.


Unit K

After Conroe, you get into rural areas and the Sam Houston National Forest, so I am willing to say that Conroe (and maybe Willis) are the north edge of the Houston Metro Area. That means Huntsville, with the Gaddis Gleeslin Gallery and Phoenix Commotion houses, doesn't count for this purpose. (That said, it's well-worth visiting and if not a part of the Houston Metro, Huntsville is definitely a satellite of the Houston art scene.)


Unit K odds and ends

Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments.

Pan Recommends for the week of August 22 to August 28

Robert Boyd

Here's most of what's opening up this weekend in Houston's art scene in these last few weeks before the fall season.

THURSDAY


painting by Emilio Reato

Argentine Art in Houston curated by Andres Bardon, featuring Ladislao Kelity, Nubar Doulgerian, Sebastian D'Amen, Monica Shulman, Luis Altieri, Alejandro Parisi, Emilio Reato, Franca Barone, Maria Paula Caradonti, Alicia Chaves, Antonia Guzman and many more, at Spring Street Studios, 6 to 8 pm. I don't know much about this show but it looks interesting.



20Hertz: Bill Arning Presents "Sad Bastard Music, C'est Moi", 7:30 pm at CAMH. A lecture by CAMH director and former rocker Bill Arning on "sad bastard music," such as David Bowie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, The Buzzcocks, Pulp, Belle and Sebastian, Xiu Xiu, and Perfume Genius. What this has to do with visual arts, I don't know but who cares? This is some of my favorite music!

FRIDAY

 
Marcelyn McNeil , Untitled (speed), 2010 , Oil on panel; 74 x 71 x 1" -- this was in the 2011 Texas Biennial

Texas Biennial Invitational : Christie Blizard, Marcelyn McNeil, Tom Orr and Brad Tucker, curated by Michael Duncan and Virginia Rutledge at Lawndale Art Center, 5 to 8:30 pm. This is a little confusing--this show isn't part of the Texas Biennial, but features four artists previously selected for the Texas Biennial. So I guess this is kind of a spin-off?


Susi Brister

Fantastic Habitat by Susi Brister at Lawndale Art Center, 5 to 8:30 pm. Some of these photos may feel like modern updates of Cousin It, but overall this looks like a very beautiful if somewhat unnerving suite of images.


Cary Reeder, Jaundiced View, 2013

Now, What Was There? by Cary Reeder at Lawndale Art Center, 5 to 8:30 pm. Cary Reeder paints beautiful, stripped-down images of the charming but endangered  bungalows in the Heights. Wouldn't it be ironic if the upper-middle-class burgers of the Heights bought them to decorate their new McMansions?


Susannah Mira's Water Tower (2012) isn't going to be in the show, but it looks really cool!

Room Divider by Susannah Mira at Lawndale Art Center, 5 to 8:30 pm. We got a tantalizing taste of Mira's work in the Big Show, and now we will see what a room-full of her geometric assemblages look like.


Picasso brand donuts from the Menil/Fiesta project

The MENIL/FIESTA Project: Ten Years of a Curious Painting Assignment At the University of Houston at Inman Gallery, 6 to 8 pm (up through August 24, so don't procrastinate!) UH Painting professors Aaron Parazette and Gael Stack have, for the last 10 years, been sending their students to the Menil and to Fiesta Mart in order to synthesize their impressions into one painting. This is a show of some of the best results of this assignment.

SATURDAY


Alex Luster's video of the Montrose rollerblade dancer

Houston Is So Hot! featuring Ivete Lucas, Tish Stringer, Bill Daniel, Chris Nelson, Alex Luster, Stephanie Saint Sanchez, Madsen Minax and more at the Aurora Picture Show, 7:30 pm. I don't know about you, but sitting in an air-conditioned movie theater is about my favorite thing to do in August.


Jonah Groeneboer, SUN / MIRRORS, video still, 2009, 22 min

THE DISLOCATED CENTER OF THE MATERIAL WORLD by Jonah Groeneboer at the Galveston Artist Residency, 6 to 9 pm (on view through October 19th). I hate it when there are simultaneous art openings in Houston and Galveston that I want to see. Tough choice! But this one, which includes video, painting, installation and a sound piece, will be up for a while while the videos are Saturday night only... So this one might have to wait until next weekend.