I just finished the above drawing for Maximumrocknroll's upcoming Comics and Art Issue. This one is a real doozy...my hand still hurts!
The inclusion of the photos in this post illustrates how the drawn image came to be. In the summer, I took about a dozen photos after an industrial fire in the North End of Hamilton where I live. The photos turned out really well-- the contrast between the vivid blue sky, the iconic red Hamilton brick and the extremely orange rust was really striking. And the way the remains of the fire were reduced to rubble was also really something.
As amazing as the colour was in the photo, I decided to translate the photo into a black and white drawing. The idea for the drawing comes from global cities and global culture and the continuous allure of the cities named in the illustration (the text is lifted from the American Apparel bag) in contrast to my own feelings of immobility, and the obvious immobility of a lot of people who live in my city, and more specifically, my neighbourhood.
When I moved to Hamilton, I was more or less unemployed for over a year. In one of the coldest winters on record, Ben and I would walk for a half hour to his shop one block north of the site of this fire late at night to plan the business he was about to start. Even though we were on the cusp of "starting something new," it was one of the most depressing, lonely, fraught winters of both of our lives. Occasionally, I would go back to Toronto to visit friends and a favourite topic of conversation among many of my friends and acquaintances was the trips they were about to go on, had been on, or just went on as part of school or for pleasure. The contrast between the topic of travel and the way I felt at the time felt really cruel.
Just got this amazing piece of work in the mail today from Abraham Diaz and Yecal Disaster of Ediciones ¡Joc Doc! in Mexico City. All pages are screenprinted and risographed; the art is by 16 artists from around the globe. Buy it here!
Couldn't resist posting here about this recent interview with Fear of Punk//Fear of Art exhibitor and comic artist/champion extraordinnaire, Leah Wishnia. Lots of great mention of the Fear of Punk exhibition, and we are thrilled that MRR learned of her work through us-- pretty unbelieveable.
Check out more of Leah's amazing work here. Also keep an eye out for her interview with me and School Jerks in her comics anthology Happiness this June.
Fear of Punk//Fear of Art at Hammer City Records came down yesterday! Huge thanks to Craig, Leah and Brett at the shop for hosting the show. We had a great time, and are thrilled with the awesome feedback and enthusiasm about the show we received. Merch (stuff above) by Matthew McGarry, Weird Luke, Dustin McChesney and myself will be available at the shop until the end of this week, after this Friday's Art Crawl. Christmas gift alert!
We want to mount this show again at least once more in Canada. If you're interested in Fear of Punk coming to your town or gallery, get in touch!
Show #2: We are excited to announce that Fear of Punk//Fear of Art will have a second installment in Hamilton, Ontario at Hammer City Records. This exhibition will open during November's James Street Art Crawl on November 8th, beginning at 7 pm.
Hamiltonians: For a taste of what the exhibition is all about, check out this great little piece written by Alison Lang of Broken Pencil that discusses the exhibition's premise and a few of the participating artists: http://www.brokenpencil.com/news/fear-of-punkfear-of-art-at-zine-dream-6
Art Crawl Night:
FEAR OF PUNK // FEAR OF ART
Adam Kindred (Halifax)
Alex Ratcharge (France)
Alexander Heir (NYC)
Dustin McChesney (Minneapolis)
Emma Maatman (LA)
Erick Lyle (NYC)
Heather Benjamin (NYC)
Jill Pucciarelli (Olympia)
Leah Wishnia (NYC)
Matthew McGarry (Rochester)
Nathan Gattis (Chicago)
Paul D’Elia (LA)
Sam Ryser (NYC)
Shiva Addanki (NYC)
Spoiler (Montreal)
Tara Bursey (Hamilton)
Weird Luke (NYC)
Yecatl Peña (Mexico City)
Curated by Ben Needham and Tara Bursey
Punk is everywhere. From malls to museums, the influence and imagery of punk’s past has largely been absorbed into mass culture. Despite this, contemporary DIY punk rock sits firmly outside of the mainstream, and at both regional and global levels is stronger than ever. The visual culture that surrounds it is variably dark, threatening, chaotic, smart, funny, mysterious and questioning.
Fear of Punk / Fear of Art highlights the creative output of current punk artists, bringing their work out of its usual context while exploring intersections between punk rock, art and print culture. The purpose of the exhibition is to celebrate contemporary punk art while sharing it with a broader audience. The exhibition includes drawing, sculpture and printed matter that draws inspiration from horror, the occult, sex, despair, popular culture, art history and urban life.
FEAR OF PUNK / FEAR OF ART runs November 6-December 10
at Hammer City Records
228 James Street North (Basement at Rear)
Hamilton, Ontario
On Art Crawl Nights you can enter via bcontemporary gallery direct from James St North, or the usual entrance off the Robert Street alley located between Granny’s Place and the Classic Cafe Patio.
Setting in to my new digs in Hamilton has been a trip! Work contracts, back-n-forth travel to TO, (unsuccessful) job hunting and moving has more or less put a halt to art-making endeavors except for some punk rock-related bits and pieces. This kinda makes sense considering the very last things I did before leaving TO were putting on the Fear of Punkshow and popping of a quick LP cover for a friend's band.
A few weeks ago, I was asked for an interview for an incredible NYC-based comics anthology called Happiness, published and edited by the talented Leah Wishnia. The interview will also include contributions from two of the four School Jerks-- I've done the art for all of their recorded output, and the interview is mostly about the work I've done for them. Doing this interview gave me a rare opportunity to talk about my other "art-half" (the one that does art for punk bands) and reflect on how I started doing this this type of work. I've included some of the interview text here (it's only a small portion of the entire interview):
Doing show flyers and album artwork grew out of my work making zines. I remember being 17 or 18 thinking that it would be a really great job to be a freelance illustrator, doing art for bands both in and outside of punk that was not unlike the work I did for the zines I had been making for years. This was before I realized how hard it was to get paid by bands that see you as a friend or acquaintance doing the band a favour! When I was 18, I dropped out of art school and had a string of crappy jobs. Doing flyers for neighbourhood bands and the odd flyer for performers and punk bands was less a way of making money than a way I kept an art practice going and got to know people while I just floated around aimlessly working retail, socializing, and trying to make an adult life for myself. My first real job doing an album cover that was widely distributed was for the LP of a Toronto band called Action in 2003 or so. They were pretty young and got signed to the label Punkcore from New York and were really excited about the prospect of touring and being on the same label as some of their favourite bands growing up. The drummer Greg was my best friend at the time. I was really happy to be a part of it because they were all friends of mine, we were all from the same suburb of Toronto, and it was such a big deal for all of us to feel like we were “making it” on some level-- they were under 20, and I was a couple years older. I ended up doing their pin designs, t-shirt designs and the front cover, back cover and insert art for their LP. This was my first taste of having a hand in shaping the entire visual identity of a band and at the time it was really rewarding and exciting for all of us to be doing something we knew a ton of people would see and hear. To be honest, ten years later, punk rock isn’t as much a part of my daily life as it used to be when I was 20, or even 25. I have a pretty broad art practice that involves making art for punk bands but also sculpture/installation, publications and curating among other things. I listen to way more 60s psych and hard rock than punk these days. I am lucky to have developed my drawing skills at a really young age (I went to an arts high school where most students wanted to be animators for Disney!), so now I have this skill that I can basically pull out of my back pocket when I need to. Most of the time it’s to draw a dripping skull or something grim for some punk dude, which is fine when I have the time.
(...) I think Ben said it best in another interview when he said that while art has always taken a backseat in punk, it plays a huge part in how punk is understood by itself and the world. Also, within punk, art (lyrics too) can be an introduction or passage to social and political issues that would be more difficult to understand through a textbook or a news source, especially for young people. For example, when I was a teenager, the art of Gee Vaucher and Winston Smith (for Crass and the Dead Kennedys respectively) was a way for me to begin to explore radical politics. Punk art can be frightening, stimulating, exciting, thought provoking and (gasp) even beautiful. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from it, too.
Collage by Gee Vaucher
The Fear of Punk//Fear of Art show has been a great way to expand on the work for bands and connect with people who are serious about doing art work in and around punk rock. Along these lines, I was also asked recently to do contribute a page to a screenprinted zine of fake comic book covers by punk artists, organized by another awesome artist, Yecatl Pena in Mexico. My recent fixation on post-apocalyptic films produced this silly but fun comic cover based on the cover old comic book of mine, inspired by the record cover I did for Absolut at the end of the summer-- in progress!
It has been a very long time since I posted anything here...!
So much to catch up on over the next little while, but I'll start with this-- Fear of Punk//Fear of Art came and went this summer, and it was both a blast and a huge success. Thanks to all of the amazing exhibitors, to my partner in crime Benbis, James Binnie and Communication Art Gallery, Jesjit and Zine Dream, the bands that played our benefit show at the 460 (Hassler, Absolut and Spearhead) and all our friends for the support!
For more photos of the installation and opening night, take a look here. And look here for a great feature on the exhibition that was posted on Broken Pencil's blog a week before the show opened. We'll be following this exhibition up with a catalogue that will also serve as the first issue of an ongoing zine, so stay tuned for more info on that in the coming weeks...
I am in the middle of pretty intense work towards this exhibition that my main man and I are putting on together. I really could go on and on about the motivations behind this show, but for now I will just leave this post as a declaration of the fact that it happening in just under a month.
This is kind of an exhibition of international punk art, though the number of artists we could include was greatly limited by the space we secured-- a teeny gallery across the street from Central Tech. The show features a great group of artists that could be simply described as 'punk' artists making artwork within and around punk rock music (though in a lot of cases, this description is only a small piece of the puzzle). Fear of Punk / Fear of Art includes several artists from NYC, a few from the midwest and west coast, Canada, and as far away as Mexico City and France.
Stay tuned for more info in the coming weeks!
***
FEAR OF PUNK / FEAR OF ART
Alex Ratcharge (France)
Alexander Heir (NYC)
Emma Maatman (LA)
Erick Lyle (NYC)
Heather Benjamin (NYC)
Jill Pucciarelli (NYC)
Leah Wishnia (NYC)
Matthew McGarry (Rochester)
Nathan Gattis (Chicago)
Paul D'Elia (LA)
Sam Ryser (NYC)
Shiva Addanki (NYC)
Spoiler (Montreal)
Tara Bursey (Toronto)
Weird Luke (NYC)
Yecatl Peña (Mexico)
and more.
Curated by Ben Needham and Tara Bursey
August 2-4, 2013
Communication Art Gallery
209 Harbord Street, Toronto http://www.communicationgallery.net Opening Party: Friday, August 2, 2013. 7-10 pm
Presented as part of Zine Dream 6, an annual small press art fair http://zinedream.com
Punk is everywhere. From malls to museums, the influence and imagery of punk’s past has largely been absorbed into mass culture. Despite this, contemporary DIY punk rock sits firmly outside of the mainstream, and at both regional and global levels is stronger than ever. The visual culture that surrounds it is variably dark, threatening, chaotic, smart, funny, mysterious and questioning.
Fear of Punk / Fear of Art highlights the creative output of current punk artists, bringing their work out of its usual context while exploring intersections between punk rock, art and print culture. The purpose of the exhibition is to celebrate contemporary punk art while sharing it with a broader audience. The exhibition includes drawing, sculpture and printed matter that draws inspiration from horror, the occult, sex, despair, popular culture, art history and urban life.
For more information, contact ben.t.needham@gmail.com or tara@tarabursey.com
Images, from left to right: Alexander Heir, solo exhibition poster design; Alex Ratcharge, Maximumrocknroll t-shirt design; Leah Wishnia, Garden of Earthly Delights screenprint; Heather Benjamin, Shut Up t-shirt design.
Okay, people-- let's get down to business. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have two first loves that are inextricably linked: zines and punk rock. It is a "chicken or egg" situation. I was inspired by early British and American punk zines when I was barely a teenager. I made my first punk fanzine on my dad's fax machine in Scarborough. My awkward earliest explorations of punk, politics and social justice were through writing in zines. While this blog more or less chronicles my "art life," and I can honestly say that I would not have an art life if it wasn't for zines and punk rock. Zines and punk are the heart and lungs of my life as an artist. (Whoa...did I just say that?)
I am in my early thirties and still involved in p-rock, but sometimes I wonder why I stick around. In contemporary punk and hardcore, zines and art are marginal activities at best. I have stood by local punk as it openly disparaged art. I have stood by punk even as it covertly disparaged women. I have stood by punk (reluctantly) as it reproduced many of the structures and conventions found in the "real world." Zines have recently made something of a comeback in the punk scene, but they draw from the conventions of Twitter and Vice Magazine. One-liners and pictures of people at parties. Punk rock by way of advertising and back again. But I digress...!
Thinking about this makes me want to revert back to a simpler time...a time when women like Caroline Azar and GB Jones were the gold-dust of my teenhood fantasies. When I was sixteen, I destroyed my bedroom floor with glue stick residue, utility knife slashes and metallic blue nail polish. By this time, I had made about fifteen zines, though many sat in my room assembled and saddle-stitched but not distributed. The postal service was still the zine-makers super (slow) highway. I dreamed of run down bachelor(ette) apartments in Kensington Market with back alley access, walls painted in red enamel, plastered with obscure tracts and littered with trinkets from Chinatown. The sound of static on the radio and red wine seven nights a week. A full moon framed by a windowsill rough with decades of paint layers peeling and chipping away; robins-egg blue, beige and salmon. Creativity as a transcendental force.
As nostalgic and somewhat jaded as I may sound here, I still believe in the power of self-publishing. And the above event happening next weekend (I am one of it's several organizers) combines all these "first loves" into a stew of zine, art, punk and lady goodness.
The She Said Boom Feminist Zine Making Symposium consists of three days of activities with a focus on zines, print culture and feminism from April 25-27. Heaps of inspiration will come by way of a screening of the documentary She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, which features the story of the legendary Toronto band who were nothing if not totally dedicated to the blending of art, music, film and publishing. Art and rock heroes GB Jones and Caroline Azar of Fifth Column will give a talk about their work on the Friday night. The following day, several local printers and zine-makers will help facilitate a day-long collaborative zine making marathon, while giving guidance on Risograph, letterpress, hand and perfect binding and photocopying strategies. Selections of zines loaned from my old pals the Toronto Zine Library will be available for browsing over the course of the day. That night, the finished collaborative zine will be launched at a party at Gallerywest on Queen Street West. FYI: On Saturday afternoon, I will be running zine participants to Kinkos, where I will teach a clandestine workshop entitled "Photocopier Tips N' Tricks." Among the workshop facilitators and symposium organizers are local printers and zinesters Shannon Gerard, J.P. King/Paper Pusher Print Works, Erin Oh (a.k.a: symposium brainchild), Amy Egerdeen, Mary "Mack" Tremonte and myself.
For more info on this extravaganza or to register for your spot in the Saturday workshop, check out this and that link, or email feministzines@gmail.com
Last week was a luxurious one in that I managed to find the time to take in two art shows in two days. I went to the preview of Patti Smith's photography exhibition, Camera Solo, at the AGO. The next day, I braved the snow and embarked on a rather hellish walk to Harbourfront to check out Beat Nation at the Power Plant. Boy, was it ever nice to spend a few hours outside of my own head (which is constantly consumed by thesis work), looking at the work of other artists.
The Patti Smith show was an interesting one for a few reasons. The exhibition was gorgeously installed-- a clean and uniform installation of small photographs with nice touches like ephemera placed sparingly on weathered wood tables, persian rugs, church pews facing a video projection, and a huge Italian fishing net in the middle of the main gallery. Despite the exhibition's pitch-perfect style, a telling moment for me was when I took in a photograph taken by Robert Mapplethorpe of Patti-- not the iconic one of her on the cover of Horses, but another one of her looking long-limbed and awkwardly confrontational...in other words, it was pure Patti. After drinking in this photograph for several minutes, it became obvious just how artless Smith's photographs were in comparison. The exhibition reminded me of my ambivalence towards Patti Smith's work, whose artistic career has been (in my humble opinion) rather uneven. The thing is, you'd never guess it from all the attention she has been showered with.
Jordan Bennett, Turning Tables (2012)
Continuing the theme of intersections of art and music, Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture at the Power Plant was worth the walk. I especially loved Jordan Bennett's Turning Tables (pictured above), which plays Bennett's voice learning his native tongue, Mi'kmaq. Also really stirring were two of the exhibition's video works-- 10 by Dana Claxton and Nicholas Galanin's Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan Part 1 and 2. Recommended!
My drawing for the Maximumrocknroll art page is now out in the January 2013 issue, #356. Check it out! More writing about it can be found here. Big thanks to Bidi Choudhury for inviting me to do it!
Big huge thanks to the very cool Paul D'Elia for posting about the School Jerks LP art on his blog, Art 4 Punks. Having a blog focus on the art and design of contemporary punk and hardcore is a noble pursuit that I cannot endorse enough. Nice to feel appreciated, to say the least! Also, thanks to anyone who has spoken up online and in person (locally, all two of you...ha, ha...) about how much they dig the art for this record and the previous EPs.
Also, I recently made the jump from Wordpress to Tumblr as a platform for an archive of the punk/rock/music related art I've done. Check it out here, and dig deep for some seriously moldy oldies that will prove that I'm not as young and fresh as I look.
A few weeks ago, I threw caution to the wind and went to New York for the NY Art Book Fair at MOMA P.S.1. What a great time! I was gone for only 2.5 days (and spent almost as much time on the bus as I did in New York), but it was a whirlwind of awesome. Much better than my last trip to Manhattan-- a mandatory day trip from Baltimore that equalled 8 hours on the bus and 5 hours in the city...?! Boy, was that frustrating.
We covered a lot of ground in less than two days, spending much of both days at the fair in Queens, staying overnight in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (bed and nightlife delivered by the fabulous Elsner), and hanging out a little bit in Manhattan. As great as the book fair was-- with tons of art publishing houses as well as a zine tent, beer, music and more-- the main attraction for me was a talk by Gee Vaucher (below), the artist behind all the iconic Crass record art. She talked for an hour about her art practice, punk and self publishing. I even worked up the courage to ask a (rather doofusy) question about how punk strategies of communication and resistance (collage, wheatpaste, etc.) have been co-opted by mainstream advertising/capitalist ventures. I was a little starstruck, I admit-- she's an art hero of mine, for sure. For more on Gee's amazing work, click here.
The NY Art Book Fair was a pretty inspiring event. There was lots of overlap between art, music and publishing there (even Malcolm Mooney, the first singer of CAN and an amazing artist in his own right, performed-- I missed it!) which made me feel more at home than I've felt at an art event in a really long time. I even ran into a fellow ziney Torontoite. Here's to blowing off school and travelling! Up the art book punx!
A few weeks ago, my teenhood dream came true when I was asked by someone at Maximumrocknroll-- world's most famous, long-running punk fanzine-- to contribute a drawing for their monthly "art page." I was more than likely asked to do this as a result of the work I've done on all the School Jerks albums, most recently their brand new debut LP.
I waited until the 11th hour to start the drawing-- I was asked by MRR to contribute during what was possibly one of the busiest few weeks I've had in a long time with work, school prep, and other projects. After breaking my brain trying to decide what to draw-- my brainstorm list included such grasps-at-straws as "cranes," "murder victims," "School Jerks outtakes," "Baltimore," "Google street view," "Kensington Market" and "mob scene"-- I finally settled on drawing American crime scene photographer Weegee's infamous snapshot, Their First Murder.
I first learned about Their First Murder a few years ago. For those who don't already know the back story, for this photo Weegee for once chose to turn his camera not on a crime scene, but at a crowd who had gathered to look at one. The photo depicts a range of emotions-- while a female relative of the victim cries, neighbourhood children rubberneck to catch their first glimpse of a dead man. Shot during the latter half of the dirty thirties, the viewer imagines the gunshot victim as two-bit hood or mafioso-type. Against the night sky, tenement housing looms heavily in the background.
To make the drawing sometime other than just a drawing of a photograph, I knew that the addition of a fitting caption of some sort would be key. Initially, I wanted to have the caption relate to the children's reactions, tying them to the fact that punk-- to me, anyway-- has always been about confronting and embracing darker aspects of life as opposed to denying or turning away from them, as well as defying social conventions. All of our lives, we are told to behave appropriately, and to not stare. The children's reaction to the dead body in the photo is curious and essentially pure.
When I decided that all the captions I came up would sound a little too misanthropic for the good of the drawing, I decided to seek out a fitting quote instead. The one I settled on is actually a portion of a poem written by a child in 1944 in the Terezin concentration camp, in what is now the Czech Republic under the tutelage of the artist-educator and possible pioneer of art therapy Friel Dicker-Brandeis. I am glad this reference is obscure enough to prevent a heavy holocaust reading of the drawing, because that's was definitely not a part of my original intention-- the drawing is still of a bunch of kids in New York City shot by Weegee, after all. The text is appropriate in that at its core is an allusion to creativity and resilience-- how creative acts are almost always concious or unconcious attempts at building an ideal world, against all odds.
Two-colour Risograph prints on archival cardstock made in collaboration with JP King of Paper Pusher Print Works. These drawings will be on the upcoming School Jerks 12", due out in a matter of weeks.
I've been busting my hump for the last week on drawings for the School Jerks 12", which is due out very, very soon. I'm down to the last two drawings and am really losing steam...! I'll be producing a 11"X17" 3-colour poster of all 17 or 18 drawings for the record in collaboration with Paper Pusher Print Works within the next few weeks. Very exciting stuff!
