I’m not new to the zine world, I co- published with great irregularity the zine Katalogue with Andrew Awesome and Ed Sinclair between 2004/2006. We usually held a ridiculous party with fortune tellers, bands, fashion shows, a celebrity museum, visual art and even once, about 100 stuffed animals wrapped in electrical tape (not our best idea). Our mission statement (compliments of the Vendart website):
“Katalogue is a zine devoted to the liberation and independence of the burgeoning underground art scene worldwide. Featuring illustration, text-based art, photography, theory, and fiction, Katalogue puts the concerned public in contact with the sympatico creative renegades who live to produce culture, not just to accept it. Not relying on a corporate obsessed curatorial committee, Katalogue functions as a manual, a gallery, a community, an experiment and a dialogue.
We support the right of every artist to put the meaning of their work before the concerns of monetary gain that many large outlets will make their primary motive to show or print. This is pirate radio for the page.”
In the Spring of 2006, we published an issue exploring the havoc Myspace wreaked on peoples lives and stopped publishing.
Fast forward to 2012 and my camera collective, The TLR Club and I are sitting on the remaining 200 copies of our self-published coffee table photo book (a run of 500 thank-you very much!) Modern Canadian Interiors and I remembered the wondrous world of Canzine. An annual event, Canzine is a festival of zine and independent art culture. It’s low-fi couture, it’s sexy buttons, on-of-a-kind art objects, indie publishing, t-shirts, art posters and a lot of unusual.
It’s enough to take a few books and mini-prints to Canzine, but I feel empty handed without a zine at my table and I’ve always wanted to make a photo zine, a high-key, photocopied booklet of images strung together by a suggestive narrative to be specific. I had just finished the 3rd chapter of Susan Sontag’s, Regarding the Pain of Others and couldn’t get Goya’s The Disasters of War out of my head. And so I appropriated several translated titles of Giya’s posthumously printed plates, mixed and matched my work with images from a roll of film I found (and devel0ped) in an abandoned house a few years ago and voila!: Archive Issue #1, The Disasters Within.
Here is an out of context sneak peak inside. These two images are not paired inside (this is how they were booklet printed by InDesign), but I like the pairing. Now I just have to get to Kinkos/FEDex and crank-up the contrast and make it a zine!
Come get a copy on Sunday!
Canzine 2012
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21
12-7pm, $5
918 Bathurst Centre, (918 Bathurst St., just north of Bloor St)
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