Lean, Mean, Zine Machine
Part of this project for me is to create zines containing my drawings and place them around the downtown core of St. Catharines. There are many practical reasons for me do to this.
Making zines is a way for me to make independent little booklets that contain some of the work I've done over the course of this year. They will be little snack-sized bites of the images and ideas I have been working on, easily consumable for the viewer. While my work is rooted in drawing, some of which appears on larger pieces of paper, condensing it into a zine helps to create an "overall look" at what I've been drawing and a booklet format helps tie the images together in a kind of abstract narrative. Each image will lead to the other, aesthetic and formal themes will bounce between the pages.
Placing the zines around downtown St. Catharines, as I intend to do, is a small scale way for me to make my work public. I plan to place them in noticeable but odd areas with notes to encourage the passerby to take the zine. My work is rooted in the architecture of St. Catharines and the notion of home this city gives me, so it seems only right that through the zines my work becomes part of the details of the city for its inhabitants to enjoy. While an in-person show is not the most feasible considering limited public access with the pandemic, a zine for the taking could make my work accessible to those who wouldn't normally find themselves in an art-show or gallery setting. In other words, this zine format could widen my audience in terms of who would see my work, even just in this capacity.
For me, there is also a lot of value of zines as tangible art objects. I feel there is power in putting art in a book format that can be held and manipulated in one's hand. The work is not longer on the wall, forbidden to be touched. The pretentious air of preciousness of the art is taken away, which can result in a more honest response from the viewer. Zines are meant to be casual. It is exciting to think that the work I have done this year that has been grounded in concept and paper drawings can come together in a small zine format. Books as objects are some of my favourite "things", looking beyond the function and purpose and simply at the materials that make up its touchable form. Books, and by extension zines, automatically invite you to open them.
The handmade, imperfect nature of the zine makes the connection between the artist, the zine, and the reader of the zine more personal. Ideas of home are personal. Even surrounding architecture, something that is visually seen the same way by everyone is personal to how we perceive it and how that architecture makes its way into our everyday lives and notions of home.
Architecture and zines have also been coupled before. This excerpt from Susan E. Thomas' Value and Validity of Art Zines as an Art Form gives some insight into that relationship:
Mimi Zeiger, founder of Loud Paper, an architecture zine, says that when it was founded in 1996, "Self-publishing was a stance against the homogeneity of architectural discourse. It was a way of taking back the means of production and a chance for multiple voices to write louder about architecture." Infiltration: the zine about going places you're not supposed to go was founded by Jeff Chapman and devoted to the subject of urban exploration. There is a history of pamphlet publications in architecture, and Zeiger groups pamphlets, artists' booklets, occasional papers, and zines in the same category of independent publishing. (Thomas, Susan E. “Value and Validity of Art Zines as an Art Form.” Long Island University: Digital Commons @ LIU, 2009, 32.)
Zines become a way to spread voices and perspectives, and this is my small scale attempt at spreading my perspective of my home to those who live here, in St. Catharines, as well.
Links
https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=brooklyn_libfacpubs
http://www.loudpapermag.com/
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