Amy Ireland is an experimental poet and theorist, co-conspiring with arcane and esoteric vectors of poetic and theoretical thought. As a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Ireland’s work develops concepts embedded within the prefix xeno-, denoting that which is unfamiliar, strange and alien. Following this trajectory, Ireland is writing her thesis on xenopoetics, which engages various poetry projects that involve
American cartoonist Cole Closser has been called a master of “butchered quotes and borrowed styles” — a man whose ink-stained dreams tend to have a yellowed, nostalgic residue covering them, and whose drawing style is constantly in a state of technical re-examination and flux. Like the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock — who is said to have noticed a drip in the mouth of a horse in Picasso’s mural-sized oil painting Guernica, and from that
“I wanted to be destroyed … and reborn.” Dash Shaw credits these words to a tattered old comic book, near the end of Cosplayers, a recent collection of his own comics about fan culture, cartooning history, creativity, and female friendship. Shaw’s teen girl protagonists have lucked into a stash of funnybooks by the legendary Jack ‘King’ Kirby (1917–1994), co-creator of the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and, in this instance, the 2001 comic book adaptation. Heedless
Anders Nilsen is a notable American graphic novelist whose works include Big Questions, Dogs and Water, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Rage of Poseidon, The End, and others. In Poetry is Useless, his latest book, Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. This expansive ‘sketchbook-as-graphic-novel’ reveals seven years of Nilsen’s life and musings: it covers
Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera is a wildly irreverent collage narrative that challenges at every turn. To create his dreamlike paper opera, Kraft worked directly over an issue of Kapitan Kloss — a Cold War comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis — superimposing a cast of strange new voices and characters on top of it. “A riot of images and words”, the resulting project is arbitrary, inventive and
Filmmaker Justin Stephenson took fifteen years to carefully create The Complete Works — a labour of love that creatively adapts the work of internationally acclaimed avant-garde poet bpNichol. From comic book detective stories & westerns to documentaries & magic realism, and from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated images, The Complete Works wrestles Nichol’s writing off the page and projects it onto the screen. It uses bpNichol’s poetic methods on Nichol himself to create a film that
Canadian ‘para-literary agent provocateur’ gustave morin has been working in the fields of composition & performance for the last twenty years. As a maker of concrete, found, collage, typewriter & sound poetry, his creative practice always manages to the blur the borders between poetry & visual art, offering up startling hybrid works that resist conventional reading. Clean Sails, a 164 page volume of visually complex, next-generation typewriter poems composed using dozens of different typewriters — the
Paul Dutton is a poet, novelist, essayist & oral sound artist, who, over the course of 5 decades, has uncompromisingly challenged the borders of literature & music. Internationally renowned for his solo sound performances, Dutton’s otherworldly voice works have helped redefine the potential of human utterance. CAROUSEL is pleased to present the first appearance in print of a selection of works from this innovative explorer of language in the following profile section — which includes
Viennese photographer Klaus Pichler’s intimate photo series, Just the Two of Us, aims to reveal the people beneath a variety of costumes without unmasking them. For adults, the act of dressing up in costume is most often associated with some form of social activity. It’s a spectacle, a transformative activity that grants us permission to temporarily play out a fantasy role in the everyday world. Costumes and disguises permit people to act in ways that
From generating performances with choreographer and media artist Jonah Bokaer, to designing sets for Merce Cunningham, to having your work curated by pop-star Pharrell Williams, collaborations are a major element of Daniel Arsham’s practice — one of the many facets of a career that has swiftly rose to international attention. He’s also part of Snarkitecture, a collaborative effort with Alex Mustonen, which blends art and architecture to create installations that attempt to “make architecture perform
Cartoon minimalist Pablo Holmberg — better known in Argentina under his pen name Kioskerman — makes four-panel comics that elude easy description. His darkly romantic strip series Edén appears in Spanish every week on his website, offering readers an ideal mix of weight & whimsy. Interview conducted October, 2014 You’ve been publishing strips on the Internet since 2004; why did you decide to start a web-comic?I was reading Tony Millionaire’s Maakies and Kaz’s Underworld online
Chip Kidd is a man of many talents, with an insider’s perspective on pop culture. Universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design — USA Today once described him as “the closest thing to a rock star” in the graphic design world — his iconic covers offer an inventive marriage of type and found images. In addition, Kidd’s work as an editor of books of comics for the mass market have helped to
Extinction. Such an outrageous word, and made common thanks to that Darwin fellow and his incredible theories. The word has the connotation of chances irrevocably gone. But the utter demise of the pigeons is an impossibility. Not even man could destroy such a quantity. Nothing has an utter end — not the pigeons, and certainly not the human soul, which continues on and ever on. — Claire Mulligan, The Dark (2013) There was a time
Through his multi-dimensional assemblages, artist Aaron S. Moran attempts to represent the rapidly changing context of Langley, British Columbia — his once rural hometown, now a growing community 50km east of Vancouver. For Moran, this setting is foundational to his practice and is the primary source for gathering inspiration, ideas and materials for his chosen medium. He amalgamates and re-appropriates bits and pieces of intermediary sites that have been left abandoned by developers. Through collagist
California-based Souther Salazar is a mixed media artist and zine dreamer whose varied projects combine the narrative aspect of children’s book illustration with a richly developed fine art sensibility. His increasingly complex artworks transport the viewer into a magical, vibrant world that is as heartwarming as it is visually striking. Souther Salazar was born in 1978 in Hayward, CA. As a teenager, he discovered John Porcellino’s self-published King-Cat Comics and Stories and was inspired to
With a career spanning nearly two decades, Norwegian cartoonist Jason is undoubtedly one of world’s finest storytellers. Known for his sparse drawing style and anthropomorphic characters, he is the creator of a series of acclaimed, award-winning graphic novels that always deliver the perfect blend of humour and heartache. Interview conducted May, 2012 Jason, can you give us an idea how you create a new work? I’m interested in how you break down the tasks, how
Jack-of-all-trades Robert Dayton has known artist / photographer David Boswell for a few years now, and has been a fan of his comic books for far longer. On the eve of the announcement of Boswell’s induction into the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame, Dayton chatted Bowsell up on the mean streets of Toronto, on a sunny day — read on to find out why he is convinced that Boswell makes the funniest comic books of
Dislodged faces and code-like assemblies of letters litter the found book cover canvases of Jeremiah Maddock’s art works. The New York-based artist uses ink, bleach and marker to lend everyday, recycled materials a fine art aesthetic that has garnered him legitimate attention over the last few years. Maddock is flirting with books as art objects — perhaps unwittingly — carrying on a dialogue with the tradition of the artist book. He successfully gives paper ephemera
Among the roster of emerging artists today, scenes of indulgently deviant behaviour bare new skin under the paintbrush of Canadian Brian Kokoska. A recent New York transplant, Kokoska creates large scale canvas-based works using a chromatic and figural vocabulary complimentary to the themes of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. Within the art historical canon, these topics have been referenced in a moralistic way — particularly by Netherlandish painters such as Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Brueghel
WINNIE TRUONG Portfolio: Trichophilia They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they’ve got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they, and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, “thus far, and no farther.” That is their great sin: