DECOCTION 03: Lydia Kwa

DECOCTION 03: Lydia Kwa

Elee Kraljii Gardiner interviews writers about their coffee and tea rituals in this special series for CAROUSEL … DECOCTION— the act or process of boiling usually in water so as to extract the flavour or active principle. “Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time,

Read More

DECOCTION 02: Chloé Savoie-Bernard

DECOCTION 02: Chloé Savoie-Bernard

Elee Kraljii Gardiner interviews writers about their coffee and tea rituals in this special series for CAROUSEL … DECOCTION— the act or process of boiling usually in water so as to extract the flavour or active principle. “Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time,

Read More

DECOCTION 01: Haruna Solomon

DECOCTION 01: Haruna Solomon

Elee Kraljii Gardiner interviews writers about their coffee and tea rituals in this special series for CAROUSEL … DECOCTION— the act or process of boiling usually in water so as to extract the flavour or active principle. “Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time,

Read More

From the Archive: Amy Ireland ‘The Stranger’ Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

From the Archive: Amy Ireland ‘The Stranger’ Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Cole Closser ‘A Drip in the  Mouth of a Horse’ Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

From the Archive: Cole Closser ‘A Drip in the Mouth of a Horse’ Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Dash Shaw Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

From the Archive: Dash Shaw Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

“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

Read More

From the Archive: Anders Nilsen Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

From the Archive: Anders Nilsen Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

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

Read More

From the Archive: “But the mouse can make a nest in you”: Richard Kraft + Danielle Dutton Interviewed (CAROUSEL 37)

From the Archive: “But the mouse can make a nest in you”: Richard Kraft + Danielle Dutton Interviewed (CAROUSEL 37)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Justin Stephenson ‘The Complete Works’ Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

From the Archive: Justin Stephenson ‘The Complete Works’ Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

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

Read More

From the Archive: gustave morin ‘Clean Sails’ interview (CAROUSEL 36)

From the Archive: gustave morin ‘Clean Sails’ interview (CAROUSEL 36)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Kioskerman Interview (CAROUSEL 34)

From the Archive: Kioskerman Interview (CAROUSEL 34)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Chip Kidd ‘Gasp! You Did It!’ Interview (CAROUSEL 33)

From the Archive: Chip Kidd ‘Gasp! You Did It!’ Interview (CAROUSEL 33)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Aaron S. Moran ‘The Rebuilder’ Interview (CAROUSEL 32)

From the Archive: Aaron S. Moran ‘The Rebuilder’ Interview (CAROUSEL 32)

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

Read More

From the Archive: ‘Improvisation is Important’ Jason Interview (CAROUSEL 30)

From the Archive: ‘Improvisation is Important’ Jason Interview (CAROUSEL 30)

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

Read More

From the Archive: ‘David Boswell: World’s Toughest Cartoonist’ Interview (CAROUSEL 29)

From the Archive: ‘David Boswell: World’s Toughest Cartoonist’ Interview (CAROUSEL 29)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Brian Kokoska Interview (CAROUSEL 28)

From the Archive: Brian Kokoska Interview (CAROUSEL 28)

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

Read More

From the Archive: Tor Lundvall ‘Transforming a Landscape’ Interview (CAROUSEL 25)

From the Archive: Tor Lundvall ‘Transforming a Landscape’ Interview (CAROUSEL 25)

New York-based downtempo producer Tor Lundvall balances his music production with a parallel career as a painter of cloudy autumn days & ghostly landscapes Interview conducted May, 2009 Sound is primarily for the ears; painting is primarily for the eyes. In your creative life, how are the two mediums interconnected and where do they overlap?For me, the line is most definitely blurred as to where the two pursuits overlap and blend; there’s such a strong bond

Read More

From the Archive: ORLAN ‘Long Live Transitional Flesh’ Interview (CAROUSEL 24)

From the Archive: ORLAN ‘Long Live Transitional Flesh’ Interview (CAROUSEL 24)

Given French performance artist ORLAN’s dedication to altering her physical appearance in the name of challenging the limits of human physicality, it’s ironic that her rather idiosyncratic look — the Bride of Frankenstein-esque hair, the exotic implants on her forehead and the owl-like glasses she often wears — makes her instantly recognizable in a way that few artists since Andy Warhol have been able to manage. In a world fascinated by cosmetic surgery, where the

Read More