Ginger Networked feminism
Fa l l 2 0 1 8
MISSION
GRACIE BIALECKI LEIGH SUGAR
LIANA IMAM
JOEY BEHRENS
Ginger maps networks of creative people. In keeping with the logic of a network, all of the contributors to this issue were referred by an editor or contributor from a previous issue. As a feminist publication, we are committed to supporting the work of self-identified women and queer/trans/gender non-conforming individuals and strive to share the experiences and distinctive voices of those who identify as such. Our goal is to produce a zine with a diverse range of forms, content, and viewpoints.
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ISSUE 1 ISSUE 2 ISSUE 3 ISSUE 4 ISSUE 5 ISSUE 6 ISSUE 7
KAITLIN McCARTHY
CARLA AVRUCH
AMANDA LÓPEZKURTZ
JAN TRUMBAUER
ASTRID KAEMMERLING + BECCA J.R. LACHMAN
MARIE HINSON
ISSUE 10 ISSUE 11 ISSUE 13
MICHAELA RIFE
ANNE MAILEY
LEANNE BOWES
ISSUE 12
KERRI GAUDELLI
MEREDITH SELLERS
MARKEE SPEYER OLIVIA JANE HUFFMAN
DEVIN DOUGHERTY
ERIC DYER
MEGAN SICKLES HALA ABDULKARIM
SOFIE RAMOS
CRAIG CALDERWOOD
JANE SERENSKA
MARISSA BLUESTONE
ANDREA GUSSIE PAULAPART
IRENE CAVROS
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BRITLYNN HANSENGIROD
ALEXIS CANTU EMMALINE PAYETTE
JACQUELINE MELECIO
NATALIE EICHENGREEN
MISIAN TAYLOR MS. NIKO DARLING
DELILAH JONES
CARLY FREDERICK
ISSUE 14
LEXI CAMPBELL
JESS WILLLA WHEATON
SONYA DERMAN
MARIA R. BAAB
KAITLIN McDONOUGH
FELICIA URSO
KRISTINA HEADRICK
SAM CROW
MARIA STABIO
AGROFEMME
LEYLA TULUN
JESSICA LAW
JEN COHEN
ISSUE 9
JORDAN REZNICK
ELIZABETH SULTZER
COURTNEY KESSEL + DANIELLE WYCKOFF
ALEX VALLS
ISSUE 8
NATASHA WEST
CAITLIN ROSE SWEET
HAYLEE EBERSOLE
LANE SPEIDEL
CLAUDIA GERBRACHT
• • • • • • •
DOROTEA MENDOZA
LAUREN BANKA
MARIE SÉGOLÈNE
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REBECCA BALDWIN
BONNIE LANE
LA JOHNSON
KATIE VIDA
KATHERINE TARPINIAN
RACHEL WALLACH
ERICA McKEEHEN
MOLLY HAGAN
KATIE FORD
LAURA McMULLEN
SOPHIE KNIGHT
HARRIS BAUER
HANNAH MODE
TONI KOCHENSPARGER
CAMERON RINGNESS
AMY BERENBEIM
ISSACHAR CURBEON
RACHEL BRODY
NP SANCHEZ
RACHEL ZARETSKY
ENA SELIMOVIĆ
ARIEL JACKSON
BRIE LIMINARA
YI-HSIN TZENG
SOFIA PONTÉN
FREDRIKA THELANDERSSON
KRYSTA SA
ALLI MALONEY
LAUREN ARIAN
HERMIONE SPRIGGS
LAURA COOPER
CAITLIN WRIGHT
MARTY MANUELA
JESSE HEIDER
ISA RADOJČIC
NANDI LOAF
WOLFGANG SCHAFFER
IVY HALDEMAN
HANNAH NELSONTEUSCH
CLARE BOERSCH
KASIA HALL ANA GIRALDOWINGLER EEL COSTELLO
JENNIFER WEISS
STEPHANIE VON BEHR
ABIGAIL HENNING
VANESSA GULLY SANTIAGO
KATHARINE PERKO HANNAH RAWE
MARTHA WILSON
COURTNEY STONE
JACQUELINE CANTU
ALEX CHOWANIEC
BRIE ROCHELILLIOTT LEIGH RUPLE
LANI RUBIN
JESSICA PRUSA
MOLLY ADAMS
CAROLINE LARSEN
JULIANA HALPERT SOPHIE OAKLEY
BRE WISHART
LEAH JAMES
NICKI GREEN
MIMI CHIAHEMEN
NATALIE GIRSBERGER
ELAINE HEALY
COLLEEN DURKIN
JESSICA WOHL
JOLENE LUPO
MAYON HANANIA
LAURA PORTWOODSTACER
MOLLY RAPP
EMILY LUDWIG SHAFFER
EMILY ROSE LARSON
JENNY BLUMENFELD
INDIA TREAT SARAH MIHARA CREAGEN
SARA LAUTMAN DEENAH VOLLMER
NATALIE BAXTER
TYLER MORGAN
TIFFANY SMITH
ERIN MIZRAHI
JILLIAN JACOBS
ULRIKE BUCK
ANNELIE McKENZIE
PAOLA DI TOLLA
MARIA NIKOLIS C. CHAPIN BECKY BRISTER
KATE WHEELER
LAURA BERNSTEIN
KATY McCARTHY
HANNAH MCMASTER ANNIK HOSMANN
TRACI CHAMBERLAIN
ASHLEIGH DYE
DEBORAH DAVIS
CATHERINE AZIMI
ALYCE HALIDAY MCQUEEN
SHALA MILLER
G I N G E R 3
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Issue NO 14 contributors Erin Mizrahi .... PAGE 07 Astrid Kaemmerling + Becca J.R. Lachman .... PAGE 10 Lane Speidel .... PAGE 15 Deborah Davis .... PAGE 18 Lexi Campbell .... PAGE 23 Ulrike Buck .... PAGE 26 Sarah Mihara Creagen .... PAGE 30 C. Chapin .... PAGE 36 Mayon Hanania .... PAGE 43 Marie Ségolène .... PAGE 49 Vanessa Gully Santiago .... PAGE 58 Shala Miller .... PAGE 60
Co-founders EDITO R
Markee Speyer D E S IGN E R
Jacqueline Cantu
On the cover: Documentation of a one-channel video installation by Shala Miller. The video was projected onto the stump of a tree that had fallen from a storm. This is part IV of her study on her mother and herself.
G I N G E R 5
Erin Mizrahi Bloom
I was going to hear Judith Butler speak but I didn’t instead I ate a salad and returned some things from Amazon and I think she might’ve liked that how casually capitalistic my absence came to be and absence always means It’s all my department’s been talking about Judith Butler is coming! Judith will be joining us for happy hour! here’s a reading list of books to read to prepare you for the event of Judith! I’ve met Judith once before in a bar in New York off of Washington square I asked her to take a selfie with me and she said No so we just took a regular photograph once when I was drunk I shouted I wish Judith Butler was my daddy! and my friend said, She’s already everyone’s daddy! and here I am giving an account of myself I’m finally ready to birth my dissertation I’ve been carrying it far too long I’m eager to see what strange bloom comes to be when the new recruits ask what year I am I’ve learned to stop saying 7th and start saying final I’m in my final year and I’m not sure that sounds much better maybe I should’ve gone to her talk I bet she said some stuff about Kafka and violence and law and I suddenly can’t stop thinking about gender I heard this poet read some extra dimensional stuff about gender she said she had to commune with another species before writing and it was wild and full of sadness even her name was poetry Marsha de la O A whole alphabet of tendrils you said let’s do something whimsical I said let’s go look for Joshua trees in places other than Joshua Tree and it’s possible I missed the point but what a beautiful detour I’ve been thinking about how “idk” could just as easily mean I DO know
E r i n M i z r a h i 7
and I half expect all words to suddenly burst into flame am I performing my social construction? are we undone by each other? I wrote a poem about great literature and cock and it was referred to as my “first mature work” my therapist called me a romantic masochist with annihilation fantasy and I still don’t know what that means I’m increasingly surprised that people want to hear me talk about Derrida which is like super Derridian but if I look at you and you look back Is that a poem? and I’m somewhere between constantly-anxious-about-the-future years old and puts-on-moisturizer-before-bed years old I’ll rewrite whole sentences to hide the fact that I can’t grammar and I’m certain hell is people over thirty trying to explain virtual currency You see I dreamt of words when I was young sometimes I want to add a “ue” to the end of young so it reads like tongue yongue I wrote about power and drag in the desert I stood there staring at the sky like I was waiting for the moon to hatch you whispered Persephone into my second mouth I whispered desire is construct and we’re all subjects of desire then curled into the flower kingdom of your chest are we deconstructing? I called you a method writer because you wrote about the desert mood and it made you moody I’ve decided I’m over bras What I want is a bra that recites Kathy Acker when touched I’ve gone in search of a whole language I once left your mouth what I found were rivers in every direction rivers What I’m trying to say is in spite of everything Wildflowers
Erin Mizrahi is a Los Angeles-based poet, scholar, and educator who fell in love with words when she was very young and has never recovered. She is completing a PhD in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. erinmizrahi.wordpress.com • Instagram: @wildsojourn • Twitter: @erinmizrahi 8
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Astrid Kaemmerling + Becca J.R. Lachman HOME – SICK
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ur book-length collaboration HOME – SICK has been fueled by mailing and emailing stanzas, photographs, and mixed-media collages between SE Ohio and the Bay Area since 2015.
Through this creative cross-pollination and long-distance friendship, our work more fully enters our experiences related to body as home and space as story, even when that home is unsafe, unfinished, or carries weighty mysteries “too close to home” into our evolving adult lives and sense of selves. For us, some of these mysteries include unexplained infertility and personal trauma. With lyric poetry, collected process material, and mixed media on paper, we aim to trace the outlines and shapes of stories related to our home building. Whether an actual house going through years of renovation, or a body and spirit doing the same, our work leans into and against the domestic, the feminine, and feminist. It depends on the power of female friendship to coax/demand/sing a story to the surface, and along with it, a life imagined or hoped-for into clearer view. A general audience still wants an ending we can literally and figuratively live with: a healthy pregnancy, a happy family, a welcoming home, even a strong female artist who’s still “in her place.” We navigate alternative creation myths we have needed to tell in order to move into the rooms waiting for us, made for us, and made by us.
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You are Whole, 2016, 8.5� x 11�, mixed media on paper
A s t r i d K a e m m e r l i n g + B e c c a J . R . L a c h m a n 11
We step over the new threshold, touch fingertips to final coats of paint and the walls are warm skin stretched, expecting. Every angle and corner, a country. We practice saying home, home until it feels more like translation. ( ) You are safe. You are whole: What I tell my reflection.
What I say to this house.
( ) The idea of a child grows first not in any womb. ( ) For weeks, we cannot get to the piano. What brought us together, what made us break ground now covered in drop cloths, surrounded by sheets of drywall, the staircase pieces waiting to be built. ( ) If you ignore something you love for long enough, does it find another door? ( ) Our world began on the back of a turtle... after the fifth sun burned out... in a grain of wheat... at the edge of the garden... in the stomach of space... ( ) And she was visited by an angel a nurse practitioner her sister’s fourth child a social worker a lawyer a surgeon a diagnosis a voice in a dream a pupa a contractor a book of poems a birth family How does the story go again? 12
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What will hold a room together, 2017, 8.5” x 11”, mixed media on paper
Becca J.R. Lachman works in the magical world of public libraries. She is also a poet, educator, essayist, and singersongwriter living in Appalachian Ohio. Her writing often focuses on re-visioning a feminist Mennonite identity. Editor of A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, she’s also the author of two poetry collections: Other Acreage, an ode-elegy to her family’s 1840s dairy farm, and The Apple Speaks, which explores being a wife/daughter of loved ones doing nonviolent peace work in war-torn places. Recent poems and essays appear in Connotation Press, Consequence Magazine, Image, and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art. Astrid Kaemmerling is a German-born artist based in San Francisco, CA. Her work as interdisciplinary artist spans the genres of visual, performance and media art and strives to connect place memories of the past, such as collected travel experiences, with a critical exploration of specific neighborhoods and selected urban places. Kaemmerling has been exhibited internationally in Germany, Italy, Korea and the United States. Kaemmerling’s work won several awards and fellowships, such as at the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy, the Vermont Studio Center, VT, and most recently at Enos Park in Springfield, IL. Current artistic research projects include a series of works that investigate “processes of home-building.” She is the founder of The International Community of Artist-Scholars, a community of artists who work at the intersection of art & research, as well as founder of The Walk Discourse, a Bay Area based laboratory for walking artists and walking enthusiasts to share walking art methodologies, practices and tools.
A s t r i d K a e m m e r l i n g + B e c c a J . R . L a c h m a n 13
Lane Speidel Recovery Journals Excerpt
Drawings taken out of my recovery journals. I wrote and drew while recovering from top surgery, and then complications from surgery, and then recovering from a second surgery.
S
itting here naked except for 2 pieces of thick gauze, thinking about the death of my body.
I’ve been close to death my whole life, knowing from the beginning that my death was always there guiding, holding, waiting in the shadow cast by the flip of a door, in the damp indentations of mud where I step into the earth, in a reflection seen through the window of a car or misaligned mirror in infinite small and slipped and flipped places you can catch it. At times it haunts knowingly, at others burrows in a burning way, at others still it embraces warmly cushioning you in a perfect sinking outline. But what I’m talking about is the knowledge of death that a depression can give, not the knowledge of a slow dying of the body that a sick person earns. The first, more ideological and abstract it is conceived through a bitter comparison of imagining that living and dead are opposites. It is made stark through romantic internal pictures of a pill or a knife or a gun. Simple tools imagined as keys to freedom. At times it has felt that I was leaning so hard at that door that it began to bow on it’s hinges and if someone were to leave it unlocked I would simply fall in.
L a n e S p e i d e l 15
This is death as a past or future statement, one is live then one is dead. The second, more realistic and daily is realized slowly through the pealing and flaking off of body parts. Through inability to do things that you always without question assumed that you would do. Shapes that you have patterned forward into the rest of your life you are shocked to find inaccurate. This is a dying, this is a action, this is a practice. This is every day packing up your limbs damp and close to you taping them down tight hoping they will be there tomorrow. This is the knowledge that the death of every green leaf passes so slowly that to the leaf, it’s a whole life. Flaking pealing dropping parts like forgotten unimportant coins, the cells drop one by one until they form a steady rain of leaving you. You know something’s wrong but you can’t say quite what because you don’t have the knowledge, the language to know that body is an impermanent state of cells sometimes travelling together. Bruising leaking hoping you try to build a future body out of imaginary skin but there’s nothing there when you reach for it. The edges of you keep whisking away. Will that be a hole forever? Will that be a scar? Will thick pink new skin be able to climb that chasm? Will you know yourself if it does
Lane Speidel was born in New York City and now lives in Philadelphia. They are a pre-school teacher, a Scorpio, a trans non-binary person, an anxious pooper, a member of Vox Populi, a graduate of Tyler School of Art, queer, 2nd runner-up for “Smartest” in the Renaissance Middle School Year Book, the oldest child of three, and a very emotional individual. I like to walk sometimes, I like to collect trash, I like to feel my friend’s hair, I like to put my body upside down, I just decided that I love myself. ihopeilikethis.com • Instagram: @body_joke 16
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Deborah Davis Beach Plastic
These collage-like displays of contemporary culture appear where unintended, brought to us by ourselves courtesy of the ocean. And the ocean has a new palette which runs the gamut and is limited only by our imagination to what we can physically throw into it. They are left behind and I photograph these objects as offered.
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D e b o r a h D a v i s 19
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Deborah Davis fell in love with photography as a young child when she “borrowed” her parent’s old Brownie Hawkeye to take pictures around her neighborhood. Later she was given a Kodak Instamatic 104 and expanded to street photography. Deborah continued to explore photography while she pursued her career as a professional book designer, production artist and typographer. Originally from New Jersey, she’s lived and worked in New York City, northern New England, Colorado and currently Los Angeles, where she enjoys exploring neighborhoods on foot. Walking for hours on city streets is her idea of a great day. deborahdavisdesign.com • Instagram: @debdavisdesign • Twitter: @debdavisdesign
D e b o r a h D a v i s 21
Lexi Campbell Pinky Human Light
Reflected Boundaries 2017, 4.23” x 3.48” Polaroid print
We fell all at once, all of the sudden, a disappearing act, mercy from that which feels, rises and slumps and sings to themselves while we mend our bones. Cell to soul, myself and on the left delirium found, replaced, and accepted. Two touch and leap apart: the rising wind of choice feels more like a penny on my tongue. After the dusk, the lost colors with their pinky human light winding along the last face draw boundary lines of here and between, acquiescing to the moon. Senses stretch and spirits reach for the spilt pour and our scattered place, in memoriam. Of possibility and sun, we hum to ourselves things will look better in the morning.
L e x i C a m p b e l l 23
In Memoriam 2018, 4” x 4.1” Polaroid print
Lexi Campbell collects, considers, and carefully arranges materials to photograph. The elements in each photograph can vary greatly, from geometric panes of glass to whispers of petals and organic forms, but the process of constructing, adjusting, photographing and disassembling is constant. Imperfect, ambiguous, small, evasive and purposely indecisive, the imagery flutters between a recognizably composed still life and something incorporeal, championing the ephemeral and the enigmatic. Campbell works to create images and elements of writing that insist on the validity of their own mystery. She received her M.F.A. from Brooklyn College CUNY (2018) and her B.A. from Dartmouth College (2013). Campbell has exhibited nationally and is included in private collections internationally. lexicampbell.com • Instagram: @lexxicampbell 24
Lighthouse 2018, 4.23” x 3.48” Polaroid print
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Ulrike Buck Fired Earth / Totem Animals
Exhibition view: Bauhaus Octopus X, Triumph Gallery Moscow 2017
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Seal on the Tennis Court, Fired and glazed red clay on fired and ground red clay, Berlin 2018
Mollusc on the Tennis Court, Fired and glazed red clay on fired and ground red clay, Berlin 2018
U l r i k e B u c k 27
Midnight tennis at Atelierhaus Australische Botschaft Ost, Berlin 2018
Born in the mid-eighties in southwest Germany between the Black Forest and Oktoberfest, Ulrike Buck studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart and „on the road“, visiting artist studios and lectures and peoples houses and gardens and forests internationally. Her sculpture production is informed by her research on different concepts of materialism and sensory perception. She is specially known for creating spaces and environments that perpetuate community. After longer residencies in Mexico City and Paris she now has her studio in the building of the former Australian Embassy to the German Democratic Republic in East Berlin with her windows facing the former embassadors´ tennis court. ulrikebuck.de • Tumblr: work-life-balance-laboratory 28
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Sarah Mihara Creagen Fart Corners
Inspired by dirty pulp magazines, The Sisters’ Fart Corner depict Sarah and her younger sister expelling a rebellious, colorful smog of flatulence. These farts, unlike the battles depicted in Edo period Japanese prints, signal more of a team effort. A thought bubble, a cloud, a loud bodily yell enacted between sisters that live with bowl and intestinal syndromes and diseases.
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LEFT: Fart Wars (may the force b w/u), 2018, watercolour and ink on watercolour paper, 16 x 12 inches NEXT PAGE: The Sisters’ Fart Corner, 2018, watercolour and ink drawing on yupo paper, 17 x 21 inches Intended for the magazine to be propped open on a surface, creating a fart corner for any space.
S a r a h M i h a r a C r e a g e n 31
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S a r a h C r e a g e n 33
Emotion Mask (self portrait), 2018, Xeroxed photograph, red crayon, and Artist’s Tape
Born in Nova Scotia, Sarah Mihara Creagen is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Creagen received her MFA from Hunter College in 2018. Creagen’s practice come out of personal experiences with Pap smears, speculums, and sexual encounters wearing her knee braces. The content is filtered through her identity as a queer, cis-woman with mixed-race Japanese heritage. Creagen’s work infuses agency into erotic images of women and creates opportunities for conversation around sexual health and consent, in the doctor’s office and in the bedroom. She begrudgingly admits to being infatuated with flatulence, and is currently working on a comic about her and her sister. sarahcreagen.com 34
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C. Chapin
9.-2-27.1
you want to just forget about it? leave it hanging in the wind between our chests somewhere below in all of its intricacy (tended to attentively it could still grow up toward the light) something like Leslie’s basement ivy crawling out of a hole in the bathroom floor you can only see the sun set from the living room in the winter in the summer you have to cross the street when it gets cold the sun moves north in Enfield anyway on top of the hill we do this oscillating everyday filling the water can trying not to forget about the plant by the door I didn’t mean for you to take it I didn’t leave it there
I put it there.
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Enfield Town Court (in the old fire station). Town Of Enfield, City of Ithaca, New York. 8-21-18.
C . C h a p i n 37
Aural Intimacies this time I’ll close one eye begin with an awareness of heel as hinge initiate from the point of imbalance separate through resistance reiterate; attenuated attraction < I’ll follow you forever if you keep pointing even if we can’t see anything but sky evening when my fingernails are dirty that always makes it harder for me to breath like the beige acrylic hat holding my shoulders up by my ears today my classmate said that “dancing is egalitarian in its ordinary form” not always man grounding flying woman when on point who gets to point out at what point do you get the point and who follows . . . you see where we are going here even if it is hard to get perspective to decipher when it shifted doubly sense the distance through the shift in scale ___ things are far away now mere smudges wiped on pale horizons ~ cirrostratus and mounds stay close and we can stay the same size tell me yesterday to bring water quickly zoom in you have hairs in your ears I hadn’t noticed when we were on the phone fine golden baby hamster I wanted to put my ear in your ear but I couldn’t find the words to ask It would have been easier to put my mouth in yours or my hand ear in ear takes consent and coordination, both parties need to be in concert. Details of Albrecht Dürer woodcuts (instagram advertised hand lotion to me the next day). Kassel, Germany. 7–2-17.
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C . C h a p i n 39
Adjacent Utterances
on The Human Condition at 205 Hudson St. 2-18-17 Arendt writes about the origin of the polis being in the freedom of speech and action, separate from the private realm of the household, where survival requires specific responsibilities, around which arises a social structure. The social structure of the polis, what becomes the space of the political, does not include these local concerns of the home. As the political body develops people start to look to it to address the issues of the household. However since the political was established as outside of the domestic realm, based on liberty of expression, it does not have the capacity to properly address the needs of the home and family, whether chosen or biological. As the political realm grows into the governmental there starts to arise a demand for that body politic to take care of the needs of the household. Since it was established outside of this private realm the government does not have those concerns built in.
on the C train 1-27-18 they are settling the warehouses were barely set up they’ll pay too much because it looks urban we took it off, put it on there are just only so many cities it’s not gonna start here it’s gonna start somewhere else we don’t live well maybe China if you own it and it falls apart that’s basically your money down the drain it’s the first time we are going to live in a place that’s all new for both of us we’d like the give her a garden before the end of the year but it’s not like all her friends have gardens to run around in you can take drops but you can still feel the cushion of the insole the tops were out you could feel the breeze parkour life there’s more than enough room for you to be humping my back pack right now
at the pizza place on Canal St. 5-3-18 I’m gonna kill my oppressor for some water I need a goddamn shower they’re already charging me for the water and shit
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Roman Forum (with a red shirt and scaffolding). Rome, Italy. 6-17-17.
C. Chapin is a dance artist and writer, evaluating transactional forces within collective and collaborative dynamics, negotiating terms of resources, their distribution, mutual causality and care. Co-founder of C.H.A.M.P.S. (formerly Complimenta Inc.), an artist run center in Enfield, NY, where they currently live and work. Hunter College MFA candidate and curatorial fellow. Participant in LANDING 2.0, MSA^ (Mountain School of Art), B.A.from Bard College. Chapin has presented work in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Oslo, and Portland, Maine. clarachapin.com â&#x20AC;˘ @imcnu_
C . C h a p i n 41
Mayon Hanania Portraits
T
Cassandra
his project started as a documentation of the men and women around me, people that triggered something in me artistically.. I had each of my models sit for me in the Calfornia Drifters Collective Gallery where I had a show in Long Beach in June 2018.
I worked on each sitter’s charcoal sketch for an hour while talking capturing this unique moment in my sketch, with all the excitement, insecurities at times, playfulness, pride and the common goal to give each other the best we could. I finished the oil portraits in my studio based on the sketches I made in the Gallery. The process of creating this series was for me a way to create a community, create a bond that wasn’t there an hour before even if I already knew the model. It became all of a sudden “real” and “permanent” through this shared moment, and something special for both the sitter and the painter. I can be a very solitary person at times and can go for days alone, working, reading, and drawing. For me, meeting people “through” art and actively creating something that wasn’t there an hour ago between the model and I and that hopefully will last and make an impression on the both of us is precious. All paintings oil painting on board, 9” x 12”
M a y o n H a n a n i a 43
Dusty
Kacie Tomita
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Yaya, 8” x10”
Madeline (Maddie)
M a y o n H a n a n i a 45
Alex
James Levy
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Gary Baseman
Sonya
Mayon Hanania is a French artist who lives in San Pedro, CA. Born in Paris, she studied Arts & Design at Ecole Estienne and Ecole Duperré. She has exhibited in France, and California, including Infinity Room Gallery LA, Misfits Gallery in La Jolla, BG Gallery at Bergamotte Station, and El Cuervo Gallery in El Segundo. She is an annual member of the iconic Post-It Show at Giant Robot Gallery in Sawtelle Japantown LA, where she’s shown alongside Matt Groening, Gary Baseman and James Jean. She’s had many shows in collaboration with artist and partner David Ivar “Yaya” Herman Dune, and their illustrated horror tale “Where The Hell Did They Come From?” was published in 2015 by prestigious Gallimard Editions in France. She loves the Port Of Los Angeles where she lives on the very same street that was Charles Bukowski’s last abode, close to the ocean and the 110 Freeway. She likes to work in her studio, sometimes with her black cat Inspecteur Morrison on her lap, listening to Tom Waits, Caitlin rose, Herman Dune and Tom Brosseau. Mayon is also a Vegan entrepreneur and designer, and her brand Good Guys Don’t Wear Leather has received many Fashion and Ethical awards (Fashion Net, Peta) and has been seen at the feet of beautiful Emma Watson and Miley Cyrus. marionhanania.com • Instagram @mayonscrayons • goodguysdontwearleather.com • Instagram @goodguysdontwearleather
M a y o n H a n a n i a 47
Marie Ségolène AGAPE
Agape (à la fois entre ouverte et sanctifiée)
For souls it is death to become water, and for water death to become earth. Water comes into existence out of earth, and soul out of water Heraclitus
He who prepares the earth
Keep my mouth open, will you? So the mosquitos won’t breed sequestered in stillness.
M a r i e S é g o l è n e 49
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He who ploughs with a wide furrow
It is from my jaw, that the rain Feeds the crops That we tend to like teeth Smell my tonsils Ripe for the plucking Begging Ceres when April comes Thanking her by September Flies nest in the corner of my eye Your tongue: a sickle We wait for the season, your head between my thighs, a gentle ache in our backs And our faces flushed from wine
He who plants the seeds
As you step foot in the earth of my throat I lavishly keep the wine inside my cheeks like a squirrel. Your lips alone Might be the grace I recline for The communion on St Theresa’s tongue.
M a r i e S é g o l è n e 51
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He who weeds
Somewhere in Kentucky, salt drips erosion. Upstate, I collect weeds with enthusiastic precision You would think it would prevent reoccurrence. Yeast, the gift that keeps on giving, From the drippings: stalagmites calcify into delicate rocks, The oils of your finger have the potential to interrupt & of course you touch anyway. Like witnessing hunger, and returning to plenitude. The oils of your fingers, now wet with clay touch me at the small of my back As if your hands shaped me, what was my waist before your wet palms? Meat straight out of a can. Your yolk dry on my chin! The glass re-filled And emptied. Thing is with or without you, Tobacco will burn. (The same could not be said of god)
You know me, I tend to confuse the clay for the potter.
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He who reaps
Knees in Lavender Sincere oils In the creases of the eyelids Sweat on the upper lip I have befriended a handful Over bread and wine But what have I been sowing? If I have not heard from them since. Where can I kneel, if not on your chest? A silence from which only silence can be reaped You open my appetite And apease my anger.
He who carries the grain
Some light pink fruits, close to yellow You peel to get to the sweetness They grow in heavy sun and spit enough to get us out of bed I wonder about you dry parched I like to think that our embrace is purposeful Salt in the corner of your mouth drips You bite, you reap, you Are my mouthful of sweet mayer lemons Leaves still attached and all A senseless tenderness, I do not know what to make of you, Does this render you holy.
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He who stores the grain
Your spine Akin to a dead fish My fork, looking for the marrow I collect You leave
He who distributes the grain
Impatiently waiting for Sunday To share my confession So precisely rehearsed 10 Notre Pere 10 je vous salue Marie Anoint my forhead
Marie Ségolène C. Brault (b. 1988 Montreal, Qc) holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BFA in Intermedia Cyber Arts from Concordia University (Canada). She is currently completing her MFA in Performance at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Marie’s work has been featured in Poetry is Dead Magazine and DRY MAGAZINE, and her books Proprioception (2015), Libation (2016), Aphrodite (2016) and Requiem (2016) have recently been published by Anteism. She has participated in several group exhibits, in spaces such as the Knockdown Centre, Pioneer Works, City Bird Gallery (NYC), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), 8eleven (Toronto), Projet Pangée and Never Apart (Montreal). Marie recently took part in Conversations on Contemporary Poetics at Hauser & Wirth in New York City, she will be performing as part of Tempting Failure in London (UK), as well as completing a residency at BetOnest in Berlin, Germany in July 2018. mariesssegolene.com 56
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Vanessa Gully Santiago
Roles, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
Vanessa Gully Santiago lives and works in New York. Her drawings and paintings depict deeply psychological and intimate scenes that convey conflicting expressions of desire and detachment, vulnerability, and imbalances of power. Her work has been included in exhibitions at JTT Gallery, American Medium and Foxy Production, among many others. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2006 and her MFA from Mason Gross School of Art in 2013. vanessagullysantiago.com â&#x20AC;˘ Instagram: vanessanever 58
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Shala Miller A Vessel For the Language of Survival: A Study of Me and My Mother’s Blood
I
t was last March when I noticed I usually wake up with new discoveries on my skin. Scratches—ranging in size and color, found with and sometimes without blood. I had answers, that were really just questions for my nails and their strange behavior during the night. This confused questioning took part of an ethnographic study about the relationship between me and my mother, Ruby Clyde, but specifically focused on and thought about the idea of trauma being passed in the blood. Through the process and play of finding grounding, understanding, clarity and then completely losing it all–the study, but specifically the scratches, made me realize that my body had already begun a study of itself, with a keen interest in the mystery behind my blood. So, since then I’ve situated myself as passenger in this voyage my body has begun to take in getting to know itself and its history, which can also be understood as a voyage to black womanhood. The Echo is the third part of a multi-part study, containing notes, questions, pseudo-answers but most importantly a marker of when I and my body began to take ship.
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AN UNTITLED NOTE ABOUT BEING SUBMISSIVE IN DECEMBER/THINKING ABOUT THIS FEAR IN DECEMBER I wanna be bad drive me around in your daddy’s car eat my shoelaces and then call me pretty say it like you don’t mean it water me until I’m thin again fake your accent and then try and steal my mom’s hum from my front Pocket
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UNTITLED IN DECEMBER my eyes are too big your mouth is too wide and it’s sunday your dad always smells like grease and rose water my dad’s sheets always smell like hospital hallways you like terrible people I’m a self proclaimed Bad christian and we both have been asking what are love letters really about so may I ask that you cover me once again in the skin you’re in it’s cold
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A LOVE OR MAYBE AN ADMIRATION I DON’T UNDERSTAND Two fears get Together and Say Let’s take it all Babe And suddenly my Skin becomes A cave And I rejoice
Shala Miller was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where she should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find her way out, and find her way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing and singing as an aid in this process.
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