1
2
3
4
KNACK is dedicated to showcasing the work of new artists of all mediums and to discussing trends and ideas within art communities. KNACK’s ultimate aim is to connect and inspire emerging artists. We strive to create a place for artists, writers, designers, thinkers, and innovators to collaborate and produce a unique, informative, and unprecedented web-based magazine each month.
5
Will Smith and Andrea Vaca Founders Ariana Lombardi Executive Editor Jonathon Duarte Creative Director/Design knackmagazine1@gmail.com
6
TEST
ISSUE
Artist Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8,9 Will Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Andrea Vaca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Jonathon Duarte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Ariana Lombardi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
7
WILL SMITH
Will Smith is a Los Angles based photographer and a recent graduate from the B.F.A. Photo and Media program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His photographic work investigates space and infrastructure. The most recent series titled, “I Photograph Utility Boxes” explores the mysterious utility boxes that line Los Angeles streets. “I Photograph Utility Boxes” is on view at the Santa Paula Art Museum and runs until October 21st 2012. It is part of the group exhibition, Next Generation. Will Smith’s work can be viewed at www.willsmithphoto.net can be contacted at will.smith@me.com.
ANDREA VACA
Andrea Vaca was born in Ridgecrest, California. Her family moved to Chicago when she was young. She is Waldorf educated. Andrea moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico for college and graduated with a B.A. in Photography from Santa Fe University of Art and Design. She is 24 years old, lives in Santa Fe, and works as a freelance photographer. She can be contacted at www.andreavaca.com or email: email@andreavaca.com. 8
JONATHON DUARTE Jonathon Duarte is a Graphic Design student at Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD). His body of work consists of digital collage, photo manipulations, typographic treatments, and this magazine’s design, amongst other things. He plans on graduating with a B.F.A. in Graphic Design. Jonathon Duarte can be contacted via e-mail at jduarte915@gmail.com
ARIANA LOMBARDI
Ariana Lombardi was born and raised in Nutley, New Jersey and now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Santa Fe University of Art and Design (formally The College of Santa Fe) and works for Pasatiempo, the weekly arts and culture magazine of The Santa Fe New Mexican. Ariana may be contacted via email, arianalombardi2@yahoo.com or her blog, homeisalonelyhunter.wordpress.com 9
10
WILL SMITH PHOTOGR APHY
A plain box stands above the ground yet few people stop to appreciate it. Fewer know its purpose. A passerby can assume that it provides some utilitarian function. Closer observation allows more intrigue. Who works on these boxes and how long have they been there? Some boxes are steel and others are made of fiberglass. Within these boxes lie secrets and mystery. Once, I was able to open a box and found there were only more boxes, some thick wires, copper pipes, circuit boards, and fuses. My idea that some unbelievably ornate interior existed inside them was wrong. These innocuous boxes are public utility hubs, sometimes for water and electric exams. Sometimes they’re local irrigation for a street or control a traffic light. The jumble of the interiors is a mirror of the way in which they interact with their surroundings and who they serve. These photographs document my curiosity about civic infrastructure and the use of photography in our society. Both are designed to be invisible to the general public. My curiosity led me to look at these boxes, which exist in plain sight, and make them noticed and visible. I find what I already know about the camera in my hands: an image tells us everything about surface, but nothing about use. They say an image is worth a thousand words but they have yet to tell us what a sentence-worth of words actually means.
11
Utility Box 1 35 x 45 C-Print Utility Box 2 45 x 35 C-Print
12
Utility Box 3 45 x 35 C-Print Utility Box 10 45 x 35 C-Print
13
Utility Box 5 45 x 35 C-Print Utility Box 6 45 x 35 C-Print
14
Utility Box 7 35 x 45 C-Print Utility Box 8 35 x 45 C-Print
15
Utility Box 9 35 x 45 C-Print Utility Box 4 35 x 45 C-Print
16
17
18
ANDREA VACA PHOTOGR APHY
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” - Oscar Wilde. If you’re an artist, that’s all there is to it, and it’s your responsibility to share it with others. I love everything about photography. When I see an image that I want to photograph, a type of euphoria passes through me and I am at ease. I began my study of photography at College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had always taken photos throughout my teens, using point and shoots. During my years at College of Santa Fe, now Santa Fe University of Art and Design, I was given an education that a growing photographer dreams of – brilliant professors, amazing facilities and positive reinforcement. This energy was truly beautiful and the talent that surrounded me was incredible. In the fall of 2010, I had the opportunity to venture to Istanbul, Turkey. It was the best decision of my life and now I feel that I can do anything. The advice I can give to a person is to travel. There’s nothing greater than the experience you gain from travel, personally and artistically. Traveling from state to state, country to country, your brain’s adjustment to change, allows your being to have a greater understanding of new information. I graduated from SFUAD with a B.A. in Photography in May of 2011.The past few years I have grown into myself as a photographer or into the mind’s eye, as the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson would say. My photography is strongly influenced by Cartier-Bresson and, “the decisive moment.” I enjoy roaming the streets, driving around to capture the decisive moment in a photograph. In the future, I hope to travel to more countries and do as the Swiss photographer Robert Frank did. He travelled the United States and created a series then a book, The Americans. I want to do that in countries outside of the United States using a 35mm camera and both color and black and white film. My current work is more contemporary in mood and uses a technique close to that of photographer Robert Adams, “New Topographics.” This series, the images featured in TITLE will soon be a photo book called, “Designed and Cohering Landscapes.” It was born from me walking around and finding designs in different architectures. When I see something that clicks, I know I must make a picture.
19
Light Blue Boxed Wall and Broken Fence Brooklyn, New York Summer 2012 Reds and Browns Santa Fe, New Mexico Summer 2012
20
Two White Chairs with a Yellow Bucket St. Michael’s, Maryland May 2012 Orange and ECO-TECH Brooklyn, New York Summer 2012
21
Red and Blue Bricks Brooklyn, New York Summer 2012 Different Greens St. Michael’s, Maryland May 2012
22
Fire Department Connection St. Michael’s, Maryland May 2012 Red Wall Stairs Colorado Summer 2012
23
Circled Adobe Colorado Summer 2012 New York City White Wall and Windows New York, New York Summer 2012
24
25
26
JONATHON DUARTE GR APHIC
DESIGN
Graphic Design encompasses any form of visual communication. It employs the use of the proper tools and mediums to produce a visually appealing product. Graphic Design is the “crystal goblet� that discretely conveys a message by following the line of least resistance. The end result is a product in which every line, shape, form, letter, color, etc. was deeply contemplated, hence Graphic Design being a contemplative art. All this is merely personal opinion, expressed through my work in terms of Graphic Design.
27
Where I’m Calling From TOAST
28
Felipe Pretzel
29
Light Leaks Zeppelin
30
Hiatus For Otto
31
Grovt Triangles, a Study
32
33
34
ARIANA LOMBARDI CR EATIVE
WR ITING
Language is a tool that humans cultivate from birth. Words create narratives and the exchange of ideas and stories have the potential to affect everything. My writing grapples with life’s themes such as the place of the self and its meaning. This is coupled with a neurosis to know and understand the world around me. I want to explore the connectivity of human nature through my work. I write in the form of letters to strangers (which appear in this issue), as well as essays and most recently, spoken word/stream of consciousness/ dream stories. Besides writing words on a page I invest my time in installation art. This discipline is a powerful way to utilize language and imagery to create an experience with words and their meaning.
35
Dear Owner of the Luxor Guesthouse Hostel in Limassol, Cyprus, I think your name was Dean. I have had trouble recalling it, but Dean feels right so I will go with that. I’m writing to explain the kismet thing that happened to me in the kitchen of your hostel. Yours was the first and only hostel I’d ever stayed in and I found slingshots in the drawer under the counter while cooking. And it has taken time—the sun and moon rising and falling day after day—for the importance of the discovery to sink in. Which is intriguing as the weight of it is held in the existence of time. Have you ever had an experience like that? When you mistake the universe telling you something for foreignness? You misinterpret the physical newness of a place for disorientation. You fail to see that the moment or experience—a mannerism, a singular movement, the flexing of a muscle—is a memory of what you have already done and you mistake it for a dream or déjà-vu. But, finding those slingshots goes beyond serendipity, déjà vu, or whatever you call those out-of-place, out-of-time experiences that feel nostalgic in their newness. This particular moment worked itself outside of linear time, reached out from my dream and reinvented itself. These slingshots were forest green, and their existence in that drawer at that moment, my reaction to finding them—cold sweat, flushed face and clammy palms— was identical to a dream I had two years previous, the dream I wrote a letter to wherein I opened a drawer in a kitchen that was foreign to me and found a forest green barbecue lighter and a futuristic flashlight. My physical existence in your hostel was merely a reflection—like when you’re in a dressing room with mirrors in front and behind and your body multiplies infinitely. Now I think about my time in Limassol and see all of its reflexive properties. For example, you referred to yourself in the third person quite a bit; the way a narrator describes a character’s actions in a story. Do you find it as odd as I do when people refer to themselves by their first name? I always feel as if I should look over my shoulder, like an audience is watching my life. What if you were in the dream two years ago? What if you were the force that led me to the kitchen of my dream and I simply forgot about you until I met you. “Dean goes to the store around the corner,” you said, when we asked where to buy food for dinner. It was Elisabeth, Louise and I—two French girls and an Ameri36
can. We were ravenous to see Cyprus, but ambivalent about moving; had come from Istanbul, were wound stiff from its movement, over-stimulated from its language and constant symphony of noise. Cyprus offered rapid decompression. So rapid that we did not know how to simply be. So we smoked cigarettes and drank gin and tonics. How very European of me, I thought. Did you ever think this about yourself when you first moved to Cyprus from the States? You are a native New Yorker after all. I heard it as soon as you spoke, slathered across your mouth—vowels sunken into the back of your tongue, everything pronounced, “aw” whether it be a, e, i, o, or u. The girls and I returned to the hostel from the grocery store and I began to cook. I wanted to eat something substantial. Though I failed to see that being there was substantial or that I had already been there two years ago in my dream. You buzzed around, came into the courtyard from the front desk, offered nuts and dried seaweed to eat. Did we intrigue you? Did you become a schoolboy trying to impress the new girls? Had you costumed yourself to become the forgotten figure of my dream? Your moon-white hair pulled into a low ponytail, canvas jacket and tribal print vest, ready to go into battle, your eyebrows as dark as the Cypriot sky. Did your hair and beard turn white from stress? I don’t think anyone is stressed in Cyprus. Maybe it was from your mother. You mentioned her being the reason you lived on the island. Do you know the slingshots are in that drawer? Are they yours? Or did another guest leave them like a clue on a treasure map? The night before my sister’s flight to Cyprus, the last night we had together before traveling abroad separately, I told her that we’d been sitting in the cradle of a slingshot for five months; the strings pulled tighter, tension and expectation building up as we prepared for departure. Once we were released we’d fall to the ground as quickly as we left. Instantaneous. That image stuck with me everyday that I was abroad. It was my personal symbol for being foreign, for gathering my bearings, for understanding what it meant to be a person in the world, how to manipulate the violent but weightless force of time. I had been carrying that dream of the barbecue lighter with me like a memory and I would always go back to it and ask myself, what does it mean? Why does it feel important? The dream stuck with me like my memories of Limassol—the bus we took to get there, Cyprus’s silence and the stillness of its people, and the smell of the sea and the sunlight. I never knew sunlight could have a smell until I arrived on the island. But the answer to that dream question fell on me when I found the slingshots. If the slingshots were real and I was actually in Cyprus, then what explains having experienced the exact same moment in my dream? Which one happened first? When I discovered the barbecue lighter in my dream it had no bearing on my life. The discovery was as minuscule as lint on a person’s shirt. But the dream’s resonance began reverberating when I found the slingshots. It means that time is not real. How can it be? Life is only an amalgamation of days and their divination from one 37
another is subjective. It is a personal interpretation. The sun rises and sets but we move throughout the spaces and realities we inhabit without pause, the way I moved from America to Istanbul then to Cyprus to visit my sister. It doesn’t matter if a person is dreaming or awake, life is, and continues to be. The girls and I were hung over the next morning. The gin served us well, but the home-brewed rakı you insisted that we try when you finally joined our party twisted us and left sharp headaches and dry tongues. I had tried to explain the significance of the slingshots to the girls. They didn’t quite understand what it meant or had to do with the existence time or lack thereof. The same way you can’t completely translate or convey the mood of a dream, its lighting, the subtext that can only be felt. You found us in the lobby and said you had gotten drunk enough to pull your tooth out. It needed to be done and you were not a dentist type of person. You have got to be kidding me, Dean.
38
Dear David Hume, You talk about things concretely. You say, a person only truly knows through experience. Here, I assume the usage of ‘know’ to be assuredness (if we were to attach what you say to feeling). You call this knowing, an ‘impression’, which I find very laughable as the number of definitions of the word impression, the variation of meaning that any person can imbue their experience with is endless and therefore ironic. Yes, of course. I must experience something to ‘know’ it, as in: I would not ‘know’ what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich tasted like if I never ate one. If I had never combined the three and only eaten them separate from one another I could only offer a description of each and could not properly give language to the sandwich form, to the trio. Very interesting, David. You have a point. I have to say though, this way of knowing does not allow the resonance or sublimity of anything to roam free. And would you apply this to people as well? Can I not ‘know’ a person unless I’ve experienced them? And how would you define experience in this instance? Meeting physically? Or understanding. You are all about human nature. The human understanding. You’re about what comes into a person’s mind, what sticks there (the impression) and how that impression fits into or lends a hand to the etching of the nature of a human. But our brains are the things that limit knowing, that confuse it with feeling and while taking one for the other—knowing for feeling and feeling for knowing—stamps it as a concrete thing, giving any impression definition and meaning. This has been my experience, anyway. This is why in terms of knowing another person; assuredness through experience does not hit the nail on the head. You see, David, everything you say raises more questions inside of me and truthfully, I already ask too many questions. I have been told this since I was a child. I’ve exhausted people. I’ve allowed dangerous combinations of thinking feelings and feeling thoughts to complicate my head. Things like: who am I, who are you, the consciousness of my own self-consciousness, how do I know what I am, how can I be sure of what I know, how will I ever know, where do I end and you begin, how will I know the end if I do not know the beginning? And the best one of all—why? Why is it so? Math never made any sense because I was always told that there was no reason 39
to question an equation. The parts create an answer. They are factors. It is concrete, like you. But I need numbers to talk to me (which is impossible with numbers, because they are stoic and unyielding). My suspension of belief is very small, David. I need to be sure of how things work, visualize them in my head so I can be sure of myself. I cannot have assuredness if I cannot translate the feeling of assuredness. So what about you and I? We’ve never met. How do I know you are real, were real, are dead even? I can’t decide if knowing is a noun, adjective, or verb. What if you and I invented an -ology for my being? That could help. What would you call it? Yours is epistemology—the theory of knowledge. (But David! This is the rub! A theory is a supposition. It itself is not concrete. Do you see what I’m getting at here?) What if my study were rooted in eccentricity? I’d call it bizarrology: the study of what is strange within me. What do you think? I’ll try to create an equation, like math, because I know this to be concrete. I guess this is close to geometry. A few years ago I was given the nickname, Bizarri. Which makes bizarrology all the more appropriate: Ari (short for Ariana) + the effect of an epiphany on my face (violent expansion of the pupils, recess of focus toward the back of my head and the swell of my eyeballs to absorb the pulp of the thought itself )= Bizarri What am I even trying to say? I know that wanting gives way to assuredness. What about needing someone or something? I need all these questions answered, because the amount of coincidence in my life is too high to be happenstance. These ideas I have make me feel like I am the second coming of Jesus, like I’m something to worship, in my own head at least. And I’m afraid of my power, of the impression I make. I want you to tell me I’ve finished with ideas, that I know. But I need one more piece to connect it all. I need you to tell me what to do next. I will not leave you alone until you write me back.
40
Dear Crying (concerning your presence as of late), You’ve been sitting, sleeping, composing yourself like a symphony inside of my chest for two years. What were you waiting for? Because now you’re speaking and it is the most eerie silence I have ever heard. It’s astounding. The sound is focused, concentrated, and sharp, like the tip of a fountain pen or a pocketknife. You won’t let me say a word.
41
42
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES for FIRST ISSUE DEADLINE: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH, 2012
PHOTOGRAPHERS, GRAPHIC DESIGNERS & STUDIO ARTISTS: Up to 10 high resolution images of your work . All must include per tinent caption information (name, date, medium, year). If there ar e specif ic a t ions or pr ef er ences concer ning t he way in w hich an image is displ ayed pl ease incl ude t hem. WRITERS: KNACK seeks writing of all kinds. We will even consider recipes, reviews, and essays (although we do not prefer any thing that is academic). We seek writers whose work has a distinct voice, is character driven, and is subversive but tasteful. We are not interested in fantasy or genre fiction. You may submit up to 25,000 words and as little as one. We accept simultaneous submissions. No cover let ter necessar y. All submissions must be 12pt, Times New Roman, double-spaced with page numbers and include your name, e-mail, phone number, and genre. ALL SUBMISSIONS: KNACK encourages all submitters to include an artist statement with their submission. We believe that your perspective of your work and process is as lucrative as the work itself. This may range from your upbringing and/or education as an ar tist, what t ype of work you produce, inspirations, etc. If there are specifications or preferences concerning the way in which an image is displayed please include them. A brief biography including your name, age, current location, and portrait of the artist is also encouraged (no more than 700 words). *Please title f iles for submission with the name of the piece. This applies for both writing and visual submissions. Acceptable formats: IMAGES: PDF or JPEG WRIT TEN WORKS: .doc, .docx, and RTF EMAIL: knackmagazine1@gmail.com SUBJECT: SUBMISSION (PHOTOGR APHY, STUDIO ART, CREATIVE WRITING, GR APHIC DESIGN) BEST, Will Smith, founder, ar t director Andrea Vaca, founder, ar t director Jonathon Duar te, creative director/design Ariana Lombardi, executive editor
43
44
45
46