ISSUE FOUR / WINTER 2014 / $10 COVER EDITION 3/5 - CHRIS BOYER
THEORY GALLERY DOWNSTAIRS AT CACTUS RECORDS 29 W. MAIN ST. BOZEMAN, MT
NOW SHOWING Joel Tatz-Morey + Josh Mangum Plus Theory Magazine featured artists Dizmal + Jade Lowder
Top Left: “Prismer of the Mind” Bottom Left: “Metadata” by Joel Tatz-Morey Top Right: “Shores of Dragonstone” Bottom Right: “The Tree of Souls” From the Lost in the Woods series by Josh Mangum (mangumart.com)
THEORY MAGAZINE / TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME ONE / ISSUE FOUR / WINTER 2014
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
6 48 52 54
THE NUMBER SIX
CHRIS BOYER A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
UEL SVEEN LAMEWAVVE & BEYOND
KRISTI CHESTER-VANCE ACTIVIST & ART DIRECTOR
THE UNDERGROUND PRESS
NASH ADDICKS FRAGMENTED PERCEPTIONS
BAUBLE OF TOIL AND TROUBLE
KURT DUDLEY THE FACADE
SHORT STORY BY L.B. THOMAS
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SNOWBALL ILLUSTRATION BY ANGELA YONKE
DIZMAL JOHN WARREN
FLATHEAD LAKE
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POEM BY DIANE CORSON
FROM THE SOURCE OF HEAVEN POEM BY T.W. MYERS
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BY ASHLEY MOON
POEM BY SAM GILMER
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KELSEY DZINTARS PAINTING
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#YOLO SHORT STORY BY JEFF HALLSTEN ILLUSTRATION BY ASHLEY MOON
NIKI BUETTNER COLLAGE
WAX SCULPTURE A COMIC BY LOUIS S. WHITEFORD
CHARLIE LYNCH BOZEMAN ART COMMUNITY RESOURCES
CERAMICS
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THEORY MAGAZINE / STAFF & CONTRIBUTORS Staff
Contributors
Editor & Founder Brian Thabault brian@theory-magazine.com
Chris Boyer kestrelaerial.com chris@kestrelaerial.com
Executive Editor Ashley Moon moon@theory-magazine.com
Uel Sveen Uel Shop on Facebook lamewavve@gmail.com
Staff Writer Michele Corriel michele.corriel@gmail.com
Nash Addicks nashaddicks.com nashaddicks@comcast.net
Copy Editor Marquis Mckenzie Q@theory-magazine.com
Kurt Dudley kurtdudley.com kurt@kurtdudley.com
THEORY MAGAZINE
John Warren facebook.com/ADizmalWorld dizmaljw@gmail.com
16 S. Tracy Ave.
Bozeman Montana 59715 802-318-1803
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Submissions Theory Magazine is currently accepting submissions of art, photography, cartoons, music, films and writing. Visit theory-magazine.com/submissions or email submissions@theory-magazine.com
Executive Mailing Services 221 East Mendenhall Street Bozeman, Montana 59715 406.586.2600 data@execservmail.com Theory Magazine is a reader supported publication run by volunteers. Volume one issue was an edition of 100 issues, It has sold out. Issues Two, Three and Four have been distributed at a rate of 250 per issue over the state of Montana and beyond. The cost to print each issue is roughly $8.80. The list price of a physical copy is $10.00. Theory Magazine is an unofficial not-for-profit organization. We are experimenting with a voluntary new pay structure based on yearly income. The scale is outlined below. Yearly Income
Suggested Price
$0 - $30k $30k - $40k $40k - $50k $50k - $70k $70k - $80k $80k + & U P
$10 $12 $14 $16 $18 $20
Our readers who support the magazine and make it happen. Our friends and family who support us. The whole crew at Executive Services for continually doing excellent work printing our magazine. Katie Wing and the staff at The Loft Spa for accomodating our launch party. Brett Cline and the staff at The Zebra for hosting us. Jason Root & Chris Sage for keeping PULSE going and showing support. Bueno & the whole Cactus Records staff for helping out with Theory Gallery. Tatum Johnson for master-minding our new office, and the whole crew at The Foundry. Country Bookshelf in Bozeman and Fact & Fiction in Missoula for carrying our magazine. And of course all of the contributors and artists who fill these pages with their life’s work.
Kelsey Dzintars kelseydzintars.com kelsey.dzintars@gmail.com Niki Buettner graybalance.tumblr.com nikimariebuettner@gmail.com Charlie Lynch facebook.com/LynchClayArt chucksart98@yahoo.com Kristi Chester Vance forestethics.org kristi@forestethics.org
Printed By:
Special Thanks To:
L.B. Thomas lorenblock@gmail.com Angela Yonke yonkeangela@hotmail.com
CORRECTION PHOTO CREDIT FOR TOM MURPHY In Issue 3 we neglected to properly credit the photographs documenting Aaron Murphy’s work. The 5th cover edition of Issue 3 featured his photograph, along with the other shots of Machine. You can see more of Tom Murphy’s work at tmurphywild.com.
Sam Gilmer samgilmer@gmail.com Sarah Eisenlohr saraheisenlohr.com sarah.eisenlohr@hotmail.com Diane Corson Member of School of Art MSU Advisory Council since 2001. dianencorson@gmail.com T.W. Myers waxingpoetic@hushmail.com Jeff Hallsten jmh374215@gmail.com Louis S. Whiteford Creator of Giant Size Rat Poison louiewhiteford@gmail.com
ISSUE THREE / WINTER 2013 / $10 COVER EDITION 5/5 - AARON MURPHY
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
T
his fourth issue marks the end of volume one. When Theory Magazine began, I made a goal to produce four issues in the span of a year, then take stock and see where things stood. It took a bit longer than a year, but here we are. 2014 is upon us and four issues have been printed. What now? The only thing to do is keep pressing on. The format of this publication has stayed the same. The only thing new to report is that I have banished paid advertisements. I love our past advertisers, and small businesses in general, so don’t take it personally. Fact of the matter is, ads suck. I just want to keep making magazines and break even financially. Theory Magazine will not conform to
Even just to break even, the magazine still needs to have an income. That is where you, the humble reader comes in. By purchasing a magazine, you are supporting our goal. We have all seen the rise “pay what you want” pricing structures emerge in the music industry. Radiohead popularized the concept in 2007 when they released In Rainbows by digital download. Why not apply that concept to the print world? Every issue of Theory Magazine is available for free online. I’ve set the base price of our physical copies at $10.00 per issue. Each issue costs $8.80 to print. Retail establisments take a percentage of the sales they make, so that is about as low as I can go to still break even.
That being said, if you can afford it, please consider paying more. There is a handy guide for choosing your price on the facing page. Any additional profits will go towards keeping the magazine ad free, and creating new content. We are also experimenting with alternate means of raising money, such as throwing parties and searching out grants. More on that in the future. For now, I am looking forward to continuing the tradition of print media and expanding the content we feature online. This magazine is powered by a collective of readers and contributors working together to share information. This is a free and open channel for self expression. If you are interested in contributing in any way, please reach out and join us! In Solidarity, Brian Thabault Editor & Founder
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THE NUMBER SIX
A cube, or a hexahedron, is a three dimensional solid object bounded by
Six is the natural number following
six square faces, facets or sides,
five and preceding seven. Since six
with three meeting at each vertex.
equals the sum of its proper divisors, six is the smallest perfect number.
6 is the atomic number of carbon. Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all known life forms. In the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen. A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of
A honeycomb is a mass
carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, tube, and
of hexagonal wax cells
other shapes. Spherical fullerenes are also called
built by honey bees in
buckyballs. Fullerenes are similar in structure to
their nests to contain their
graphite, which is composed of stacked graphene
larvae and stores of honey
sheets of linked hexagonal rings.
and pollen. The axes of honeycomb cells are always quasi-horizontal, and the nonangled rows of honeycomb cells are always horizontally aligned.
A standard guitar
A non-aggregated snowflake often exhibits
has 6 strings
six-fold radial symmetry. The initial symmetry can
Most woodwind
occur because the crystalline structure of ice is six-
instruments have 6
fold. The six “arms” of the snowflake, or dendrites,
basic holes or keys.
then grow independently, and each side of each arm grows independently. Since the micro-environment (and its changes) are very nearly identical around the snowflake, each arm can grow in nearly the same way. However, being in the same micro-environment does not guarantee that each arm grows the same. The Six-Day War, also
Insects, from Latin
known as the June War
insectum or “cut into
was fought between
sections” are a class of
June 5 and 10, 1967,
invertebrates within the
by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt
arthropod phylum that have a
(known at the time as the United Arab Republic),
chitinous exoskeleton, a three-
Jordan, and Syria. The war began on June 5 with
part body (head, thorax and
Israel launching surprise bombing raids against
abdomen), six jointed legs,
Egyptian air-fields. Within six days, Israel had won
compound eyes and one pair
a decisive land war. Israeli forces had taken control
of antennae. They are among
of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from
the most diverse groups
Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from
of animals on the planet,
Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The
including more than a million described species and representing more
image shown above is of a 1967 Israeli air attack
than half of all known living organisms. The number of extant species is
on Mount of Olives Hospital in Jerusalem.
estimated at between six and ten million, and potentially represent over 90% of the differing animal life forms on Earth.
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Beer is sold in sIx packs.
Polydactyly is the medical term for when a person grows
In the New Testament,
a sixth finger. The extra digit can manifest itself very subtly,
the Book of Revelation
for instance only as a nubbin on the ulnar side of the little
cryptically asserts 666
finger, or very distinctly, as a fully developed finger.
to be “the number of a man,” associated
Six degrees of separation
with the beast, an
is the theory that everyone
antagonistic creature
and everything is six or
that appears briefly about two-thirds into
fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in
the apocalyptic vision. In modern popular
the world, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can
culture, 666 has become one of the most
be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.
widely recognized symbols for the Antichrist
It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy and popularized
or, alternatively, the Devil. The number 666 is
by a play written by John Guare.
reportedly used to invoke Satan in rituals.
That idea eventually morphed into
Extrasensory perception
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, a
(ESP) involves reception
parlor game, wherein movie buffs
of information not gained
challenge each other to find the
through the recognized
shortest path between an arbitrary
physical senses but
actor and venerated Hollywood
sensed with the mind.
character actor Kevin Bacon. It rests
The term was adopted by Duke University
on the assumption that any individual
psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic
involved in the film industry can be
abilities such as telepathy, clairaudience,
linked through his or her film roles to
and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal
Kevin Bacon within six steps.
operation as precognition or retrocognition. ESP is also sometimes referred to as a
The Star of David, is a
sixth sense. The term implies acquisition of
generally recognized symbol
information by means external to the basic
of Jewish identity and
limiting assumptions of science, such as that
Judaism. Its shape is that
organisms can only receive information from
of a hexagram with six
the past to the present.
points, the compound of two equilateral triangles. The
A coffin is traditionally
hexagram has been in use as a symbol of Judaism
buried six feet below
since the 17th century, with precedents in the 14th
ground level thus, the
to 16th centuries in Central Europe, where the Shield of David was partly used in conjunction with the Seal of Solomon (the hexagram) on Jewish
phrase “six feet under” means that a person or thing is dead.
flags. Its use probably derives from medieval (11th to 13th century) Jewish protective amulets.
In Islam, Iman is generally outlined using The Six Articles of Faith: Belief in God 6 of Spades Tarot Card
Belief in the Angels Belief in the Prophets Belief in Divine Books
In Numerology, positive characteristics of sixes are responsible, loving, self-
Belief in the Day of Judgment Qadar (Fate)
Braille is a tactile writing system used by the blind and the visually impaired. It is traditionally written
sacrificing, protective, sympathetic and
"Iman is that you believe in God and His Angels and
with embossed paper.
compassionate. These loyal, maternal
His Books and His Messengers and the Hereafter
Each letter cell in braille
figures are domestic, fair and idealistic
and the good and evil fate [ordained by your God]."
is composed of six dots.
healers or teachers.
-Prophet Muhammad in the Hadith of Gabriel
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CHRIS BOYER A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE by Michele Corriel “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” -Anaïs Nin
S
uspended in a transparent skin above the earth, we tilt over the Gallatin River, the sway and roll of the land beneath us. At 700 feet, on par with eagles and hawks, aerial photographer and pilot Chris Boyer, lifts the nose of the small plane. Directly beneath us, our shadow undulates over hills and fields. There are only two seats in the apple red Cessna 172. The landscape below us reveals itself in a way that is both familiar and brand new. I watch Boyer’s avian nature take over, as he dips his wings, scouting for a good shot. Boyer uses his plane like some artists use a brush. Lightly sweeping through the air, his eye searching for color, line, composition and something else. “I look for the hard intersections between the natural landscape and man-made objects,” he says. “I photograph a lot of junkyards.” Veering toward the Madison River, the land – bare of trees in this part of the valley – looks like a cover of velvet. Close enough to see the smattering of movement from a tractor parting the soil and to catch the sun-dazzled water like scales on a fish, reflecting, moving downstream. “There’s a sense of things unfolding from up here,” Boyer says, talking to me through the headset. “And the time scale feels more intimate.” Boyer thinks of himself as a geomorphologist with an airplane. “I wanted my maps to be so detailed you see the movement,” he says. “I didn’t want to work from static maps. And I knew from flying what I could see up there. So I put together my need to fly and my need for good maps. The photography was something I was interested in and when I started my mapping project I began playing around with aerial photography.” Looking at the land from above helped him to understand the formations he was studying. It also helped him to get work. “The aerial photos I took helped me to win clients and it’s a valuable assessment tool. People love the view from above. It speaks to them on a deeper level than conventional photographs.” Centuries ago, when people first began map making, it was an art form, an exercise in the unimaginable made tangible. A stretching of what was known, touching the edges of the unknown. Boyer brings us back to maps as art. The images created by Boyer takes what is known and introduces us to it again, on a much more intimate level. We know these man-made highways of asphalt that line the land, marking it forever. But when we see the drag of blood from a just-killed deer it speaks to us of instinct and responsibility. 8
Drainage Canal, Bonneville Salt Flats, UT.
“There’s a sense of things unfolding from up here, and the time scale feels more intimate.” - Chris Boyer theory-magazine.com
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“We know these man-made highways of asphalt that line the land, marking it forever. But when we see the drag of blood from a just-killed deer it speaks to us of instinct and responsibility.� - Michele Corriel
Edge of the Suburbs, MN.
Roadkill, Gallatin Co, MT.
Middle of the Suburbs, NY.
Junkyard, Prairie Potholes, SD
“Some responsibility goes along with this. I hope my photographs have some kind of impact.” - Chris Boyer
“My work requires participation from the viewer,” he says. “I like to think of maps as static by nature. If you get a high enough resolution to see the ripples on the water, there’s an element of time indicated in the photograph.”
Before using the vertical camera, Boyer would take off the door and shoot while flying. But once he figured out the logistics of the vertical camera and began taking test shots, those became some of his favorites.
His hand is on the remote for his camera, a special set up to snap photographs while he’s flying. He shoots with a pair of Canon 5d Mark 2s, 21 megapixel that is attached to the bottom of the plane. A vibration dampened vertical camera mount he set up by using a small inspection port already positioned in the belly of the plane.
In order to get those shots he needs to trust his intuition. “I put the plane on course,” he says. “I can’t see what I’m photographing as the site dips under the nose. I time my angle; when I get over the area I want to shoot, I hit the remote. Every photograph is a gift.” Boyer knows it’s an honor earn his living in the sky, doing the thing he loves best, and so
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to give back he donates flights to LightHawk, whose mission is to champion environmental protection through the unique perspective of flight. LightHawk’s goal is to mobilize enough volunteer pilots, aircraft and resources to help tip the balance toward sustainability for major environmental issues. Boyer flies volunteers, reporters, and environmental scientists out to sites. “What a great way to use an airplane,” Boyer says. “I remember when I first learned to fly in Oregon. I’d see the ‘fool ‘em strips’ left by the lumber companies. They’re a buffer between the road and thousands of acres of clear cut that could only be seen from above.”
Cyanide Tailings, Whitehall, MT.
Last year he flew over all the coal mines south of Gillette, bringing in radio and video journalists to document the devastation.
Gliding over Lewis and Clark State Park, Boyer says, “It’s a beautiful meander, chaotic but mathematically governed.”
“That’s what’s so great,” he says, “with my need to be an airplane geek, I don’t have be an activist. Through LightHawk I can fly activists, thereby doing something important with my plane.”
Not too far away, a dust devil spins, a brown funnel growing from the ground. A reminder that we are in the hands of nature, no matter the adeptness of the pilot and the steadiness of the plane.
The Cessna shifts and bumps each time we hit a thermal or the wind blows. I realize, once again, we are a tiny thing in a vast sea of sky. Sharing the privilege of spectacular visuals, I can’t stop thinking about how magnificent each contour, each bend of a stream, even the perfectly geometric fields appear.
“The wind is our constant nemesis,” he says. And then he’s silent for a while, taking it all in. “It’s not just art but something … some responsibility goes along with this. I hope my photographs have some kind of impact.”
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UEL SVEEN LAMEWAVVE AND BEYOND
A
lthough he only lived in Bozeman for nine months, Samuel Sveen made a unique impact on our small town art scene. It all began when Samuel, who was living in NYC at the time, followed up on a Craigslist job posting for an opening at Wild Joe*s Coffee Spot. After a lengthy phone conversation between Wild Joe*s owner Ron Gompers and Sam in which they discussed art and NYC, Ron offered Sam the job, provided he move to Bozeman. Ron did not expect the eccentric NYC artist to show, so he was quite surprised when Sam knocked on the door to his office, ready to make coffee. After a few days on the job, Sam noticed the empty space behind the coffee shop and inquired about it’s use, Ron suggested that it become an art space, and so it was that the Bozeman Lamewavve space was born. Over the course of the year, Sam hosted weekly events in the small garage style space.Lamewavve included local and touring music performances spanning genres including, Rock & Roll, Metal, Hardcore, Hip Hop, Electronic, Acoustic, Experimental and Noise. There were also various art shows, interactive events, poetry readings, stand-up and sketch comedy shows. Operating on a weekly basis, Uel Sveen had to get creative with his booking and party ideas. In addition to planning shows, Sam played Rock & Roll music with his good friend Dalton C. Brink in a band called Numbers. Dalton runs the Cottonwood Club and was the inspiration for the piece “Don’t Suck.”
Uel Sveen wears a Lamewavve E-Shirt on the white carpet.
Uel Sveen plays Rock & Roll drums with Numbers
The Doldrums play
I visited Sam at his home studio in Bozeman earlier this year to talk to him about Lamewavve and his own art. What did you do after you graduated from Cornell University? I made coffee at a fancy coffee shop in Ithica, NY. I did that for a year and was just hanging out and doing music stuff. I released a record on a local label, a vinyl record under the name Elsa and the Awesome Awesomes. After that I moved to New York City. I continued to do music stuff and was working at a coffee shop in addition to editing for a website called artobserved.com. It is a super contemporary blue chip fancy shmancy site. All we talked about was the most expensive artists. If we wanted to cover a show, the two questions were, what’s their name? How much do they cost? Our readership was mostly really rich people. It led me towards a lot of weird stuff. It got me more into performance and conceptual art. I used to wear a lot of cut off jean shorts, and I kept all of the legs to make a piece called “I’d rather be pants.” It was silly. There was a lot of corny conceptual stuff. I also got into the online stuff by making e-shirts as a way of involving people more. E-Shirts are an attempt to involve people more with my work. No matter what you are doing, whether you are putting out art or music, eventually people get numb to it. I was trying to get peoples attention and get them to like my page on Facebook. So what I did with the E-Shirts was stalked through my friends Facebook photos, which is what Facebook is for, stalking. Everybody jokes about it, but it 14
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Ron Gompertz joins Uel in flinging Red Ramen at Red Romney at the Cheap RRR Party.
I used to wear a lot of cut off jean shorts, and I kept all of the legs to make a piece called “I’d rather be pants.” is true. I went through and found peoples most embarrassing photo, photoshopped their shirt to be a solid field of yellow, put my logo on it then put the photo back up and tagged them in it.
I was feeling lame, I didn’t care. It was an excuse for feeling lame. In New York I teamed up with Lamewavve Dan. His name is Daniel and my name is Samuel.
Lamewavve was a movement before you got to Bozeman, How did it start?
We were Lamewavve Iel and Uel. It was a pseudo artist collective with a manifesto about shamelessly and annoyingly self-promoting. That was the whole point, to be really annoying. It’s critiquing celebrity and self-promotion.
Lamewavve started right before I moved to New York City. I was feeling pretty depressed. I was stuck in a rut with a lot of different things.
Abstraktes Bild
What was your favorite Bozeman Lamewavve show? I liked the Large Art Show because I brought a kayak in and nobody knew what to do with it. I like the idea of the Large Art show being very literal. My whole aesthetic is very by the seat of my pants. Aborted art was a big part of Lamewavve in New York. We had a lot of stuff that we started and then we would just say, “Fuck it, that’s it.” I like to use a lot of word play. We had a lot of pieces that came in for that show, and some good music. Another good one was the Bring Your Own Photo Show. We had golden cameras, and we had F11 involved for prizes. It was a fun night.
The Doldrums played that night and I really like them. How did the scene in Bozeman affect your visual art? I started painting in Bozeman, seriously at least. The abstracts were the first ones that I did. They are a reaction to traditional Montana landscape art. No, I’m not going to paint a landscape and try to sell it. But also, my brother is very busy and always doing stuff, and the paintings are mostly about doing for doing’s sake. I don’t know what I’m doing, but look, I’m doing something! No, I don’t know how to paint, but I am painting.
It’s just fun to mess around and get wild. It’s fun to just spend and hour and try all kinds of different tools, try closing my eyes or like splattering more paint on. All my pieces always start by me dragging a ski across them. What can you tell me about your decontextualized art pieces? These are to remove the context of other people’s work and point to the things that seem absurd and weird that would seem normal. Most of them I get paintings at thrift stores then paint out the backgrounds. The main idea behind it is that I’m not that great of a painter, and why would any
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Cowboy Boot Abstract
painter in the first place want to paint something super realistic when you have photography. Photography is arguably the truest form of representation, you can’t paint anything that is more true to life than a photograph, so why even bother. I’m just going highlight that, It’s like, I could never paint a wolf that good, so why bother, I’m just going to paint everything else around it. 16 theory-magazine.com
What is the story behind the Michael’s Mother’s Lips piece? In my little shitty loft in Brooklyn I lived with four other roommates. They all just smoked and did drugs all the time. It was kind of a disgusting place. Separated by a piece of plywood below me was Michael, it turned out that he was a heroin addict, which I didn’t really realize for a while.
He was a nice guy and I was good friends with him. He ran out of money and had to move, but when he left he said, “Sam I have this painting.” He had painted it and it was of his mother who had recently died. He didn’t want to throw it away, but he also didn’t have room for it, so he asked me to take it and do something with it. I sat on it a while then decided to just paint over
Dog Mountain
FUCK YEAH
Manhattan Love Nest, Window View
DON’T SUCK
Self Portrait: An Affirmation that the Artist Has No Idea What He’s Doing Michael’s Mother’s Lips
everything except for the lips. The lips are the sexiest part of the painting, so decontextualizing them was kind of strange, just to see them there with nothing else. It was an uncomfortable flip, but I did it. I ran out of paint, so you can still just vaguely see the chin and the rest of her face. What is your obsession with the color yellow? It all started with my love of hummingbird, or seafoam green. In Ithica, I made a keytar out of an old keyboard and a piece of plywood. I painted it seafoam green, then I realized it was my favorite color. I painted my whole bedroom floor to ceiling. My desk, my shelves, my dresser, everything was seafoam green. I also painted my bass guitar the same color. I fell in love with seafoam genuinely. There is a painter Eve Kline, he was a conceptual artist in the 60s and he actually patented his own color, Eve Kline Blue. He had an art show where he painted all sizes of different canvases the same patented
I don’t know what I’m doing, but look, I’m doing something! Eve Kline blue color, but they were all radically different prices. from one dollar to one million dollars. He had his favorite color and he had patented it. My favorite color, seafoam green or as it is specifically known, “hummingbird” was already patented by Martha Stewart. It’s Martha Stewart’s Hummingbird. That was funny to me, my favorite color was already owned by corporate America. Damn. I’m still going to keep painting, but corporate America already owns my favorite color. Then I just had a change, from a very specific color, I decided that I liked Yellow. I didn’t want to be specific. I wanted to keep it broad. Yellow is very bright, fun and energetic. It was a reaction to Martha Stewart.
Skis for When You Want Skis on the Wall but Don’t Have Skis
I try to paint things that cannot be photographed, odd juxtapositions, odd colors, things that may not even be real. Uel Sveen has since moved away from Bozeman to Bloomington Indiana where he is the proprietor of his own coffee cart company called Uel Zing.
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NASH ADDICKS FRAGMENTED PERCEPTIONS
F
ragmented Perception is a collection of images of urban landscapes with floral patterns woven into them, abstracting areas within the image. The floral patterns represent life and beauty contrasted against the decay and forgotten elements of the urban landscapes. Weaving the images together, my intention is to create a unique and interesting perspective, questioning the viewer’s perception.
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Chamonix Mont-Blanc, France
Up close and personal with ursus maritimus, Manitoba, Canada
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KURT DUDLEY THE FACADE
I
am the creator of a special brand of anxiety. I notice small idiosyncrasies that make my heart twitch and inspire a fleeting moment of panic. This panic stems from my fear of having a sudden break with reality. The feeling can only be described as a glitch, or a stutter in my mind. A wide range of subjects trigger my fight or flight mechanism, from debates
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over political issues to the overly contrasted colors of an object lying in the grass. Usually these feelings can be shrugged off or ignored. Sometimes they stick with me, forever arranging in my mind as a lifelong list of anxiety-producing moments. My anxiety is irrational and erratic. Yet that knowledge does not make my feelings any less real.
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DIZMAL THE ART OF JOHN WARREN
W
hat were the most valuable lessons that you gained from your university experience?
Education wise, I’ve been around a lot. I started two years at the University of Wyoming. It was a decent program but they never pushed you. I hate to sound arrogant, but the people and instructors there weren’t anything special, no stand-outs. I ended up going to the community college there, took my core credits, saved up and came to Bozeman. MSU had credibility, nothing like Wyoming. A lot of the people in Bozeman got out and went other places. I’m a firm believer in getting out and experiencing different scenes
where you’re seeing real, legitimate art, seeing what the pros are doing, who they are and how they create their art. I strive to do that and I felt like MSU pushed me to do that. Also competition wise, at University of Wyoming there was no one that challenged me. And I got to the point where I got lazy. I was so focused on getting out of there to the point where I was a mute for almost two years. No talking, no socializing, just working on art. Working three jobs, just to get money. I needed to get out of there. In 2005, I came out to Bozeman. More recently you were living in Portland, what made you want to move again?
Yeah. It got to the point where I needed to get out of Bozeman. I grew up in a small town and there’s certain things about that I’m not a fan of – like when you know everyone – you know their background story, their family. It gets nosey and I wanted to meet new people. I was out of place in Bozeman, which was kind of surprising because it was probably the best year I’ve had art-wise. I moved to Vegas for a while. I tried the whole Vegas market. Turns out there is no market, unless it’s digital photographs of the strip. They love their cheesy digital photography. Still, no one is buying it. I had buddies with amazing galleries and amazing art in them, they only sold one piece out of 300 shown this year.
I personally desire darker imagery, but from a business standpoint, I have to tone stuff down for the general public. They didn’t bother putting price tags on it because no one is going to buy it. Vegas is it’s own little world which I don’t recommend for anyone unless you are on vacation. What is it like working as a creative artist and working the market, trying to do the professional thing? What’s your experience and take on it thus far? Connections. Networking. Networking is key. I used to be stubborn about things and try to let my art speak for itself. Before I moved to Montana, I was quiet. It was hard to talk to me and I would be the guy in the corner at my own shows. Here, meeting certain people, I came out of my shell. I met so many people who know people. A place like Bozeman doesn’t necessarily have the most thriving art scene but the people who are in it have great connections. There is a huge variety. I know blacksmiths in this town, graphic designers, ceramicists and such a huge variety of creative people. Where in Wyoming, I can’t talk art with anyone. I put my art out as a job. Which a lot of people romanticize about the lifestyle. In theory, that would be nice but statistically, you’re going to be putting in more than 40 hours a week. Going from working 40 hours a week with a job that guarantees money and has stability, to working 60 hours a week with no guarantee or stability is a huge leap for people. I’ve toiled with that for many years and finally got to the point where I’m confident enough where I can pay bills by doing art. I can’t look friviously for it. If I had a approached it any other way, I don’t think I could have done it. I’m very conscious of all my situations. I learned a lot about having a career in art. It’s small things like the importance of prepping your canvas. I don’t leave a white edge because that’s poor representation. With Teeth
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Lord of Dark Waters
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New Fetish
Pestilence
I always grew up where everything is good, everything is happy, Lots of wildlife art. I want to be the complete opposite of that. Do something that stands out. theory-magazine.com 33
To a gallery, that looks lazy. “He paints an amazing piece but can’t even get to the edges?” I am all business oriented. I work out all the fine details from top to bottom. In that regard, I’ve had good support from my friends who are like minded. What types of themes do you work with and where do you draw inspiration for your visuals? Generally dark and evil things. I always grew up where everything is good, everything is happy, Lots of wildlife art. I want to be the complete opposite of that. Do something that stands out. I personally desire darker imagery, but from a business standpoint, I have to tone stuff down for the general public, which I don’t mind. My art isn’t evil 100% of the time. I had a battle with color over the years. When I started college, I was anti-color. I like black and white, sepia tones, but no bright colors. I had buddy who got me into graffiti and from there on out I discovered so many colors. With graffiti, you are limited to one tool, your can. The quality of paints differ and some cans are easier to use, but I was so intrigued by adding certain colors, without manipulation. I had to make it work. I’ve seen a lot of people abusing color, throwing all the colors on the canvas and saying “ta-da!” Do you still work in graffiti style spray painting? Yes, a lot for my backgrounds. I use acrylic and spray paints. I love oil paints but the drying time kills me. I like using a dot matrix with spray paint and getting good blends. Big scale or small scale, it goes quick. I’ve done a lot of live painting, so its a good medium to use. Where have you done live paintings? I’ve done some painting at the ArtWalk in Bozeman. I also work for the GVSA, Gallatin Valley Skating Association, with a lot of fundraisers to auction off the paintings during the event. We have it lucky in Bozeman with so many venues and opportunities, which is shocking to me. Try going to Portland where a lot of these people have the mentality to go to a big city and make art. Well you’re a dime a dozen in a big city, statistically. I’ve had a lot of friends who want their band known, so they move to Seattle. How about you get your band and your style established? Get some mileage under your belt because in Seattle there’s 100 other bands doing the same thing that you are doing. Do you work with any other types of art besides visual? In the past year, I’ve been dabbling in casting resin toys. It’s pretty difficult. At first, it’s kind of pricey because of pressure pots. The Boston marathon made it only possible to purchase them with a commercial license. And there’s online workshops to make them yourself, but I don’t trust that. I also do woodworking and basic welding, I consider myself a jack of all trades. I make that a conscious decision because I get bored. I keep the hand moving. I can do graphic design even though I’m self taught. In all of your creative endeavors, if you get stuck on something-- creative blocks, what is your fall back? Other artists. I hope when others look at art, they get that feeling. I need to paint now! 34
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A lot of my friends are on-top-of-their-game artists. It’s good to get out and look at some good quality artwork. Also, these people have their ideal artist model. They work artist hours to be able to pay the bills. The people I surround myself with influence me. I weed out people who just hang around and romanticize about the artist lifestyle. People will ask me what I did last night and I’ll respond “I did 16 hours of painting.” They’d respond “That’s horrible.” Sometimes it is horrible, but it’s like any other job. There’s going to be rough days, especially before shows. Three days before my shows, I’m pulling all-nighters. I’m not a guy who procrastinates last minute but I always achieve my goal. I have a structured timeline. I wish more people did that, especially in college. When I was going to school I worked full time at a job that required me to be at work at six in the morning. Some days before my eight o’clock class, I’d have to be at work at 4:30 in the morning. I’d come to class and everyone else would be moaning and groaning waking up while I was in the middle of my day. When it came to projects, I didn’t have time to put it off until the last minute. Especially in printmaking because every time a project is due, you’re limited with space and presses. I don’t have time for that. I don’t even have time for a social life. I’m the type of guy that will have my work ready two days before it’s due. What style of art pisses you off the most? Something that you wish didn’t exist, if any. I’d have to say conceptual and performance art. And that’s only because of Portland. I was thinking about going to grad school out there. I attended a grad show opening. It was weird, the minute I got there, all these people I was around were talking about this one girl. “She’s the new in-thing, we’re going to be hearing about her!” Her piece was a video of her eating cake and spitting it in her boyfriend’s face. It was running on repeat all night. There was also a guy that did very traditional illustration and his work was tucked back in the corner, in the shadows. They wanted these larger than life performance characters. They focus more on being able to bullshit your art, than actually create your art. I got an anxiety attack, turned into the hulk and walked out of that gallery. It was a good realization of what I’m not into. Maybe grad school isn’t necessarily for me. I’m able to survive and do what I want to do without the safety net of grad school. Not to knock anyone going to grad school, but I think to some extent, it’s a safety net. Extending and pushing the debt back, you know. But I know it’s a studio space, it makes sense. Or, I could also say abstract art. With people who make good abstract art and you can see the amount of hours they put in. Bad abstract art, you can clearly see that there was no work, no time and no effort involved. They think it’s an easy way out. You’ve got to put time in before you jump to abstract art. Look at all the masters who started out realistic, and decided to change it up. And why not? That’s a proper approach to things. Start out with photo realism. I used to draw the covers of Cabellas catalogs. A lot of people take abstract art as the easy way out. It is such a trend lately.
Any last words? I hope this doesn’t come off as negative. Everyone always says “Oh, John your so negative.” What I’ve learned through my experiences is that you have to approach art professionally. At a show, I talk to everyone, I don’t get sloppy drunk. I take care of the show first. I feel an artist must represent themselves to the fullest. You can go and enjoy yourself in the off-time, but some artists just represent themselves so poorly in public. Another thing I’ve learned is the minute you love everything you
Beyond the Barriers of Light
do, you plateau. Very rarely do you see a person who can be truly critical of their own work. You can be happy with your work, but when you can look and see room for improvement, that forces you into your next piece. Being content is dangerous, in any aspect of life. The minute you quit caring about something and become complacent, you get in trouble. Like on a job site, being complacent could mean getting your hand chopped off by a miter saw. Luckily, in art, you won’t lose your hand. Don’t be stagnant.
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KELSEY DZINTARS PAINTER
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Badlands
hat’s your artistic background?
I grew up in South Dakota and did quite a bit of artwork growing up. I had a pretty creative childhood. My mom was always doing arts and crafts with us. It wasn’t until later on that I discovered that not every household has an arts and crafts room. In my sophomore year of high school, I knew I wanted to go into graphic design because I liked computer work. I always enjoyed painting and homemade cards and things like that. I went to MSU and studied in the graphic design program. My thesis project was a graphic novel, so I was trying to push in that direction. After school, I freelanced for about a year. Eventually, I ended up back in Big Sky working for Outlaw Partners. Ever since, I’ve been trying to keep up my own artwork on the side. Nights and weekends, I paint as much as I can.
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Free Rain
Whether you are doing it for yourself or making a career out of it, keep working. How do you balance your interest in graphic design and fine art? I think they complement each other. Working with a client, you have boundaries to work inside. It’s nice to get away from that and have no restraints. As a designer, it’s important to draw and keep the creativity flowing. Thinking outside the box and bringing it back in. It’s a nice balance. My main passion is my fine art side but I kind like the balance of having a place to go to work and given problems to solve with more structure to it. Where do you draw inspiration with your fine art? It’s a lot from my own experiences as well as fantasy. Experiencing nature like all forms, I think that keeps the art true to myself. It keeps it personal in that sense. When I was in high school and developing my ideas, I was interested in the big city. I had a lot of imagery that was very urban and it wasn’t anything close to home. So now, I’m bringing it back in. Do you work on any work for commission? I’ve done a few things. I like to be given subjects to work on and put my own flair into it. What other hobbies and passions do you have? I enjoy doing outdoor stuff, I snowboard and ski. I do a little bit of music, play guitar and piano a bit. I also play roller derby. I started playing with The Gallatin Roller Girls a little over a year ago and since I joined, it’s grown immensely. I always played sports growing up, so now it’s my outlet. It is something rare to be an adult and be on a team. I think its just really empowering that our ages range from 18 to 45. We are from all walks of life. It’s a cool community, a lot of fun. What advice do you have for people breaking into the world of creative work? The biggest thing is to keep working. There was a time when the creative flow was fluid and I had no problem going from one painting to the next, cranking stuff out. Then I would hit a roadblock and not paint for months. So it’s really hard to get that momentum going again. I went to school with a lot of kids; once we were out of school there wasn’t that structure of assignments and they didn’t do anything with it. It’s sad because there was a lot of great talent. Whether you are doing it for yourself or making a career out of it, keep working.
Jellyfish Island
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Synesthesia
Foxy Mountain Snake Buzz
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American Spirit
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NIKI BUETTNER COLLAGE ARTIST
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What ignited this notion of awareness? ell us about yourself.
I’ve always been a very observant person which led me to be critical of a lot of aspects of society. I find it hard to relate to a lot of things, generally associated with mainstream. Over time, I developed interest in environmental issues. I wanted to make artwork that was somewhat concerned with the values that I have. What messages does your work strive to convey? We can see our own impact on the Earth. Stop buying useless products that we will throw away, only to replace it with another one that is slightly new or updated. The ideas of planned obsolescence and consumerism were definitely in mind when I was making these collages. I really want to reduce the amount of materials it takes
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to make art. I like to use recycled materials. The boards I mount the materials onto are scraps from art students on campus. I avoid buying new products.
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I think it was a gradual process. When I was in high school, I certainly didn’t want to be imposing on anybody, whether it’s something as little as littering. I always knew littering was bad, but never consciously thought about it. I think a lot of it came from starting to become vegan, which I learned from my sister. A lot of values came from my sister initially. Veganism sprouted into environmentalism. There wasn’t one certain thing that ignited it. My artwork through college slowly developed into that. My first couple years, I didn’t produce anything that was socially conscious. Until one series on the urban sprawl and unfinished construction projects around town. Big giant slabs of concrete left in a field because, for whatever reasons, they put it aside. I couldn’t continue doing film
photography because it was taking things from the environment. I actually wanted to construct something, and not use all these resources associated with darkroom processes. Traditional film photography uses a bunch of water and chemicals that may or may not be filtered out of the ecosystem. That thought led me to digital photography, which can be done over and over without environmental contamination, besides the initial manufacturing process. Would you consider your artwork as documents or photographs? How would you define your medium of art? Collage. Photography is a means of recording my work, so I can distribute it for people to see. Most of the collages I make and then deconstruct, so they are no longer an object. I don’t think my artwork is valuable in itself. It’s more about the message. I was never really concerned with selling prints. For my trash collages, I recycled the recyclable materials I gathered. I had no intention of making anything
For Sale
Under The 19th Street Bridge
lasting. I wouldn’t consider it photography, but the trash could be considered documents of different locations around town. What do you want people to experience while viewing your pieces? Just having people seeing the trash. Everyone is aware of littering as a problem, but seeing it in an organized manner makes people more self-aware. It comes down to being mindful of your own individual impact. It’s systematic. We are taught to be okay with disposable things, the idea that nothing is reusable. You can get your to-go coffee cup.
We are taught to be okay with disposable things, the idea that nothing is reusable. You can get your to-go coffee cup. How can we create work that makes people actually give a shit? I think taking it out of the gallery space is one thing we can do, creating public installations using trash or a pile of shit in one location. It may be aesthetically beautiful from a distance but once you get close, then people realize the
true material. Making it more visible and not segregated from public life, like so much art is. You more or less expect to find some sort of activist or environmentally conscious artwork at some point, but it’s a question of whether or not people take it to heart. That is one the largest struggles of being an artist. To move people or
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Ditch Behind CVS, Bozeman, Montana
make them more conscious of their own actions or society’s actions. I always ask myself whether my efforts are worthwhile as an artist thus far. If I’m making art to criticize society, I should be able to put into practice the values that I’m promoting. But if it just ends there, it’s more or less stroking my own ego. Like “Look at me! I’m making recycled art,” but it doesn’t solve anything. My art is an attempt to do something out of my frustration with the world. Have you had any negative feedback from people?
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No. Most people give me positive feedback. If anyone has anything negative to say, they keep it to themselves. My trash series is pretty safe, especially in Bozeman, where people are more or less environmentally conscious or at least promote an image of being that. The only image that I produced that evoked some sort of reaction was ‘Best Buy’. People were confused, asking what I was trying to say with it. The idea of that image is “ethical capitalism,” or being able to buy your guilt away. Obviously there’s poverty in the world, so if I buy this TV and a little bit of profit goes to help some kids in Africa, then
I’ll feel better about myself. I can justify my reasoning for buying a TV under that promotion. I am questioning why that company is promoting the image of being compassionate, when really it’s just a miniscule amount of money to them. It’s all about public relations and profit. Who are some of your inspirational figures? The one artist that comes to mind is Barbara Kruger. She is very to the point. She doesn’t try to hide behind abstractions. Currently, my inspiration comes from people who produce their own work and distribute it freely, like the
Abandoned Underground Parking Garage, Bozeman, Montana
DIY mentality of zine production. I read a lot of zines that people produce online. I am always searching for them. I read personal accounts of their own experiences, artwork, and/or political theories. I like any sort of artist that incorporates their values into their artwork as a statement, rather than being about aesthetics or beauty. Which is fine – there’s a place for that – but it really doesn’t inspire me. Another artist I like is Eric Drooker, who has very politically motivated stuff. He works in printmaking, wood-block style. It’s an interesting time for artists who are doing these specifically motivated creative pieces, that
we do have to live up to our statements and not be hypocrites. I think it’s impossible not to be a hypocrite. I’m a hypocrite sometimes. How do you explain that to people who really don’t understand alternative means of production or commentary? What’s your response to people that think you should be making a profit off your work?
to photograph a pretty landscape and put it in a nice frame and sell it for a couple hundred bucks but that’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to do weddings – nothing commercial – even though that’s what pays. I don’t think there’s any place for me to make money with the art I do now. Art is just something I do for myself to keep me sane on some level, along with writing. Any sort of expression, even on Facebook, some of the things I vomit out.
I have a day job that covers my expenses. On some level I feel like I have to compromise what I do to be able to sell something. It’s easy enough
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Is there a piece of art that has been monumental for you? I try to avoid picking favorites or the most influential because I can’t say there is a single work. I’m a big believer of inter-sectionality. Everything combines and everything cumulates. Everything builds together and reacts with each other. How should we expand the conversation on capitalism in art? The persistent push for buying products is inherent in capitalism. Just the idea of getting phone calls from people trying to sell you stuff or receiving mail that you can’t stop because they paid a certain person to send you this mail. I think capitalism has made it very comfortable for most people to live with the idea of “buy this thing, get rid of it, then buy another thing... repeat.” That message is not compatible with my own. How to communicate that to an audience is a struggle. Just being able to use the word “capitalism” in that context gets people thinking. Barcodes
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Celebrate
Best Buy
I don’t want it to be about the individual, like it’s their fault that the environment is going to shit because they happened to buy McDonald’s and they threw it out their window one time. I’m more concerned with what is it in our culture that makes that sort of action okay, and seem normal. I would say most people don’t agree with the notion that buying things makes one happier, but it’s still in the back on some people’s minds. Society is so fractured, everything is so commoditized. Part of the reason I don’t sell my artwork is because I don’t want it to become another commodity that someone with enough extra money will put on their wall to make them
I am questioning why that company is promoting the image of being compassionate, when really it’s just a miniscule amount of money to them. It’s all about public relations and profit. look cultured. I want my artwork to be available to everybody who wants it, even if they can’t afford it. Which fortunately, I make enough money at my job to be able to afford to do that. In that regard, I’m still a hypocrite. The creation of my artwork is a constant struggle between
myself, my ideals and how to navigate through society in a way that makes me feel satisfied. I realize what I do is valuable, the question is how do I define valuable?
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CHARLIE LYNCH CERAMICIST These ceramic cups are replicas cast from plastic disposable cups. The surface is a product of the wood firing process, each piece is unique. This work is a comment on America’s use of the ubiquitous plastic disposable cups and the negative health effects they can have on people. I hope to provoke consideration of what people drink out of and why. Some of the plastic cups casted contain a chemical called BPA (bisphenol A). “Bisphenol A is thought to be an endocrine disruptor which can mimic estrogen and may lead to negative health effects. More specifically, Bisphenol A closely mimics the structure and function of the hormone estradiol with the ability to bind to and activate the same estrogen receptor as the natural hormone.” What happens if you drink from something that could poison you? Would you drink from a lead cup? No, you know it’s bad for you. So why do
you drink from plastic? Three of these cups had BPA (bisphenol A) before they became clay. One million cups are thrown away every five hours in the United States alone, filling up our landfills and our oceans with trash. Plastic breaks down into smaller bits of plastic, but never truly breaks down entirely. Plastic particles enter the ecosystem and concentrate in areas like the Pacific garbage patch.
As consumers we need to use our money wisely, in order to change the products that companies make and sell.
As consumers we need to use our money wisely, in order to change the products that companies make and sell. Our choices on how we spend the all mighty dollar can influence the companies that provide products. By not purchasing a product made with BPAs you can stop the use of BPAs. We should demand labeling of plastics and to know the chemicals they contain. We should have health effect warnings. We need to recycle all plastics in the proper way.
Photographs by the artist
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KRISTI CHESTER-VANCE DEPUTY DIRECTOR AT FORESTETHICS ACTIVIST & ART DIRECTOR How did you get your start in graphic design and advertising? It’s what always made sense to me, I always saw it in a different way. I was lost in art since I was a child. I remember the art in first grade better than anything else in first grade and it kind of progresses like that in my whole life. I had this tree in my backyard with all these swings and hammocks hanging off of it. That was my childhood. I loved being in that tree. It got infested with bugs so my parents had to cut it down. I was so mad even though I kind of understood why, I was just so mad. They cut it down and as a symbol of my discontent, I painted the stump with bright and ugly colors. Every time they looked out of their bedroom window they would have to see it. Then my dad had the stump removed. It was really funny actually. I think that was my first direct art action. Was there a distinct moment when you realized the power that design can have in our world? I actually studied journalism and advertising in college. I am really interested in words and writing. The problem with journalism was that I wanted to be an activist. Journalism is supposed to agnostic. I couldn’t do it. Everyone said “You’ve got to be agnostic.” I stayed in journalism, and would do art on the side, painting huge portraits of war criminals from the 1996 war in Serbia. I was painting these war criminal posters and writing. It became clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to be a journalist and an activist. I realized that being a designer and advertiser is such direct communication. It’s these bite-size chunks of information. In the pre-Twitter days it was a way to condense a big amount of information into a very simple concept. That was really appealing to me. I came of age when Nike was doing a lot of big things. That was huge moment to see the power of advertising. Make something out of nothing. I’m struck by that. I didn’t like the consumption piece but I was very struck by the power. When you left school you were working in a design industry, the more typical commercial side. What inspired you to leave that side of work and move into the more activist, non-profit sector of work? I partly paid my way in design and advertising school by designing this business to business magazine about working in the kitchen. Then I really wanted to move to San Francisco, so I set up seventeen job interviews. I was really an art director, my degree was in art direction. I went to interview at all these ad agencies, during the “dot.com” boom. It was crazy. People were writing me blank checks to create logos for crazy “dot.coms.” I took a job with a woman because I valued her design sensibility. She had pretty solid clients that
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Impact of Tar Sands oil extraction
We focus on tracking where the products we use everyday come from. When they come from environmental destruction, we hold companies accountable for that destruction. resonated with me, like educational services, and then she had Chevron. I didn’t want to be on that file. But eventually, I got on that file. One day they asked me to design the cover of Chevron’s quarterly report. They had this clear cut in a forest, and they asked me to choose the best looking photograph of it. At the same time, I had also started doing design work for Rainforest Action Network and we were fighting against that same clear-cut. In that moment, I knew that if I didn’t take heed, then I might end up doing work on the Chevron side of things. It was great money, great clients, expense account lunches, but I had to ask myself, “Am I going to be doing this so early in my life? Should I let go of my dreams this early in my life?” I didn’t have kids to pay for, I didn’t have a mortgage, so I said, “This is the time.” What organizations do you currently work with and what are the goals of each of those? I am the Deputy Director for ForestEthics. I’ve worked there for twelve years. We focus on tracking where the products we use everyday come from. When they come from environmental destruction, we hold companies accountable for that destruction. That can look like Staples or Office Depot, their paper comes from the Boreal
Forest in Canada. So we expose that to their customers because we believe the customer is always right. One of the difficulties is that these companies have so much money. When we were running our Staples campaign, they made more money in a single store in one week than our entire organization’s annual budget. It was one of many campaigns that we were running. So it’s not about money, it’s about brands. A brand is so powerful these days. That’s what we do at ForestEthics. We are doing a lot right now against the tar-sands oil extraction. We ask, “Where does all this oil come from? Where does all this fuel come from that we all use?” In particular, we often forget in America, that stuff doesn’t grow on shelves in stores. We ask not only “What is that paper and where did it come from?” But also “How did it get here?” These trucks that transport everything around use a tremendous amount of oil. Most of it is coming from tar sands. So we work on that as well. I also have a small design firm with a friend of mine, it is called Half Full. We have been working together since 2000 with a number of clients. Right now, we’re doing a lot of work for storm water run-off, which is pollution that comes from covering ground, covering roofs, and really hard surfaces. There is nothing
stopping these pollutants from running straight into our rivers. So we’re doing a lot of work for organizations that bring awareness to that issue. Concerning ForestEthics, what would you consider to be the organizations most successful campaign to date? We run a cross-border organization, half Canadian and half American. In the U.S., people say “Oh my gosh, you ran the campaign against Victoria’s Secret!” In a certain world, everyone knows that campaign. That is perceived as a huge success and it was a huge success. On the other hand, sometimes it’s the stuff you don’t see in the news that is so powerful. For example, in the campaign to change the way catalogs are made, we worked with Williams-Sonoma. They run a lot of catalogs, like Pottery Barn and many others. They mail out a ton of paper. They worked with us very closely, but there was never a campaign and nobody ever saw anything in the public. However, as a result of our interactions, they made changes that powerfully transformed the entire paper industry. In Canada, we are known for actually legislating the protection on the ground. They may not know about our Victoria’s Secret campaign but they know we’ve helped protect the Great Bear Rainforest on the west coast of Canada. We work in a place where we connect the dots between the consumption and the places that consumption impacts.
The Canadian government tried to shut us down. That was a pretty big challenge. They tried to shut us down specifically because of our work fighting against the tar sands development. That takes a lot of work to get around.
What is the biggest challenge your organization has run into while fighting the development of Canadian tar sands? The Canadian government tried to shut us down. That was a pretty big challenge. They tried to shut us down specifically because of our work fighting against the tar sands development. That takes a lot of work to get around. What kind of actions did they take? The government has allocated a large amount of money to challenge the non-profit financial status of organizations. Basically, they’ll audit you, which is a huge amount of work for an organization to handle. Then they’ll audit you again the next month, and then they’ll audit you again. That’s one way they do it. Another way they do it is by telling us we have to get rid of our fiscal sponsors or they will shut us down. It was pretty straightforward calls for action. It’s difficult to handle being called an “enemy of the state.” How do you train yourself to handle that sort of thinking? Americans are living in such a time of transition, if you think about the fact that the iPhone is not even six years old. Now half of all Americans have smartphones. Facebook is almost seven years old. We are living in transformation but we don’t see it. When we talk about changing the way we drive, what we drive and how we move things around with oil, people think it’s impossible. They think it’s rainbow and unicorns. It’s not. It’s just like the horse and carriage. What’s a car? What’s going from a candle to electricity? We have to think like that. It’s a big challenge. Ad: Victoria’s Dirty Secret Jan 1, 2001
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5B
USA TODAY WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2011
What actions can an individual take to help ForestEthics reach it’s goals, or even just with our general thought patterns? We have all kinds of actions on our website. We have 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 3 hour or 3 day actions you can take. But on a broader scale, re-awakening our imaginations is really important. Starting to look at what’s possible and realizing we need to compete on ‘green’ is really important. After one person does that, things start to shift. We all have to start asking some serious questions. Why? Why do we consume like this? Why is it that I order a cup of coffee and they just give it to me in a paper cup? The default being, your cup, that is reusable. Why are we doing the things that we are doing? Where does this stuff come from? We all know that corporations have incredible power. Corporations live because we give them our money. Voting with your money at the check-out line is incredibly powerful. Of course, voting in elections is important, but we forget that these companies that are so big and are running the world only exist because we give them our money. You should ask yourself, “Who are you giving your money to?” Can you explain what greenwashing is and why ForestEthics is against the “Sustainable Forest Initiative” campaign?
Dole Bananas: Brought to you by Dirty Oil. It takes a lot of fuel to get a banana from the tropics to the produce aisle of your grocery store. Unfortunately, Dole uses fuel made from Canada’s Tar Sands—some of the dirtiest oil on Earth—to bring you its bananas. Extreme energy from the Tar Sands isn’t monkey business—it poisons water, air and communities, while ravaging one of our most important natural resources: North America’s Boreal Forest. Most of the companies in the Fortune 1000 are shipping products with fuel made by refineries from Tar Sands, but a growing number of companies have taken action to protect their brands from this problem by asking the simple but powerful question: Does the fuel we buy reflect our values? Dole told us they have ‘no interest’ in that. Tell Dole to join the clean energy bunch and stop giving our future the slip: visit rottenbananas.org to learn more and get involved.
rottenbananas@forestethics.org | 1-855-TOXIC-OIL forestethics.org | facebook.com/forestethics | twitter.com/forestethics
USA Today ad: Dole and Chiquita, drop tar sands fuel August 17, 2011
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When I started this work in 2001, we ran a campaign against Staples and there was nobody there that dealt with sustainability. They didn’t know where their stuff came from. They literally did not know. I tell you what, twelve years later, these companies have departments of sustainability. They know the power of green. We ran a campaign against Staples. One of our demands was that they had to market their green products. They said, “Okay, we’ll try it.” They are based in Framingham, so they took their flagship store in Boston and painted a wall green. They put their “green” products in front of it to see if there was any value in marketing products that are ‘green.’ Needless to say, it worked. This was in 2002, think about the market for “green” today. It’s a five hundred billion dollar market at a minimum in the U.S. There’s so much value for ‘green’ stuff. Every single company wants to tell you their stuff is ‘green.’ Greenwash is just a cynical way to take advantage of consumers’ best intentions by telling them that what they’re buying is ‘green’ when it is not. It doesn’t mean anything beyond a pretty little label. The SFI (Sustainable Forest Initiative) is owned, operated and run by the logging industry. They wanted in on the greenwashing game. Basically, they were like, “Hey! Are you logging over there?” Then the company says, “Yeah, I’m logging.” Then the SFI says “Okay, Great! you are certified. certified for logging.” The SFI has invested a tremendous amount of money marketing a label like the “organic seal of approval,” but it’s meaningless. I don’t think they’ve ever rejected a request for certification. It’s a scam to prey on your best intentions as a consumer. ForestEthics feels strongly about holding companies accountable for that.
We want to move the marketplace towards better products. If someone is out there preying on people, we aren’t going to stand for it. We are running a huge campaign to hold them accountable because the more the SFI label shows up and people think it’s ‘green,’ the more problematic it is. That contradiction is interesting in the design world, where you can use the power of design to expose wrong-doing, then the wrong-doers turn around and use design to legitmize themselves. That’s actually true. That’s a really hard thing as a designer, to see these incredible people and organizations that do such powerful work with so much integrity, but they’re terrible at marketing. Some of the best caliber work out there is so hard to find because the people who do it don’t know how to market themselves. Then you see really shoddy work with no integrity, and they are everywhere because they have money and are really great at marketing. They have big celebrity marketing campaigns to market this stuff and they’re geniuses at it, but the product is garbage. Meanwhile the good products and services go un-seen. We work to balance the scales and challenge that paradigm. What advice do you have for young designers who would be interested in designing for environmental and social justice? The prevailing opinion in some design school institutions is that “There are no jobs doing that.” That’s exactly what they told me when I was in design school. I was able to see beyond that though. When I was in school, Jelly Helm came and talked to us and really instilled in me the power of design. He was a genius advertiser, he basically made Nike what it is today. He designed a Nike commercial where a team of soccer players is playing a team of demons in a futboll championship. It is a really cinematic advertisemnt. At the end, Ronaldo squares off one-on-one against the demon goalie. He non-chalantly flips up his collar and kicks the ball with so much power that it punches a hole through the devil and he scores. Jelly was in London during the World Cup when the ad was airing. He was in a pub and everyone is going crazy for the match. His commercial comes on and the whole place goes quiet. They all watch
The SFI has invested a tremendous amount of money marketing a label like the “organic seal of approval,” but it’s meaningless. I don’t think they’ve ever rejected a request for certification. It’s a scam to prey on your best intentions as a consumer.
and when Ronaldo flipped up his collar, everyone watching flipped up their own collars. That was the moment he realized how much power he had. Designers have so much power. So after the match he came home to his wife and said, “Honey, the craziest thing happened. Look at what I did!” She said, “I have a crazy story for you too, I was teaching these inner-city kids in Virginia and I asked them to draw a picture of heaven. I can’t tell you how many of them drew themselves wearing Nikes.” Do you remember when people were shooting each other for Nike shoes? That got him. He asked himself, “What am I doing?” That story spoke to me, and I realized that the things that nag at you and bother you, that’s the core of who you are, what you believe in. But, you might have to abandon it sometimes. There are times in life where you have to, where something happens to your family or financial circumstances where you have to put those feelings aside, but I’ve never heard of anybody dying wishing they had made more money or worked more. That’s what makes your life have meaning. My suggestion to people who feel this inside of them is to not let go of it, but also set yourself up for success. If you say that you are going go all out, and work for free and starve yourself to pursue your passions, you are setting yourself up to fail. You aren’t going to have a place to live and you’re not going to have food. That’s not setting yourself up for success. What does it look like? Maybe, “I’m going to get this job, give myself cash padding for six months and then commit myself to this project.” Or maybe it’s going to be my side project and check in
with myself and make it a real project. It’s really important to recognize that there is compromise. When we sit down with these logging companies and we are negotiating, if we say, “No we aren’t going to do this,” and they say the same thing, we aren’t going to get anywhere. There needs to be some compromising. This work needs lifetime activists. We need lifetime activists, we need lives that sustain activism. That means caring for yourself, not burning out, and not setting yourself up to fall on your face. True that. Anything else to add? A big part of my work right now focuses around mindfulness and meditation because being an activist is hard and people do burn out. We can’t afford that because the more skill and understanding you have, the more capacity you have to give. We need to become mindful of the connection we all have to one another. If you’re winning and someone else is losing, that’s not a real gain. We have to all move forward together. It’s messy, complicated and so difficult and incremental, but that is where real change happens.
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THE UNDERGROUND PRESS IN AMERICA BY ASHLEY MOON This is a call to action! Our world is calling upon you to revolt, resist and renew. Underground press was a journalistic and social movement that grew from rising dissent all across America. Stemming from the silent generation, an upheaval of individuals found a voice to express their total distrust of the political and cultural conditions of the 1960s and 1970s. The decline of individualism and eruption of mass production spoiled the American Dream. Leisure became capitalized and profits were squeezed through many forms of manipulation. The underground press did not stand for this. This new alternative means of information provided a critical dialogue pertaining to the basics of citizen life. The new-left agenda attracted truth-seekers to gather for collective discussions, creative deliberation and incentive to abolish the status quo. The issues at the forefront of the time were urgently addressed, the Vietnam draft, civil rights injustices, broken education systems, corporate media corruption, Worker’s rights and reproductive health issues. The underground press developed its own operating structure. With no specific guidelines for business practices, advertising or accounting. Standard economic models didn’t align with the publishers personal philosophies. The objective of the publications was not to earn a profit, or to be a non-profit as we know it today. The act of creating dissent through publication was seen as a civic duty. The compensation for participation was the satisfaction of being heard. Living a life of defiance was an act of protest in itself. Printing was once a monumental task with high costs and required much technical skill. Publications used offset printing, typewriters, camera-ready copy and mimeographs to complete their goal. Over five hundred underground press publications were established across America during the late 1960s and early 1970s with distribution ranging from 2,000 up to 200,000 people. This means a significant number of people were finding radical information valuable. Tools to express dissent were made available for G.I.’s drafted in Vietnam and Korea via the “Benjamin Franklin Printing Press Kit”. These free kits included all the necessary supplies for creating an underground press. At the peak of the underground press movement, the parents of the revolting youth were scared and angered about their own children’s rejection of traditional school, church, and state institutions. The dissenters found a way to resist a culture of repression, discussing ‘unmentionable’ topics and imagining new systems of living. The importance of these critiques is that we are our own enemy. Avatar in 1967 answered the question “Who is the Underground?”
“You need your hands in the dirt to realize your roots.” - William Hemingway Who is the Underground? You are, if you think, dream, work, and build towards the improvements and changes in your life, your social and personal environments, towards the expectations of a better existence. Who is the Underground? The person next to you on the streetcar, as he proceeds to be where he wishes to be and do what he wishes to do. Who is the Underground? Think – look around – maybe in a mirror maybe inside . . . Today, we have the internet and we are oversaturated with information and the ability to express ourselves. This doesn’t mean that we are free. The spectacle has its own very seductive and numbing consequences. Brainwashing is perhaps our most misdiagnosed societal condition. The underground press provided an honest approach to journalism that was poetic, blunt and looming with possibilities. A way to express one’s self in a collaborative environment that is outside of the mainstream media. The underground press disregarded living as a commodity, instead established true concerns for people, things and events. Being a conscious individual is not crazy, despite what ‘acceptable’ forms of communication have embedded in our psyche. Finding purpose and passion in an overwhelming swarm of inundation is overwhelming. I challenge you to have a critical discussion. We are witnessing a growing disintegration of value. It’s embarrassing that the mainstream media values superficial talk over critical discussion of issues that deeply affect us all. The art of intellectual discussion has been lost, forced into the ground. We can’t wait until the earth shatters below us to re-awaken those discussions. We need to use our primitive skills of resilience to divert the conversation now. As my friend, WIll Hemingway, a musician and activist says, “You need your hands in the dirt to realize your roots.” I challenge you to reach underground and take part in a revolutionary act. Write, read, discuss, perform, create, build and emerge! The medium is the message and it’s your duty to take responsibility and act.
Covers of The Rat and The Guardian by Susan Simensky Bietila
Susan Simensky Bietila was a pioneer in the feminist takeover of the underground publication The Rat in New York City. Bietila worked with several underground and radical newspapers, including The Guardian, creating artwork and illustrations. Her art has been featured prominently in almost every book about the underground press, but because authors attributed the art to the publication, she remained fairly anonymous for that period. For the last 15 years Bietila has been working against mining and involved with coalitions in support of tribes in Wisconsin. She still continues to create political artwork today through Justseeds Collective and recently participated in a Graphic Radicals traveling art show. She will be featured in the World War 3 Illustrated anthology debuting in May 2014. Find the in-depth interview with Susan online at: theory-magazine.com
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Check out more of Susan’s work at: art-as-activism.blogspot.com
GUIDE TO BOZEMAN ZINES Bomb Snow Magazine Perhaps the most succesful independent publication out of Bozeman, Bomb Snow started as a zine, but has since grown into a full fledged commercial publication focusing on snow sports culture, and art. Despite their commercial success, Todd Heath and the crew still keep the indedpendent spirit alive, continuing to pursue their mission to “Unplug Corporate Media Malarkey.” Learn more at bombsnow.com Scenes From The New World The near future: Earth gasps its dying breaths under the crushing weight of human overpopulation and abuse. Smog clouds choke out the sun over sprawling metropolises. Rising sea levels reclaim dozens of coastal cities. Nations war over scant natural resources, particularly clean water. The world burns. Humanity now stares into the abyss of global ecological collapse. Faced with extinction, the powerful Three execute a plan to give humans a second chance on Earth. But when the slate isn’t wiped completely clean, how will those left behind challenge the Three’s vision for the future? Evolve or die. Welcome to the New World.
Wildfire Collective Disorientation Manual This is an insider’s guide for incoming Montana State University students published by The Wildfire Collective every year. Use this tool to get involved and make Bozeman feel like your home. There are many amazing resources and community groups that will happily support you in your projects and efforts.
Curious? A science zine to quench your curiousity... Curious? is a science zine created by Montana State University student Lindsey (Lieu) Wolfe as part of her Hughes Scholars science outreach. The zine is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Views and opinions expressed in the zine and on this site are those of the author and do not reflect the views and opinions of HHMI. Giant Size Rat Poison A mysterious comic zine produced by Louis S. Whiteford. The comics are a mix of plot lines, including satirical takes on life on Bozeman. This publication is available to purchase at Cactus Records.
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BAUBLE OF TOIL AND TROUBLE A SHORT STORY BY L.B. THOMAS Three college-aged kids swing open the door of the M&M bar, café, and cigar shop. A gust of laughter blows in with the cold November air. A young man and a young woman are on either side of their drunken friend as they help him stay upright. The more capable two walk their friend in and place him on a bar stool. He props himself up as best he can, then drops his fist on the counter. “Eggs,” he says. Illustration by Angela Yonke
The other boy, also clearly drunk but more lively than his friend, mimics the action, pounding his fist on the counter. “Eggs for all of us!” The woman behind the counter raises an eyebrow, but lurches into motion. “Three orders of eggs and gravy?” At the end of the bar, I sink down close to my cup of beer. A moment ago I was the only patron, enjoying the quiet sounds of the television set mounted on the far wall. The young woman flutters past me. “I’m going to the bathroom.” She’s wearing a tight jacket, leather boots and a black skirt. The outfit looks sexual, but not nearly warm enough for a freezing Montana night. Kids don’t have any sense these days. And who’s she dressing up like that for anyhow? These two bumblefucks? One is a thimble of schnapps away from alcohol poisoning and the other one looks like a first-year truck driver with a five-dollar haircut. The more energetic boy says to the woman behind the counter, “I’ll have a PBR too, ma’am.” The other one says something indecipherable. A moment later, the young woman bounds out of the washroom and ambles towards her friends, her purse swinging around wildly on her arm. “Did you order me a beer?” “Order your own damn beer,” the more sober boy says. “I ain’t made of money.” He laughs. “Oh my God, Tom,” she says. “You’re such an asshole.” “I’ll buy you a drink, miss,” I say. She stares at me, looks back at her friends, then stumbles over and sits in the stool next to me, five seats away from Tom. “Thank you,” she says. “You’re a real gentleman.” “Don’t think she’ll go home with you just because you bought her a drink,” Tom yells at me. “Actually, nevermind. She prob’ly will.” He laughs again.
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“Oh my God, Tom. Shut up!” She turns back to me. “I apologize for my friend. He only has one dick and it’s where his head should be.”
“Yeah. It was in all the papers. You didn’t hear about this? Montana Power? They were headquartered just down the street from here.”
“Not a problem, miss,” I say.
“I only read the sports section,” Tom says.
She digs through her purse, then sets it down without retrieving anything. “I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”
“What happened to your wife?” Mattie asks.
“Patrick Wilcox,” I reply. “I’m Mattie. Not Maddie. Not Madeline like with the twelve girls in two straight lines. It just says ‘Mattie’ on my birth certificate.” “Pretty name,” I say. The bartender cracks eggs on the grill behind the bar. They sizzle. She walks over and gives me a what’ll-you-have look. “A shot of Jack for me, one for my friend Mattie here, and one for her friend down the way.” “Are you some type of rich guy?” Tom asks. “That you buy drinks for strangers?” “I’m not rich. I used to be a millionaire, but not anymore.” “What happened?” Mattie asks. “I was a meter-man for the power company, and I had company stock. Worth a pile. Worth a goddamn pile. I was going to retire, take the wife to the Bahamas or some shit. Then the power company invested in this telecom thing. It was one of those bubbles. When they went belly-up last year, the stock started dropping, but I couldn’t dump it because we were in one of those black-out periods. When I was finally able to sell it, it was worth about half a cent on the dollar. I lost my job too. The executives made out well somehow though. Seems like they always do.”
“She’s off at her brother’s place in Idaho. We had a lot in common when we were both going to be millionaires. But now, not so much.” “That’s so sad,” Mattie says. The bartender places the whiskey shots down before tending to the food again. “I was married for forty years,” I say. “But we never had children. For the better, no doubt. I’m sure they would‘ve turned out wrong.” “I want to be a parent someday,” Mattie says. “That’s a terrible idea, Mattie. A bad idea. Even if you had the sense to raise ‘em right, they wouldn’t listen. I never listened. I only recently realized that my parents had things figured out all along. Worked up at the copper mine, both of ‘em. They worked hard every day of their lives and never had a penny to show for it. Drank it all away. But you know what? They were proud. ‘We all go empty to wherever we’re bound,’ they’d say. And they were goddamn right.” I hold my shot-glass up. “I like you three. You don’t look like you have half an intellect between the bunch, but you know how to spend a Tuesday night. Cheers.” I drink. The others follow.
“Oh my God, did that really happen?” Mattie gives me a deeply concerned look.
Image: “Ways In Which We Use Our Hands” by Sarah Eisenlohr
Snowball by Sam Gilmer hold out
hold on
please just
respond
holed up
slow down
stare off
space out
get up
get out
let your
hair down
stand up
stand out
get down
stay out
show up
get down
move it
around
lose it
free fall
zone out
snow ball
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FLATHEAD LAKE
FROM THE SOURCE OF HEAVEN
BY DIANE CORSON
BY T.W. MYERS
irst wave: Flathead Lake
I taste the face of water crisp
From the source of heaven ignorance they drive around with bundles of wood
To the mouth of informative bliss
some with kindling sticks
Developing under strangest circumstance
How its breadth of knowledge begs illicit Through each and every pore
is from Mars
Hello to the heavens, has your meaning now passed?
he’s tall and wears pants
How it begins to remember the curls of my hair
which end at his knees
The Antirrhinum dropped delicately fair Here, here in vase curved fashion flair
ranger something ranger beware
Preliminaries on tales enigmatic past
Configurations of the soul
the truck is from Japan
Life survives by the skillful mixing of the two To pour a molded fervent cast
How it shapes itself in strict
bound bundles from California the man with a tan uniform
The balance of Yellow and Blue
We see the canals brilliant
Our boisterous heretics breathe large mass
In splitting the Earth by human shout Poignant those icy tracers so stout The hammer of the Gods, of renounced creation Striking the anvil of nothing In resonance of pure drought
And the special shape of romance undone
the waves lap at my shore
How beautiful the world
-Past the beatific idea of God
Onward, I take my perceptions hunting . . .
second wave: Flathead Lake
Atmosphere vibrant, spectacular bolts sprite had to rig a coffee maker set paper cup upside down
La Fin
My now millisecond eyes voltage supreme Along the gravity-
took a cone filter (brown)
Of cognition buoyant
placed slit in bottom of paper cup
Throughways of glorious air streams
there stuffed cone paper filter
Seeing things only to be seen in the freshness of thunderclouds
filled cone with LavAzza crema egusto
In altitude, ascending higher through neutral crytpics How is your light bended, refracted through to me?
boiling water fell into paper cone balanced in paper cup
Because I cannot see you instantaneously Just the blurriness of your edges
spewing the cone of the crema egusto
In the dark energies of whimsical heaven
eruption of a mind
Where I offer up my pledges
with ceremony it collapsed across the picnic table
We staggered along among angular Earth
In certain ways -nite collage
Thresholds to tables and pillars- darkness
little ended in my mug i drank its thick grittiness
spaghetti western cowboy coffee
Accepting the invitation to the dance Condemned prisoners birthing frozen floor mirage
We witness the pious stir, inching brains along lovingly to gutter Becoming aware of bristled shackles in muteness stutter
third wave: Flathead Lake
Pitched onto mouths of open water steamed a butterfly sits in the sun
How can I possibly continue this lifeless trek?
gently wings fall up, down flying on land;
Better yet, how do I surrender open eyes,
her sticky feet hold tight to an idea
tethered to pine needles
A gasp of death so primitive
To those who speak looking down, in lies
Energy bustling and burning
smelling the pine, the water, the air
Unflinching to the pain of its own heat
after her weary flight, the sun soaks her up
Provisions of visions in alignment uttered By frightened, solitary skies
a sobering squirrel drops a nut:
And the forceful urge to kill my stifled cries
a pine nut
Here on this barren Earth we sing
and squawks through little teeth
Composed of quantum strings in lurk
chuckling madly over nuts
With other dimensions slowly at work
butterfly flies up: squirrel nods 56
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#YOLO BY JEFF HALLSTEN They had never hung a man before. It really didn’t matter though. Public execution, vigilante justice… It was all coming back like vinyl records and black thick-rimmed glasses. They gathered a man from the street and took him up on the hill. On the hill was a large oak tree with long gangly branches that silhouetted against the setting sun. No one knew who the man was. No one knew what he had done. No one really cared. Whether he had beat his poor old mother with a crowbar, pissed on the toilet seat or voted for Bush twice. He was going to pay for it now, whatever it was. Nobody knew how to tie a noose. Half of the mob pulled out there iPhones and began searching for directions. From the town you could see the lights from their phones on the hill. It looked as though they held torches. When they finally got the noose tied an hour had passed. It took them twenty more minutes to get the rope secured around the branch. Then they got the man up on a chair and slung the rope around his neck. “How do you plead?!” yelled the hangman with the yellow skinny jeans and handlebar moustache. The man said nothing and stared into the horizon. “How do you plead?!” he yelled again. The man continued to stare. He could see the small forest behind the town. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the smell of the pine trees, or the sound of the small creek that ran through it. “Just kick the fucking chair!” yelled a large woman from the mob. She threw her empty soda cup at the hangman & grabbed another Big Mac from her grease stained bag. “YEAH!” roared the mob. “FUCK ‘EM! GIVE IT TO THE BASTARD!” Then the mob began to chant together, over and over, “HANG HIM! HANG HIM!” The hangman shrugged and began to put a canvas tote bag over the man’s head. He tightened the noose. Then with a deep breath and a gentle breeze he kicked the chair out from under the man. The man dropped and then began to struggle. He kicked and squirmed. They had not got him up high enough for a straight fall to break his neck. They did not know this though and they watched confused. “He’s still alive!” said somebody in the back of the crowd. A few people grabbed him and put him back on the chair. They kicked it again. Alas, he began to squirm and struggle as before. The mob began to get angry. They threw empty beer cans at his writhing body. This went on for a while until some young men who were playing bicycle polo in the park nearby came over and began to club at his knees. Finally, the man died. His body stiffened and his head drooped low. There was a moment of silence among the crowd. It was shortly broken however, when somebody’s phone pinged, signaling a text message. For the rest of the evening the crowd partied on the hill. They took pictures next to the hung man and posted them to Facebook and Instagram. Everyone was so happy and carefree they did not even mind the smell of the hung man’s bowels releasing his final meal. They were proud. They were happy. Tomorrow, they would try burning someone at the stake.
Illustration by Ashley Moon
They took pictures next to the hung man and posted them to Facebook and Instagram. Everyone was so happy and carefree they did not even mind the smell of the hung man’s bowels releasing his final meal. theory-magazine.com
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Excerpt from Giant Size Rat Poison by Louis S. Whiteford
BOZEMAN ART & COMMUNITY RESOURCES The Cottonwood Club - Free event space, art gallery & studio space. Find on Facebook. Wildfire Collective - A consensus based, de-centralized collective working to benefit the community. franklittles.org or find on Facebook. Paper Robot - Handmade Comics for Charity. Wild Joe*s Coffeespot - Coffee shop, venue & art gallery. 18 W. Main St. wildjoescoffee.com Free Art School - Art-making for arts sake. Find schedule on The Book of Faces. The Foundry - Collective artist space + Theory Magazine headquarters. Find on Facebook. Country Bookshelf - Independent bookstore. 28 W. Main St. countrybookshelf.com Bozeman Film Festival - Non-profit organization bringing adult oriented films to Bozeman. bozemanfilmfestival.org or on Facebook. The Bozeman Magpie - Local online independent newspaper (bozeman-magpie.com) Tart - Boutique and contemporary art gallery. (111 S. Grand Ave. #107C - tartique.com) SLAM Festival - A bi-annual festival of local art held in Bozeman. facebook.com/slamfestivals The Ellen Theatre - A non-profit theatre in the heart of Bozeman for performance art. theellentheatre.com Pecha Kucha Bozeman - Organizing nights of engaging talks following the 20 X 20 format at The Ellen Theatre. Find on Facebook. KGLT FM - Independent open format public radio. kglt.net - 97.1 & 91.9 FM Bozeman. Live From The Divide - Celebrating American Songwriters in Bozeman. livefromthedivide.com Gallatin Art Crossing - Building and maintaining public art in Bozeman. gallatinartcrossing.com Interchange - An annual festival celebrating strides in human rights & equality. iaminterchange.com Bozeman Public Library - bozemanlibrary.org Bozeman HRDC - Building a better community. thehrdc.org The Warming Center - Offering seasonal shelter. 2104 Industrial Drive Bozeman Soup - Community micro-granting dinner celebrating creativity. Find on Facebook. Montana NORML - Working to reform marijuana laws in Montana. montananorml.org Transition Town Bozeman - Designing and building a relocalized community through education and practical applications. transitiontownbozeman.weebly.com
THE COMPLEX
Bozeman Youth Initiative - Connecting the youth of Bozeman. bozemanyouth.org The Complex - A multi-purpose all ages venue. thejegroup.com.
THEORY MAGAZINE IS FREE ONLINE - VISIT THEORY-MAGAZINE.COM Look for past issue archives as well as additional artist features from Montana and all over the globe. We also feature music, video, poetry and writing. Submissions are always open and welcome. Keep tabs on the art & music happenings around Bozeman. We are social creatures.
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Cactus Records & Gifts - Independent record store, art gallery, seller of locally made goods. 29 W. Main St. - cactusrecords.net The Fox Den - An artist collective focusing on music events and art gatherings. Musik Live Here - Montana electronic music event organization and promotion. musikliveshere.com PULSE - House & Techno DJ collective. 59
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