Illustration: Black Bads Mix Tape

Jawbone Study Collage

This is a collage consisting of a number of old cromagnon and ape jawbones reproduced in a number of mediums, staged within the spread of a book. The book is still intact (it's cover and pages are still attached, although a number of pages have been cut out to reduce bulk), which has allowed me to cut away to reveal hidden things found on underlying pages, and also the hardcover provides some rigidity. This book is now something of a frankenstein - it is mangled, but it's alive.

Birds Of The World

This is an example of one of the pages of my next small publication, which incorperates the pseudo-science of collage with the pseudo-science of wit and humour. I will post more of these as they are created. I'm not sure how you'll be able to get your hands on a copy of this book once it is published, but we can figure that out when the time draws near. The distortions here are done on the photocopier, not on the computer. A comparative note: I have yet to visit the Main Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library (of Ghostbusters fame), but the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library makes meager effort to provide its visitors with comfortable photocopying space. Their copiers pale in comparison to the Toronto Refence Library's quick-zoomng, feature-packed xerographic workhorses. I hope Manhattan's main branch can provide for me what I require, else I'm bound to find my way to Toronto a little more often than what's obliged by family and friends.

A Few Words About Collage

Collage is a medium that can create some very unique creations. It's kind of the melting pot art form. Regardless of how you came to get to the pieces you've assembled, the pieces find themselves on a new plane, as citizens of a new kind of imagery. Your pieces may have been a photograph in a magazine, or a drawing in some scientific publication; they may have been torn from their home in an unspeakably violent manner, or carefully tabbed and photocopied, their shape surgically removed from its environs by a steady hand; they may have been a scrap, discarded and readied for recycling, or they may have been an important piece of something greater, without whom the something would cease to function as a complete thing. It matters not where or whither of whence they came - they are now part of a collage, and this is the only identity they'll maintain.
You might well reason, and you're right to do so, that it's not always easy for collage bits to get along. As the builder of a collage, it is your responsibility to create a balanced and cohesive habitat for your displaced bits and peices. If your intentions are true, and your goal includes the successful coexistence of even the most meager of pasted scrap materials, then there is no reason your collage should not grow and one day become a full-functioning work of art.

NERO Magazine

Nero magazine is a free publication you can find in Italy. Niall Mclelland and I had a chance to do some illustrations for them, as well as the cover for their new issue. It's got a some sort of elegant brute design style that's very appealing. you can download the entire magazine online, here. If you can read Italian, then you're in for a treat. If not, you really don't need to spend much time browsing through the magazine, as the majority of the words are in a language you won't (and I don't) understand. Not understanding a language is a bonus perhaps if you're a cynic and are sure that, were you able to follow the content, you'd be dissapointed (this is common and more factually true than cynically biased when it comes to song lyrics. Take, for example, any foreign-language band in the history of rock and roll). Below is one of the type treatments I did for the magazine.