The theme of the third issue (#3) of Bonk! is Lines. The issue is published in four parts.
Part 1 is Subjective Walks by Izabela Łęska, a work that describes and visualizes the artist’s daily stroll as a visitor/foreigner in Berlin. Its design and folds are intentionally cartographic. It’s a simple inkjet printing on paper leftover from Issue #2.
Izabela Łęska is a Polish artist who creates graphics, objects and texts, dealing mostly with notions such as narration, linearity, perseveration, the simultaneity of the world, André Breton’s objective chance.
Part 2 is a set of postcards by 24 artists:
Anna Kautenburger is a German artist from the Luxemburgish/French/German border, researching and traveling for mind-blowing inspirations and working in different medias. Keywords: Dreadfulness, Coincidences, Fairy Tales, Daily Life Situations, Supernatural, Trash and Self-created Dream Worlds.
Anna Tea‘s photography explores different characters, things, places, and most importantly she explores herself. She finds a connection between everything and everyone that/who surrounds her with her inner self.
Antonio Occulto is an Italian painter and analog collagist based in Stavanger, Norway. His style can be defined as minimal decadentism, with work processes driven by impulsiveness, memories, and introspection.
Aron Rossman-Kiss is a visual artist with a background in the social sciences. His practice focuses on themes related to collective and private memories, migrations, and the politics of representation. He is currently based in London.
Artemis Papachristou is a human being who tends to think about stuff related to life and creates other stuff based on these contemplations. She is interested in curatorial practices [archives, taxonomies, art theory, critical thinking, and aesthetics] and in philosophical approaches of architecture in the performativity of everyday life, focusing on the inhabitation patterns of contemporary digital nomads.
Bib Frrokaj is a young Albanian artist. His background is in painting, but he is increasingly focused on photography. In his artwork, he observes composition, sensitivity, dependence, and movement in the world around him, and then creates a visual or spiritual connection between them.
Billy Mavreas lives in Montreal, Quebec, where he makes comics, collage, visual poetry, and the occasional zine.
Constantin Malmare’s medium is drawing, and he has a clear obsession with lines and how we read them. What makes a line beautiful? Is it the context, is it the shape? When he sees his concepts materialized, he immediately forms new ideas, which keeps him going.
Giannis Delagrammatikas is a visual artist. His artistic work focuses on the cultural and political issues that constitute the modern era. By employing suspicion (in Greek υποψία> hypopsia> hypo under-opsis sight) as his interpretative medium, he seeks subjectivity in the apparently stable structures which create the terms that represent the “new”.
Giulia Boggio is a graphic designer and photographer from Milan. She shoots almost everything with a 35mm compact camera and her focus is on everyday life gestures and feelings. She is probably just afraid of forgetting, or getting old.
Gil Zablodovsky is a visual communication designer in the medium of video and 2D products. He recently finished his M.A. in integrated design studies and exhibits in many places around the world. He is currently working on a new series of video art projects concerning the subjects of education and inspiration.
Jane Waggoner Deschner is a Montana-based artist. In her “Remember me” project, she hand-embroiders anecdotes from family/friend-written obituaries into early- to mid-twentieth century vernacular photographs.
Kasia Ozga is a Polish American sculptor and installation artist based between Chicago, IL and Brest, France. Her work explores how our attitudes and behaviors toward the natural environment impact the human body.
Lia Tuia is an illustrator from Italy who loves creating her drawings with ink, watercolor, or pencils. The world she makes up with her art is filled with odd and ironic creatures, magical elements, and melancholic girls. All these characters inhabit this little universe, portraying feelings, situations, dreams, or memories.
Maria Gutu is a collage artist from the Republic of Moldova. ”Inner pieces” (a series of black and white collages) is her long-term project in which she explores forms, dreams, and inner feelings in a monochrome way. Collage art is an intimate art, and through it she gives her emotions a visual form.
Mary Rouncefield, with a life-long interest in mathematics, has developed a large body of work on the theme ‘Mathematical Curves’. These limited edition screenprints take a humorous look at equations and graphs, but also comment on the rigorous mental discipline of mathematics.
Matt Lee uses drawing, collage, photography, and video to examine processes for constructing, framing, and manipulating visual messages. His work addresses themes of presence/absence and sense/nonsense. Originally from the UK, Matt currently lives in Bangalore, South India.
Nastia Cistakova is an aggressive illustrator with a big fascination for everything absurd. She enjoys making angry drawings about social injustice and ‘just annoying things’.
Rachel Kinbar is a writer and artist interested in tiny details, slow processes, and repetition. She is half of the noise duo Unfade and the co-editor/publisher of Bonk!
R. Prost was born and raised in Chicago and has a background in literature rather than the visual arts. He has always been interested in the visual aspects of language and the contexts in which language is found. He makes visual poems, altered books, and literary objects.
Steven Cline is a collage artist living in Cartersville, Georgia. He also helps edit the journal Peculiar Mormyrid.
Tetsushi Higashino refers to himself as an Unproductive Production Activist. His work makes visible the logic of this notion, and the metaphorical visions often derive from things that subliminally intervene in our daily lives. They transform the ordinary world we overlook into one of extraordinary nonsense. The work included in this issue started out as a blank piece of drawing paper and a piece of carbon paper and was created as it traveled through the mail from Japan to Estonia.
Tina Oelker is a German painter based in Hamburg who is known for her long-term project “1000 Hasen – limited edition“, which was finished in December 2014 after exactly seven years. The hare is the whole point and yet there is no hare. You can catch art, but try to catch a free wild animal or a free spirit and you will never stop hunting.
Vanessa Clark is an intersex, transgender, androgynous, pansexual author in love with life’s simple pleasures. Their book with Bold Strokes Books, The Man on Top of the World, is a bisexual romance that spotlights the wild, complex relationship between a David Bowie-esque glam rock superstar and his drummer, is their debut novel.
Part 3 is a full-color, 32-page tabloid that also includes the above audio track by Melissa Pons (artwork by Lori Miles, also featured on the tabloid cover). It features the work of 35 artists and writers:
Alcebiades Diniz Miguel is a translator, researcher, essayist, screenwriter, and short story writer in Brazil. In 2016, Ex Occidente Press published Lanterns of the Old Night, his collection of short stories inspired by the magic lanterns from the early cinema. He is also the publisher of Raphus Press.
Alina Akbar is a certified miniaturist and visual artist with a proclivity for creative maturities who presently lives in Lahore. Her focus is on the point where drawing, design, painting, and photography intersect.
Amira Karaoud is a self-taught documentary photographer. Her artwork takes a critical view on social, cultural, and environmental issues, deconstructing the rules of a modern society that breaks values and put limits and barriers on different ethnic groups, gender, and culture; treating them as less important.
Amy Bassin is a fine arts photographer and video artist from New York City included in numerous publications and exhibitions. The work included in Bonk! Is part of a series called Book Worms—collaged cutouts that slither across the pages of tree-birthed books to borrow and penetrate the intellectual landscapes of its readers.
Amy Janes sets out to visualize a simpler state of nature in her work, looking beyond the surface with a more minimal, diagrammatic, and almost architectural approach.
Anton Lefabi‘s work is essentially based on a conceptual modus operandi which manifests itself in various thematic work series. Long-term projects deal with the artistic and philosophic examination of time and temporality (including the Matières series) as well as his idea of “absurd contextualism”, where reality and fiction coupled with irony and pun generate post-factual imagery.
BanWynn Oakshadow has been a writer and poet since 1978. He is a fan of cultural history, enjoys exploring the fringes of society and the people who live there and crossing boundaries between them.
Bubu Mosiashvili is a student at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. The images included in this issue of Bonk! are from the series Intentional Thoughts, a series done without thinking.
Catfish McDaris has been in more magazines, chapbooks, and broadsides than a porcupine has quills. His 25 years of published material is in the Special Archives Collection at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His ancestors are related to Wilma Mankiller from the Aniwaya Clan of the Cherokee Nation. Currently he’s selling wigs in a dangerous neighborhood in Milwaukee.
Chad M. Horn is just another mild mannered, middle-aged Kentuckian who still appreciates the written and spoken word. He is a faithful follower of the old adage that “one should read more than one writes.”
Daniel Por likes to read whatever he can get his hands on. His work consists of tragedies and experimental fiction. In his spare time, he likes to play tennis and read.
Edwin Ushiro is an artist from Hawaii who is currently residing in Southern California. He captures the essence of Hawaii, youth, and nostalgia in a technique that’s uniquely his own. Layering ink and acrylic over sheets of Lucite printed with assemblages of his more traditional drawings and paintings results in luminous reflections on the past.
Elizeya Quate is the author of The Face of Our Town (KERNPUNKT Press, 2016), an imploding series of interconnected stories about the dangers of interconnected implosions.
Emily Ruth Taylor – Q: Why do Marxists only drink herbal tea? A: Because property is theft!
Greg Edmondson’s work from 2005–2015 work centered around an exploration into generative systems and their ability to produce complex imagery using only single, simple, repeated “bits” of information. These works were all made entirely by hand, and it is their errors and inaccuracies as much as the rules they followed which made them what they became.
Howie Good is the recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his latest collection, Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.
Irena Azovsky‘s work reflects on the way that we dissect the endless flow of visual information thrown our way and the parts we may take in and take out, utilize or chose to ignore. Taking apart the layers of such imagery is almost therapeutic, where removing the context makes the propaganda harmless and allows us to see it more as an art form as opposed to allowing it to impact our perspective and ideas.
Jacob Budenz is a queer writer, multi-disciplinary performer, cabaret queen, and witch bitch living between Baltimore and New Orleans. Jacob’s work as a theater artist and writer has landed somewhere on City Paper’s Best of Baltimore list for the past few years, and various reviewers have referred to Jacob as “impeccable,” “truly grotesque,” “angelic,” and “a Warholish Peter Pan.”
Jennifer Weigel is a maverick subverted out-of-the-box artist. Her work touches on themes of beauty, environment, identity, humor, gender, institutional critique, memory, social consciousness, etc., and often seems to come through the back door after meandering out of left field.
Justyna Adamczyk‘s paintings are part of a series that comes from a particular story. She treats painting like writing a notebook. She paints things she wants to remember or to forget about.
Lola Cervant uses the force of portrait to depict people who, through their looks and expressions, generate a reflection on our contemporary societies. She is in constant search for forms, colors, symbols, and elements that (together with the portrait) create poetic pieces. She uses graphite, watercolor, and enamel on paper.
Lori Miles‘ work privileges artifice and champions the fake. It is an act of self-forgery, recreating lost items from her childhood from memory. Things that are true can only proven wrong, but the fake can never be proven true. It is always exactly and only what it knows itself to be.
Matt Harris is a writer based in Liverpool. His stories combine study of the everyday with elements of sci-fi and weird fiction. He is particularly interested in class, cults, post-humans, machines, rituals, and dreary ordinary life.
Matthias Neumann moved from Germany to New York where he founded the interdisciplinary practice normaldesign in 2004. His work has since been fluctuating between architecture and a wide range of artistic media, with a particular focus on art and installations in the public sphere.
Melissa Pons is a sound recordist and sound designer in Sweden, recording aspects of reality that deserve more attention. Through sound, she tries to conquer people’s focus on detail and beauty.
MK Punky is a founder of the 80’s hardcore band The Clitboys and the author of eleven books of fiction, memoir, and journalism. MK serves as Poet Laureate of Vista Street Library in Los Angeles.
Nancy Mungcal spends most of her days art making and writing. She likes road trips, books, whiskey, and pie. She calls California home.
Oliver McConnie’s work explores the concept of the grotesque image through idiosyncratic worlds. Oliver aims for his work to be twofold in nature: one of parodical prophecies, destructive on one hand and regenerative on the other, by means of laughter and the defeat of fear.
Olivia Lennon researches differing scientific theories of our place within the universe and paints miniature watercolors in interference pigments. Her latest work explores the use of telemetry since the 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite in relation to the writing of ancient Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus.
Robert Knox is a husband, father, freelance writer for the Boston Globe, rabid backyard gardener, and blogger on nature, books, films, and other subjects based on the premise that there’s a garden metaphor for everything. His poems grow from books, trees, and thorny words, and growl at current events. His novel on the origins of the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti case, Suosso’s Lane, was recently published by Web-e-Books.
Robert Wynne believes in imagination, particularly when broken into lines. He was raised on the west coast, but now resides in Texas.
Scot Cotterell, Hobart, Tasmania
Sean Peter’s research beyond the surface layer of our everyday English language has been a journey into a parallel reality.
Tim Duffy is a poet and scholar who thinks and writes about space, the past, theology, political disappointment, and fatherhood. His recent interests deal with ecstatic or spiritual questions grounded in memory, desire, and the spaces we construct.
Val Prozorova, mentally living in one timezone and working in another, tries to make the best of tiny island living. When not working on collaborative pieces, Val enjoys negotiating keyboard rights with her cat and trying to learn how to whistle.
Zoran Dragelj is a filmmaker whose visual style is dreamy and idealistic, enveloping his depiction of ordinary life into imaginative vignettes and panoramas. His innovation of form and content, media and context, mark an exciting career as a music video and film director, producer, and visual artist.
Part 4 includes two 12x18in double-sided posters in full-color. It features the work of 4 artists:
Conny Blom is a Swedish conceptual artist whose work often deals with law, censorship, and power hierarchies. Blom is currently based in Landskrona, Sweden and Bukovje, Slovenia. Together with Nina Slejko Blom, he runs Conceptual Art Centre Bukovje/Landskrona.
Giulia Landonio is a graphic artist and illustrator currently based in Napoli, Italy. Her approach to illustration consists in a double movement – getting closer to the text, making the author’s words become her own, and distancing herself from the text in order to leave space for personal images to arise. Giulia mainly works with acrylic, pencil and various printing techniques.
Lauren Prousky is a play and research based artist, writer and curator, working on the territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Her work generally deals with both the charming and the derisive and the spaces in which these two opposites can be in dialogue with one another.
Stella de Kort is from Amsterdam. She draws with ink on paper, but sometimes it drifts into objects and installations. Mainly she likes to draw interior and exterior messes—the more chaos the better!