New zine which debuted at the 2019 Denver Zine Fest.
Year of the Samsung Galaxy S8
The Year of the Samsung Galaxy S8 was a mini-comic created for Ty Warren's Digital Drawing Class at the University of Oregon in the Fall of 2016. It explores ideas such as social media, language, consumerism, the millennial generation and youth involvement with world politics. It was inspired by Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and a conversation about Donald Trump in the wake of the 2016 election.
It has been printed as a zine, hand stapled and distributed over the last year on campus and around Eugene. Translation by Camilla Markussen (Find her work here.)
Please Welcome... All-American
My piece for Hyperplum's first show THIS IS US.
People of color always exist in a performative space, either being forced to assume specific mannerisms or change our appearances to reinforce, circumvent, or completely break through stereotypes and expectations surrounding our race. However, in spaces designated for performance, the performer is always under the scrutiny of the audience, making the job of the musician/artist/poet two-fold. They must not only 1) curate their body of work to be relatable content, but must also 2) curate their own image to make that content relatable and easily accessible to the audience. For musicians of color in the indie/rock music scene, (a genre dominated traditionally by white people), navigating these requirements can mean attempting to completely strip certain aspects of POC identity from their work.
For POC, fitting into white spaces on a day-to-day basis is difficult enough. Our inability to control our perceived image in totality often means auditing our behavior to fit in. The pageantry and exploitation of POC in performance spaces is nothing new, and similarly, the entertainment value of musically-inclined animals has been exploited in culture since the day we taught a monkey to clap a cymbal.
