Aaron CockleJune 5, 2018NewsCrabapple/Hisham; Gipi; 2dcloud; Mega Press at Printed Matter; Chute/Drnaso/Tomine/Ware
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Molly Crabapple & Marwan Hisham: Syria in Ink
At Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY, May 15 to Jun 30, 2018.
Crabapple’s drawings, created from 2014-2017, illustrate the pages of Hisham’s coming-of-age story, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, which the two co-authored (One World/ Penguin Random House, 2018) and mark their ongoing collaboration. For the 82 illustrations included in Brothers of the Gun, Crabapple drew inspiration from photos she and Hisham shot, amateur photos and videos posted on social media by Syrians involved in the conflict, Google Earth, and above all, Hisham’s memories. The artist composited references from hundreds of sources, using Hisham’s instructions, diagrams, and visual research to accurately convey the war and his experiences. BPL is pleased to present Crabapple’s original works on paper and an immersive experience of the text, along with an audio walk that includes Hisham’s reflections on the war and the artwork which emerged in response.
Molly Crabapple writes:
In creating the art displayed in Syria in Ink, I was inspired by Goya’s Disasters of War. We now live in the age of infinite photos, and Syria is perhaps the most widely documented war in history. But oppressors, whether they are governments or not, seldom allow cameras into the spaces where they inflict their oppression. The lived experience of those under them disappears into the memory hole. Thankfully, art is a slippery thing. It can evade censorship, make history visible, invest the hideous with beauty and the prosaic with force. It can reveal that which power would otherwise be able to hide. I seek to accomplish with my art what photos cannot.
Also, Lindsey Hilsom in The New York Review of Books on ‘The Smartphone War’:
Hisham, who, after attending a religious school in a village near Aleppo, became fascinated by European soccer and literature, is the ideal interlocutor for Western readers, but the reasons he and his friends had for rising against the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad were far from typical:
We were an extreme minority within Raqqa. The values we held marked us, in the eyes of our neighbors, as dangerous, un-Islamic agents of the West.
grassroots
democracy
electoral rights
respect for the ballot box,
as a basis for representation
and legitimacy
Could these words be more alien to most Syrians? Could these so-called universal values, the values my friends and I screamed for between our gas-choked curses at security officers, be far from universal indeed? Perhaps they are parochial mores, speculated about in the university campuses of European capitals. Perhaps they are as insubstantial as ghosts.
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Land Of The Sons
New Gipi book out with an English Translation:
This unusual postapocalyptic story is often grim and violent, but by channeling the story through the brothers’ limited, cockeyed perspective, Gipi develops a naturalism and human quality often missing from SF survival fantasies. The loose, limber black-and-white artwork is a marvel; the figure drawings balance careful realism with cartoon expression, and details of the natural world—rain, water, weeds—are sketched in quick, powerful lines. Above all, the art reveals a credible vast alternative landscape of mud, water, reedy islands, makeshift boats, and strange and hostile patched-together colonies. It’s a strikingly envisioned imaginary world.
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2dcloud Spring 2018
Another strong selection of work, featuring books and zines by: Christopher Adams, Alexis Beauclair, Tara Booth, Apolo Cacho, Eli Howey, Fifi Martinez, Justin Skarhus, and Maggie Umber.
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Mega Press at Printed Matter
Featuring work by Panayiotis Terzis, Yuriko Katori, Kurt Woerpel, Teng Yung han, Irkus Zeberio, Alexis Beauclair, Anna Pipes, Makiko Furuichi, Apolo Cacho, Nichole Shinn, Lane Milburn, Ben Marcus, Benjamin Brubaker, and Zebadiah Keneally.
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Why Comics? Adrian Tomine, Nick Drnaso, Chris Ware in conversation with Hillary Chute
Sunday, June 10, 2018, 1:30-2:15 PM CDT
Harold Washington Library
400 South State Street Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, Chicago, IL 60605
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Vision Box – 6-5-2018 – by Cameron Arthur
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Joanie and Jordie – 6-5-18 – by Caleb Orecchio
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