Now Nowhere
(Self-Published)
Printing @ www.perfectly-acceptable.com
Ordering @ www.elevatorteeth.com
Now Nowhere is the
type of sophomoric work I’m tempted to give a negative review because at first
glance it can come off as obtuse, pretentious, or even cloying. When I slow
down and absorb it, I realize that superficial reading would actually belie its
rather fundamental strength. The world of (self-published) small press is full
of navel-gazing ingénues addressing existential dilemma, self-prompting with
entry level philosophical questions that only lead to more questions. Now Nowhere rises above these mundane
offerings because it pushes further and begins to address the reconciliation of
purpose. It doesn’t just ask the “Why?” but becomes a wise self-aware exercise
in “Why Ask Why?” which is infinitely more interesting.
My favorite moment in the book, though I admit I’ve grown
weary of specific “moments” in life – for reasons I will explain shortly, is a
page that posits “Don’t Worry. This Is Part Of The Process.” That’s a motto I
could easily live by. It infers the old adage about life being a process, a
cycle that flits and renews, the proverbial journey, the lack of destination,
the lack of fixed place, no illusion of fixed moments, no “where” as the title
suggests. We are all time travelers in a sense, we’re all moving perpetually
through a non-linear construct, chrononauts of the infinite. If you’re always
looking ahead to the fleeting promise on the horizon, or backward toward the
lie of nostalgia, you’re never living the present, doomed to the life of a
temporal refugee.
The book opens with a blue grid pattern teasing some order
to things, but quickly devolves to chaotic questions, decrying the very nature
of reality with clever wordplay. For example, “The Things We Are” and “Are We?”
appear wrapped textually as one sentence, but are interrupted by smart panel
design and color choices that separate the words into two parts, implying a
sort of call and response that uses the medium very effectively. The duality of
man is represented with the primal colors of red and blue, overlapping shadow
imagery echoing in the manner that practitioners David Mazzucchelli and Dash
Shaw used respectively in Asterios Polyp
and Bodyworld to illustrate our sense
of fluctuating reality. The figures in Now
Nowhere always give the illusion of motion, they’re always traveling,
entering and exiting, pulsing with life, one action bleeds into the next and is
rarely accompanied by fixed borders.
Now, I’m in a rare position where I know the identity of the
artist working under the online pseudonym elevatorteeth. You too can see odd
bits of street art and stickers littered around certain San Diego haunts if you
know what you’re looking for. While it’s not my place to divulge the
information I’m privy to, I will say that I’ve consumed snippets of the
artist’s older work-in-progress, and in true elitist hipster fashion, I can say
I prefer the older stuff. The artist’s work of just two or three years ago is
full of hand-drawn textures and raw patterns that seem to undulate with an odd
sexuality. Imagine thousands of areola swaying together in off-kilter unison,
their rhythm never quite coalescing, wantonly teetering just on the edge of
order.
Thankfully, traces of that dynamic linger in Now Nowhere, some of my favorite parts
involve the attempted resolution of chaos and order. Consider the shots of a
wall of bricks, from a distance they are neat and orderly, but zoom in for
closer inspection and the more fractured and damaged they become. The bricks in
the wall are no different than the various components of our life, a job, a
friend, or a lover, our reality is always susceptible to enhanced scrutiny and
disappointment. That’s not the point. The point is to revel in the beauty of it
anyway. While Now Nowhere might
sacrifice the raw determination found in the artist’s earlier work, it hums
with vibrancy, there’s a cohesive confidence to these new lines that is less
random and hesitant. It’s as if the artist finally worked out the non-linear
narrative they wished to express.
Now Nowhere is
self-published as a two-color risograph and was printed at Chicago’s Perfectly
Acceptable Press, but you can easily imagine it at home in a lineup from
Sparkplug or Uncivilized or 2D Cloud. It’s an accomplished aesthetic that
understands the deceptively simple notion that in life, things happen. Sometimes
in sequence. Sometimes not. Sometimes there’s causality. Sometimes not.
Sometimes they occur unexpectedly, or not in the way we anticipated. There’s
ebb and flow, beauty in mistakes, and as the Hawthorne Effect postulates, we
change something just by looking at it or touching it, the interaction leading
to a new divergence of multiple possibilities. Now Nowhere embraces this limitless quality instead of being
stymied by it, it favors chaos theory in life, beginning and endings in a
constant state of flux. There is lack of a divine plan; there is only the
process. There are simply events, reactions, and motivations all crashing
together to create the spectacle we navigate moment by moment.
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