Zine Review: Cabin-Time: Green River

ZINES_cabintime

Artzine, various, cabin-time.com, $15

This spiral-bound zine is a record of a weeklong artists’ retreat in Desolation Canyon, Utah, north of the Green River. Each of the fifteen participants contribute a few pages to the zine, most with one or two paragraphs of text followed by three pages of prints, drawing, film stills, or photographs. Most of the text contributions are artist statements, followed by a summary of what the artist wanted to achieve during their residency, and a two-sentence biography. Some of them read like manic freeform poetry; others are more straightforward. All of the photos have a voyeuristic, haunting quality, like looking at a strangers’ vacation photos, and in a way that’s what this whole exercise is. I liked the way some of the writings referenced each other — musician Cyrus talks about playing a house show in a nearby abandoned stone cabin on the last night of the retreat, and a few pages later, radical homemaker Sarah explains that she spent the week trying to make a home out of the same cabin. This interconnectivity helps the publication cultivate a cohesion that’s otherwise difficult to do with so many contributors. (Mary Green)