Artzine, Sarah Davidson & Linton Murphy, [email protected], $10
Sarah Davidson and Linton Murphy have prepared a folio of collaborative drawings featuring geometric abstractions, strange buildings, and shadowy figures. This black-and-white zine contains few words, but the phrases that do crop up describe the content found therein: “Transparaline Drawings,” “Oblique Drawings” and “Plans, Elevations, and Sections.”
The drawings, which use elements of collage, seem like blueprints for the buildings we explore in dreams. The landscape is fragmented and blanketed in a mist, but with the feeling that the design makes sense on some intuitive level: we are just too small to understand it all.
The book opens and closes with the image of an infinite latticework, a unified field of undifferentiated energy that repeats itself throughout the piece, sometimes plainly and other times with imagery on top. This field gives way to an actual field: an abstract plain, a landscape. Smoke and swirls fill the page, and human figures appear: wayward cowboys, pathfinders, trail-blazers weaving through surreal architecture, wavering in and out of focus.
The final and most distinct figure enters at the end; a mystified hippie having a freakout (seemingly stressed by the faint text which appears above his head: “Canada Revenue Agency”—perhaps a commentary on the monetary difficulties today’s artists face?) Maybe this final image, like the zine’s occasional text, is self-referential, depicting its ideal audience — someone who is willing to let go of their sense of reality and just enjoy the flickering images. This one’s for heads and fans of free drawing. (Neal Armstrong)