Home Zine — Issue Three: People
Art/Lit. Zine, Tallulah Fontaine & Carla McRae (curators), 74 pgs, Home Zine, home-zine.tumblr.com, $15
Featuring the multi-medium work of 39 contributors, this third and final edition of Home Zine is a brilliantly compact feat. Carla McRae’s design work, here, is dynamic — a balancing act between art, photography, poetry and prose, which comes off feeling natural and encourages the reader to keep turning pages. She makes it look easy, not to mention bright and spacious; the digital print is particularly suited to watercolours and pastel tones — a recurring tint throughout.
“People” takes less of a focus than its already-broad topic claims to and encourages a happy variety of submissions. Fontain & McRae selected a solid plethora of these works (with emphasis on illustration) to develop their zine. A particular highlight is Karys McEwen’s poem “At Home, Together,” which runs through a list of past housemate anecdotes as a means of articulating the dynamic of an empty house.
“I’d like to reaffirm the fanciful idea that
home is wherever I’m with you.
But I can’t
because it’s not, at least according to past experience.I’m sort of happy now, as it is, without you, solo once more”
Alternatively, photographer Peyton Fulford centres two portraits over an attractive spread, with half-smiling figures clutching one another, or a stray teddy, or a bottle of Four Loko. It’s a familiar moment of half-asleep, end-of-apartment-party recognition — striking for being so focused and unceremonious.
Read an excerpt of Home Zine
“People” is, if nothing else consistently, unpretentious. Do not be fooled by its lack of jacket-title or its blank red spine; here is a structured gallery, worth your time and money. (Joel W. Vaughan)