WEYLAND, Jocko
ELK

After a five-year hiatus, and coincidentally on the 20th anniversary of Elk’s first appearance, Jocko Weyland comes with this 274-page-long Elk gathering sometimes jarring but compellingly alluring juxtapositions as well as extensive accreditation and a comprehensive index (!?).

Going back to at least 100 B.C., from Slim Aarons to Doug Zyskowski, flitting from Tirana to the Place Saint Sulpice to Paul Revere Middle School to Dunkirk, NY and far beyond, collapsing the territory between Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages and Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life, starring Jesper Fabricus, Lorraine Hansberry, Natalia Goncharova, Keith Levine, Simone Martini, Edna O’Brien, Ringl + Pit, Gee Vaucher, and a host of others, Elk is the summing up, final tour, and swan song. Never say never, but the ultimate, in both senses of the word, manifestation. Not a compilation of old issues but a brand-new enterprise encompassing a staggering range of topics from just about every realm under the sun, reshuffled and recontextualized in a poetical mingling and merging with no discernable precedent. Within these pages Elk reaches its apotheosis as a simultaneously serious and playful attempt to delve into unexpected and suggestive affiliations drawn from the furthest corners of our immeasurably vast communal pictorial and written corpus. Complex entanglements of aesthetic, cultural, sociopolitical, and historical affinities bridge inscrutable spans of time, space, and subject matter, attempting to evince our contemporaneously collective meshing of universally shared and personally secret realities. [publishers’ note]

Published by Nieves
Artists' Books / Zines