Zine launch and reception goes down July 12 at Snelgrove Gallery
It’s a party that’s one half zine launch and one half visual art exhibit.
REALMS, a zine curated by Saskatoon artist and musician Jon Vaughn, launches tonight, Friday July 12 from 7 to 10pm at The Gordon Snelgrove Gallery.
REALMS is the first official publication from Vaughn’s publishing project Ecstasy Editions, which specializes in small runs/limited editions. The zine, which Vaughn says he has worked on for the past three years, brings together 40 artists from Canada, the USA and Europe.
Additionally, the event also serves as the reception for Allysha Larsen and Jon Vaughn’s exhibit “Always Something There to Remind Me”, which, yes, is named after the Naked Eyes song.
Ominocity caught up with Jon Vaughn for a quick rundown on REALMS, running a small, independent publishing concern and affection for abstract art.
Ominocity: Tell me about REALMS – what ties the curated artists, who are from all around the world, together who appear in the zine?
Jon Vaughn: Quite honestly what ties the artists together is how I’ve crossed paths with all of them, either through meeting them in my own city of Saskatoon, on my travels throughout Canada, and actually mostly through the Internet. It also represents a community at large of artists many of which who know each other for many years that work together to make zines, exhibitions, clothing, etc.
OM: What’s next for Ecstasy Editions?
JV: Well tonight is the launch of the REALMS zine. It will also be the launch of my Artist Clothing Series featuring a sick design by my friend Cazzimir Meulemans. After this I’ll be finishing a split zine between myself and an artist named Chou Yi from Taipai, Taiwan and working on REALMS II, as well as the next T-shirt which will have a brand new design by Jennifer Mehigan, an Irish artist based out of Singapore.
OM: So tell me about your collaboration with Allysha Larsen – visually, what can people expect?
JV: Allysha and I have been talking about making an exhibit for a the last year or so, and bonded some time back on our affection for abstract art and early modernism. The exhibit tries to show the struggle within abstraction to escape signification or representational elements and thus also comes full circle to embrace similarity, likenesses within all image making. It’s a fun show I think.
REALMS zine launch takes place at The Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, located at: 191 Murray Building, 3 Campus Drive, University of Saskatchewan. The reception runs from 7 to 10pm.
