Nerds Gone Wild!

SNAP! Issue Eight

Made-in-Montreal independent art magazine SNAP! brings out its eighth issue this month and gets a little bit gritty and pensive with their SURVIVAL theme. Reflections on war, prison, personal struggle and surviving life in the city are some of what you will find in the Fall issue, alongside a dark warrior aesthetic and a strong photo lineup including an on-location shoot with five of Montreal’s best graffiti artists and a series on indoor office plants. Definitely worth checking out, and featuring a sick ad for Lost At E Minor designed by Montreal mixed-media artist Jeremy Dabrowski (it’s on page 15). Read more

Food + Sex Magazine launched

Bright illustrations and bold designs line the pages of Food + Sex magazine: a new “collage art food” publication that explores how food and its environment are shaped by erotic desires. Read more

Nate Page’s magazine carvings

Nate Page carves magazines into stunningly tactile and sculptural works that transcend the banal consumer culture from whence they came — they stare back at viewers, almost indicting them in an inversion of the initial seductive intentions of the images. Read more

Ken Taylor

Australian illustrator Ken Taylor has created imagery for some of rock n’ ’roll’s great purveyors of sound, from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, to Nine Inch Nails and the Mars Volta. He has an easily recognizable style that screams sharp edge cool. Bold and bawdy, Taylor’s pieces use vivid colour to create a cut-out-comic-like feel reminiscent of old movie posters from the 1930s and 40s.

Kelly Smith

Beautiful, delicate, fragile, a little bit collage, a little bit sketchfull. This is the work of Kelly Smith. Combining several mediums in a collaborative expose between pencil, paint and print to create timeless works of elegant splendour, it is easy to compare Smith’s works to the last snowflake of winter, fleeting but real, avoiding the brash bright mercantile world for the prettier climes of illustrative pleasure. Smith has a twelve-day exhibition on at the 696 Space in Brunswick, Melbourne, opening November 14.

Brandt Peters

Trapped in a time warp between then and now, the work of Brandt Peters combines an old school aesthetic with a modernity bordering on futuristic fantasy, with a touch of morbid fascination thrown in for good measure. In other words, he creates wonderful imagery combining cartoon-like pin-ups with sometimes freakish attributes (large skulled beings, for instance), and every now and then seems to throw in a nod to sci-fi — such as a mechanical glass jar — for good measure. Muted tones replace the bawdy colours often associated with such mediums, giving his pieces a whimsical, dream like quality. He must live in a delightfully wispy world.