FULL DECEMBER ISSUE
- From the CF Team
Question: Why Print?
Mia:
Current Activity: 3D printing, getting by
Maybe the answer to this question lies in the fact that all of us keep coming back to this format, despite how much of a pain we know it can be when we are producing. For me, the feeling of seeing and holding the physical manifestation of any idea cannot be matched. I often think about when our team received the first copies of Issue 01 back in September 2023, and how special that moment of unboxing was. On a less sentimental note, now more than ever it is important to catalogue, archive, and collect physical materials, because it is a way of consuming media that is beginning to escape us – if it hasn’t already. It is near impossible to comprehend the sheer amount of images and information that I pass by everyday, both in real life and online, and holding on to printed matter is a small way that I feel like I can ground myself in what actually inspires me and makes me think. I also have an impending fear that everything I have ever saved online as a reference will one day soon disappear all of a sudden. I don’t think that would be the worst thing that could happen, but in case it does, I will be glad to have my stack of papers next to me.
Camille:
Current Activity: Restmaxxing, biking in the snow
I feel that print media is becoming increasingly rooted in counterculture, specifically because it is so much more complicated to produce than a digital upload. Screenprinting the magazine ourselves (Zach printing it and me lending a hand) changed my perspective on creating a print. The process has become more intimate, cutting the pages by hand and staying up late to handprint the copies has rooted our practice in print as a medium. I think societies are becoming too removed from labour in general; technological advances now cater to ever-accelerating wait times and the maximization of convenience. That’s why print is dying: every part of it requires patience, and it can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming. The result is worth it, however, as overcoming the simple hurdle of physicality and actually holding a print overrides any desire for ease, because not everything should be convenient. Meaning cannot be created without effort. To quote The Little Prince, "it is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important"
Sam:
[Currently in Thailand]
Zach:
Current Activity: Training zombies, growing my brain
As someone who's been screenprinting for around 7 years (comin' on 8!) It's hard to give a straightforward, concise answer. I love lots of different things about print, and I guess it really comes down to the type of print we're talking about. My primary source of dopamine when screenprinting (and why I've stuck to it for many years) is the fantastic blend of technicality and artistic expression. Whenever I look at artwork of any kind, the first thing I ask is, "How did you make this? Take me through the steps." I'm less interested in the piece being aesthetically pleasing in itself and more so in the process of its creation. In other words, I'm obsessive over technique, and manual printing suits that obsession perfectly. I had an interesting conversation in the studio with an excellent graphic designer who's also a part-time screenprinter, and he was speaking about the importance of having something you've made exist in the physical world. He recalled having thousands of Photoshop draft files sitting on his laptop and how he felt a sense of meaninglessness, one after the other, lost to the digiverse. Once we start pulling these things out of the screen and onto material, our perspectives on the work or photograph or writing completely change; it exists now, it's tactile, you can hold it, look at it from different angles, share it. For me, the importance of print lies in the feeling of permanence and its physicality. I have lost far too many files, photographs and ideas to the digital realm.
2. Under Observation - Nick Mass
Exhibition Statement:
Under Observation is a portrait series built from isolated segments of the face, photographed on Polaroid Integral film with the Macro 5 SLR. Originally designed for forensic and medical documentation, the Macro 5 SLR offers five fixed close-focus lenses and two powerful flashes on the right and left, allowing extreme precision and intimacy in capturing details of the face. By photographing individual features at varying levels of magnification, the scale and perspective of the faces shift from frame to frame. The resulting composite—assembled using the Polaroid borders as a structural grid—creates a portrait that resists a singular, fixed viewpoint.
The subjects are fellow artists, whose identities shift constantly. Their presence and expression change rapidly moment to moment, influenced by internal swings, the pressure of public perception, and the ongoing negotiation between honesty in their work and the need not to give all of themselves to the people. The tension between anxiety and calm, exposure and acceptance, combined with the tension between artist persona and true self produces disjointedness, with each frame capturing a distinct instant of that multiplicity.
Some portraits within the series appear more structured, their pieces aligning with a certain order and stability, while others are more fractured and cubist. This mirrors daily shifts in personal balance. Certain portraits incorporate subtle nods to the subject’s creative practice—through objects, symbols, or colors tied to their work—while others strip these references away entirely, reflecting the concept of who they are without their work.
By using instant film in a modular, nontraditional way, the series pushes at the medium’s limits while honoring its tactile, analog nature. Each Polaroid is both a self-contained image and part of a larger whole, its surface carrying unrepeatable marks of time and chemistry. The Macro 5 produces a consistent spread failure of such chemistry along the top due to uneven roller pressure when adapted to use modern Integral Film, which I have opted to not fine-tune to emphasize self-perceived shortfalls by revealing the photo negative. On the positive, defects reveal as much as the images themselves, holding space for imperfection, transformation, and development that define both the artists and the medium.
Artist Statement:
My work spans across sculptural painting, collage, instant film photography, experimentalhiphop, and curatorial projects. Each medium carries residue from the last: paint scraps shiftinto collage, collage methods shape my performance wearables, and performance influencesmy run and gun photographic technique. Improv instincts from earlier comedy work drive theflow-state logic connecting the practice. I evolve by sampling previous forms of myself andredirecting them into new ones.
My themes stay consistent. I examine relationships, community, emotional honesty, depressivetendencies, environmental and societal dread, and the small moments that structure a life.Reused materials, saturated colors, floral imagery, and fragmented forms become ways to thinkabout growth under pressure and how people find beauty in chaos, navigate intimacy, and adaptthrough connection.
My work ranges from inch-scale photographs to body-scale wooden constructions built fromoriented strand board, cardboard, fabric, thrifted objects, and remnants of earlier projects.Controlled chaos and strong use of motion guides my compositions. I archive materials and letthat archive set direction. Most pieces are completed in one sitting to preserve immediacy.My music follows the same logic. Distortion, chopping, vocal sampling, and beat manipulationparallel my use of material reuse and reassembly. Performance energy matches the rawintensity of my visual work, and wearables and video direction link the sonic and visual worlds.Curation shapes how I collaborate. It teaches me to identify strengths in others and merge themwith my own, letting community influence the work.My intent is to document how individuals live, connect, and isolate. I make work for myself andfor the everyday person, shifting between the extremes of clarity and withholding, and creatingworks that hold beauty, honesty, and occasional dread.
3. A CALL FROM THE SOUTH - An Interview with Shallowater by Nicky Tcherven
Nicky Tcherven: Straight off the bat, where are you from, what’s your name, and your role in the band?
Tristan Kelly: My name is Tristan, I play bass [in Shallowater], and I’m originally from Lubbock, Texas, same as our drummer. Our guitarist, they’re originally from Booker, Texas, which is about three hours north of Lubbock, Texas. [It’s] up in the panhandle of Texas, kind of in the middle of nowhere.
NT: Is Arlen a real place like Arlen, Texas? (Note: King of the Hill reference)
TK: Yeah well it’s based on a Dallas suburb, I forget which one it is, but it’s like one of those local suburbs around Dallas but like the people in the show [King of the Hill] are very much more like the people that I like grew up around.
NT: Oh shit in like in Lubbock?
TK: Yeah, West Texas just has its own vibe. It’s basically where the Midwest of America starts, and that’s kind of the vibe of King of the Hill. It’s a weird place, but we all live in Houston now, we moved in 2022. We’ve all been living here for about three years, and it’s definitely a lot different. It’s nine hours away [from Lubbock], anywhere else that’d be like multiple states away but in Texas it’s just so fucking big.
NT: What kind of genre would you say best fits Shallowater?
TK: Well, what we wanted to do was make like a slowcore project, but since we’re from Lubbock, I didn’t even see my first show, a concert, till I was like 17. So we were all pretty far removed from the current scene. We were pretty unaware that shoegaze and slowcore were a big deal. We initially aimed for slowcore, but it ended up being more country. We mixed in elements of shoegaze, and I think that isolation made us a little bit different than like other slowcore and shoegaze bands.
NT: True, I was gonna say, when I saw you guys, it reminds me a bit of Wednesday, kind of like country shoegaze a bit.
TK: For sure, when I discovered Wednesday and Jay Linderman that definitely blew my mind. It made me feel like I wasn’t insane. It felt a lot better to not feel like I was the only person doing this. We all felt that way. We were like, Is this a viable thing? Is this something we can actually…are we like trying to reinvent the fucking wheel right now? But it was a huge relief to find out there were other people currently doing it.
NT: That’s sick man, they’re also from a southern state, too, right? They’re from like Tennessee, right?
TK: No, they’re from North Carolina, up in Asheville. We actually recorded our second album with the producer that has made all the Wednesday and all the Jay Linderman albums. I just dug into them and wanted to figure out everything I possibly could. It just led us to recording with Alex Farrar.
NT: Where does your name come from?
TK: So Shallowater is the name of a small town outside of where I grew up. It has a population of like 900 people. There’s nothing but a Sonic fast food restaurant and a couple of gas stations, and some houses. The rest of it’s just fields, but it’s right outside of Lubbock. I grew up always seeing like the exit on the highway to go to Shallowater, Texas. I always liked the way it was spelled out; it looks cool. We changed our name up a lot when we first started. We decided on Shallowater, that one that one stuck.
NT: What are your biggest influences?
TK: I mean, if you ask me, you’re gonna get a lot of shoegaze stuff and like the og math rock stuff. Blake is super into like old country and Smashing Pumpkins. Ryan’s into prog rock, and I feel like you can hear that within all the music. My personal influences would be bands like Codeine, and Tortoise. In a way, at the very beginning, when I started learning bass when I was like 22 it was American football [that got me into it]. I wanted to make songs that had that feeling. I didn’t want to make Midwest emo, but I wanted to bring out that feeling that you got when you went to do an American Football song.
NT: What’s your most hated band?
TK: [Laughs] It’s so tough because I hate so many bands. I think right now my most hated band would probably be Nine Inch Nails. I tried so many times to get into Nine Inch Nails, and I just don’t get it. I didn’t get it like at all. I see the t-shirts everywhere, but I just don’t understand how you can listen to that. It’s like someone saying their favourite food is like artichokes or some shit.
NT: How was your tour?
TK: It was fucking sick. That was like the first time we’d ever really headed out in a big way. Because we get stuck in Texas, just because it’s so big. You can do a whole tour in Texas. Bands would come through, and we would do the San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Dallas, route with bands, and then they would drop us off and keep going on to California. World’s Worst was the first band to ever take a shot and take us out around the country. It was an absolutely life-changing time in my life. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I’m glad that like we waited a little bit before we did it. It was a lot of build-up, and we kind of had a little bit of a following before we headed out. Going out there and meeting people who have been listening to our album for a year and a half. People drove like six hours to come see us in some places, it was the coolest fucking thing. I would do it again; I wish it had lasted longer. We were out for three weeks. I wish we could’ve done a full month, but that’ll happen one day.
NT: What was your favourite show on tour?
TK: Oh man, honestly, I love New York so much but it’s a tie, it’s either Montreal or New York. Montreal is fucking sick, dude. We had so many people come out, the venue was fucking so sick. I don’t know, that was my first time out of the country, and going to Toronto was already mind-blowing enough, but going to a place where everyone’s like speaking French…like I’ve never been around anything like that. I’m from a small town in Texas. I never thought I’d go to Montreal in my life so that was just like a cool cool cool thing. Then we got to meet our internet homies, Truck Violence, out there. If you never listen to Truck Violence, you definitely need to listen.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
Listen to Shallowater’s new album, God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars:
4. Photography Of Travels - Efe Torgay
1.
‘This first picture was taken in Xochimilco, a borough in Mexico City. It's known for its canals and colourful boats that host everything from bachelor parties to family tours. Amongst the chaos of blasting Mariachi music, drinking, and dancing, I was able to capture this beautifully quiet moment.’
2.
‘This second picture is from my trip to Tromso, Norway. It was fascinating to learn about the Sami culture – the indigenous people of Norwegian Lapland. Under the northern lights, they taught us their rich history and spiritual connection to reindeers. At night, we’d join locals for a swim in the freezing lake, then run into small wooden cabins, seeking the warmth only a sauna could provide’
3.
‘This image is from the Teotihuacan ruins in Mexico City. The picture is of the “Danza de los Voladores” ritual.’
4.
‘This fourth picture was taken in Azenhas do Mar, Portugal. On the wall beside me, from which I took this photo, was written the following:’
"Aperitivos e Lagosta
Tentacões do Paladar
Mas o mais Doce e o Sol
Eo mais Belo e o Mar"
- Texto do Ericeirense Raul Duarte Gomes
"Appetizers and Lobster
Temptations for the Palate
But the Sweetest is the Sun
And the most Beautiful is the Sea"
- Text by Raul Durante Gomes from Ericeira
5.
‘This last picture is from Tuz Gölü, Turkey. Beneath a wishing tree, a small stray puppy rests in the shade, hiding from the summer sun.’
5. Raygun - Zach Foster
This will essentially be a blog posting of the thought and technical process behind this work.
I love the Raygun. Recently, my roommate and I have been playing a lot of Black Ops 2 Zombies. Getting back into the groove of training and figuring out how to push our round limits higher than we may have achieved when we were younger (which honestly isn’t working out very well). Through this process, we have experienced tons of nostalgia as both of us used to play this game, specifically zombies and even more specifically a map called “Town” pretty religiously. What strikes me as interesting is the excitement we get when the random modifiers for the mystery box give us the Raygun. We get so incredibly excited and yelp out like two little dogs every time we see that silhouette. I think a lot of that has to do with how we perceived the Raygun when we were younger, when it was one of the few wonder weapons that actually existed in Call of Duty. Now, comparatively, it's not even all that great, but it will always remain special in our minds, as it will for many, I’m sure.
Aside from Zombies specifically, I have been thinking a lot about bringing game-like graphics into my print practice. Initially, it was just out of curiosity to see how these forms would take shape in a layered halftone format, but it’s becoming a lot more than that. I take great inspiration from the nostalgia I experience from playing over these old games again, and it’s just as exciting as I remember it, which is relatively surprising. I’ve been obsessed over character and weapon design from older games (2000-2016 range) for a while now, and I’m super happy I finally took a stab at recreating something like that in print, and what a great place to start. My next one will most likely involve the Halo series, as that was a massive part of my childhood. I used to wake up before elementary school around 4 am just to play Halo: Reach invasion.
The process of creating this piece was not significantly different from my other CMYK works; however, it was fun to work directly with a textured 3D model. I was going to try out different angles and stuff, but I just decided to stick with the perspective you see from the mystery box to really bring out that nostalgia. It was shocking to see that rusty red really came through in CMYK because it typically struggles in that gamut range, but I’m unbelievably happy with the result. It triggers something in my brain, and that’s when I know I hit the target. I used a 305 mesh screen with an 80 dpi halftone, standard CMYK angles, and self-mixed tri-art 7:1 ratio ink for you technical heads. These are printed on GORGEOUS sheets of Legion Rising White Stonehenge 300gsm paper. I needed an extremely smooth paper to allow these dots to be placed correctly. Brought the trusty old pins and tabs system out with the correct off-contact, and Bob's your uncle. Clean, photographic prints, my favourite. I also LOVE the damaged look the process blessed me with, it happens almost every time I do CMYK, maybe it’s just my learned technique, do I claim it for my own or simply give credit to the Screen gods?
Can’t wait to share the next one,
Zach.
Muah.
“I grew up always seeing the exit on the highway to go to Shallowater, Texas. I always liked the way it was spelled out”
“It made me feel like I wasn’t insane. It felt a lot better to not feel like I was the only person doing this. We all felt that way. We were like, Is this a viable thing?”
Shallowater (from left to right): . Photo by: