Printing Potroast paper bags

We’ve been busy with printing Potroast paper bags with a linocut design on a Platen Heidelberg printing press this weekend. What do you think?

Submissions for Issue #11 are now closed

Good Job! We’ve received oodles of awesomeness.

We’ll be a bit quiet now for a few days while we work through all of the submissions  received. It’s going to be a hard job deciding which to include!

If you submitted something, you can expect to hear from us around mid April with an official response to your submission.

Thanks for submitting your work, thanks for supporting Potroast!

#11 Calling for Submissions

Potroast #11 is looking for submissions!
The theme for this issue is HOME - innovative and experimental interpretations encouraged!

Showcase: Felix Harris

When Felix Harris submitted work to Potroast, we were almost wracked by guilt over the fact that our publication was only able to offer to print them in black and white. It is with pleasure then, that we are able to present a showcase of some of Felix Harris’ recent work in its full vibrancy

Vibrancy is a good place to start a discussion of Felix’ work. Both formally and in terms of content, the paintings included today emanate with undeniable energy. The richness of palette, the eclectic, collaged composition and the simplicity of forms make the works instantly aesthetically striking. They vibrate with a visceral energy that is only compounded by the subject matter. Looking at ‘Heart ache’ (2010), the kinetic qualities and boldness of colour are instantly obvious, but they are layered with direct, grotesque and often humours allusions to sex and death. The breast-like mountains and phallic ice-cream cones and observant vaginas all take on a deeply personal, surreal tone, but stylistically seem to refer as much to Mexican Muralism as they do Surrealism.

Works such as ‘Rocky Road’ reflect this influence clearly with their colourful and energetic depictions of death, but it is the sense of allegory throughout Harris’ work that truly capture it. When we look at ‘Kahma’ there is clearly a kind of urban story being told. The figures seem to exist within some kind of city environment and compose a kind of complex culture. Yet the eclectic composition and subjects blur the intent and allow only hints towards this story-telling. This is further blurred with the introduction fantastical figures and with the introduction of religious iconography and an ambiguously moralising tone, seems to evoke the later works of Courbet as much as they do street art.

Yet, all this makes Felix’ paintings sound heavy and historical, when in fact it is quite the opposite that makes

them characteristically charming. Imbued with a very contemporary sense of self-awareness and a constant tone of parody and humour, the iconography is pulled away from heavy handedness into something that rings more true. It is the sense of something personal, but something that can equally mock itself without ego that makes Felix work so thoroughly enjoyable.

So dear readers and other citizens of the internet, it is without further ado that Potroast would like to present our showcase of the works of Felix Harris.

Felix currently has a show, Virtual Poporn, showing at the Gilberd Marriott Gallery in Wellington. See below for the invite.

http://www.photospace.co.nz/_GMG_pages/Felix_Harris/FH2012-1.htm

late-night monologue – Iain Britton

Potroast #10 featured an excerpt of a poem by Iain Britton. We wanted to make the whole poem available to read, so here it is. Enjoy!

late-night monologue

be like this – be transitory

a gateway obstacle

          to the next apartment

where a sigh escapes in a roll-your-own breath

where a stool takes the sudden shift of my weight

and a late-night monologue    

                          loads

a listener’s request

to practise walking

down a long tunnel

        gutted by ancestral burnings       

<>

I offer my version

of events as they happen

you aren’t sure about the rain

it’s coldness

the integers      parenthesised

on your arms          or the inked letters

of a name  

               tattooed in sunsets							

recapitulation is all talk / dredge work / more talk

              you’re into the habit of quickly

shutting doors

<>

but who’ll step up          make

                    altar-suggestions

of stained-glass jabberings reflected on the mount

                   who’ll request a right

to what I’ve hung      drawn and arranged
in every room

<>  

a water-colour        shoves a church

through my window / monuments

       crumble into drunks
                        mixed genders
                                  angels in shabby clothes

a crowd         hacks at the air to get a look in
they knock at places with rooms to let

you pick up another man’s junk

we are witnesses to things as they happen

                we make apes of ourselves

                leave slag heaps for neighbours
                turn our backs on backs

                we avoid confrontations					

zeroing-in

on the mischievous cackle of a river

Potroast overseas

Potroast went to Frankfurt earlier this year, included in Bryce Galloway’s Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People: ZINES AUS NEUSEELAND with loads of other excellent New Zealand zines.

More info here: http://www.nzatfrankfurt.govt.nz/events/incredibly-hot-sex-hideous-people-zines-new-zealand

Can you spot a page from Potroast #9 in this photo?

A huge thank you to Bryce Galloway for the opportunity and support!

Christmas for Subscribers

We want to thank our subscribers for their support this year.

We’ve made a mini-zine for you for Christmas

It’ll be in your mailboxes before Christmas!

The mini-zine includes works from;
Marc Conaco
Kelly Malone
Rickitinic aka Nicola Brady
Emily Starrett Wright
Eli Lamont
& Hannah Rose Owen-Wright