We've got it all right here, folks! Everything that's ever been written up, photographed, and discussed on the Sad Mag website. Enjoy browsing our archives!
It was a move of passion––nearly instinctual. You were straddling me as we kissed on the couch and I stood up as you held on like a koala and slowly navigated us towards the bed; doing my best to avoid the coffee table, the chair and my clunky oversized bicycle on the way. I almost lost balance when I noticed a pair of my dirty underpants on the floor and casually tried to kick them out of sight.
Then came the sound. I squatted to lower you onto the bed and it was like a gunshot. A cannonball fired from a pirate ship oddly moored in my apartment. My pants had exploded from my scrotum to the soft patch of skin above my ass that acts as a foyer to the fleshy mound before it splits like an embryo into two hairy cheeks. I felt the breeze from the open patio door on my bottom. You held your composure as long as you could before crumbling into laughter. I didn’t think it was that funny. I really liked those pants.
The boardroom at the parks department was hot, humid, and full of media and piles of us skateboarders who were filling the seats and every available space on the floor. We were waiting to speak in opposition of an asinine motion concerning the removal of a well-loved and utilized skatepark. But first there was another item on the docket—the proposed zipline at Queen Elizabeth park.
Yes, a zipline. Because it’s always best to have a quick exit readily available at popular tourists spots for when your relatives come to visit and your grandpa starts talking about “all of the damn Filipinos that are moving to town” again. The commission asked you general questions about your company’s proposal like “What does the zipline’s revenue model look like?” and “What will be the environmental impact?” before lobbing you a softball. An easy homer. “Is it true that 1/10 people who ride the zipline are squealers?” Admittedly it was a strangely worded question but not as strange as your answer.
“I’m not sure about that statistic, I mean, this isn’t an episode of Deliverance.”
There were two fucked up things about your response. First, Deliverance was a movie starring a sans-mustache Burt Reynolds, not an episodic. Second, you just made a wildly tangential reference to one of the most infamous rape scenes in cinematic history at a public and televised Parks Board meeting. A few of us gasped. The board voted almost unanimously in favour of the zipline.
“Oh, the skateboard man, the skateboard man, skateboarding down the road as fast as he can!” You sang to me while I walked down the alleyway. Before you broke out in song you had been raking gravel back and forth across the road, not collecting leaves or trying to get pieces of a broken bottle into a manageable pile; you were just raking rocks and dust while wearing a very comfortable looking ivory white sweat suit.
And I’m not sure why you began singing about my skateboard and me. Maybe you saw how upset I was and you wanted to cheer me up, or you were just looking for an excuse to play your rake like a guitar. Either way, I instinctively started to sing along and banged on my air drum-set like an Albertan Neil Peart, using my skateboard as an exaggerated drumstick. When we’d finished I thanked you and kept on down the road, face wet with tears, even more confused than before.
For the month of February, all new subscribers to Sad Mag will be entered to win an exclusive print of “i still dream about you” by Roselina Hung. Each subscription counts for 2 entires!
Local artist Roselina Hung still dreams about her last cat Ari, and isn’t afraid to talk—or draw—about it. In her latest piece, i still dream about you, she incorporates these feline reveries into a poster-sized collage print, piecing together a series of hand-drawn portraits her own and others’ past cats. For ex-pet owners, Hung writes on her blog, the print might capture feelings of love, loss and obsession; but “for anyone who hasn’t owned a cat before,” she warns, “the image can propagate the idea of the ‘crazy cat lady’ ”.
For the sake of all our self-proclaimed crazy cat readers out there, we couldn’t let this opportunity pass us by. Sad Mag sat down with Hung for the scoop on all things art, feminism, and of course…cats.
SM: So lets start with the basics. Where are you from? How did you get into all of this?
RH: I’m from Vancouver. I grew up here and did my undergrad at UBC in fine arts. After I finished there, I moved to London, England and I did my masters there at Saint Martins. I was there for about 3 years and then I moved back at the end of 2006.
SM: How did you originally get into art?
RH: I think I’ve kind of always been doing it. There was never really any doubt in my mind that this was what I was going to do. When I was growing up, I’d tell myself that I was going to do something else—you know, like a more “practical” job. But I always just kind of ended up going back to art. I just always knew.
SM: You’ve done some residences in some amazing places—Banff, Paris, Reykjavik—has any one place stuck with you in particular?
RH: Each one was so different. I got something different out of all of them. When I went to Paris, that was the first time I moved away from home…and the first time I moved somewhere where I didn’t speak the language. I had a studio there just off the Seine and across from the Louvre, so that was a very romantic idea of being an artist. [The residency] in Michigan was kind of like summer camp. Off in the woods, we were in cabins and there was a lagoon. We’d all come together for home-cooked meals. And the Reykjavik one was an even smaller group, and the environment there was so unlike anywhere else—almost no trees, everything’s low bush, shrubbery. Parts of it look like the moon!
SM: Can you tell me a little about the cat print?
RH: While I was [in Michigan] I found some fabric with all these animal heads on it. Something about it was so tacky and gross, but it also really attracted me. So I made some mock-ups with different fabrics I found—a cat one, dogs, horses.
SM: How did you find the cats you used?
RH: I wanted to find images with people’s pets that they didn’t have anymore—that had passed away or been given away, so I was asking people for pet photos. Not many people sent anything to me actually…I think dog people would send more. I even had people write me and say, “let me know when you do a dog one.”
SM: What about cats attracted you?
RH: I’ve always just liked cats, and I had a cat for a while. And my cat still comes up in my dreams—you know, every once in a while. Once you’ve had a pet and it passes away, you just always miss it.
http://roselinahung.com/
SM: Is that the same idea behind your pretty boys kill me collection?
RH: There’s a bit of a parallel. But with the pretty boys, I guess it’s a different kind of desire and love…
SM: I hope so!
RH: (Laughing) A different kind. I’ve done a couple now with different [themes].
SM: Where do the titles come from?
RH: They’re from text messages and chats that I’ve had.
SM: Really? How do those pretty boys feel about it?
RH: I don’t know…I haven’t talked to any of them. In some ways, they’re so generic—anyone could say them with how people text and chat. I don’t even know that they’d know it was from them.
SM: It seems so much of our communication is like that these days—generic. And that we build so much of our identity through these almost anonymous texts and chats. Did you think about that while you were working on the pieces?
RH: I was interested in the way that we were communicating desire and love through these little snippets of text. There’s only so much that you can put into [them]. They aren’t even original; we’re just repeating things that we’ve seen or heard somewhere before. Kind of like lyrics from songs—clichéd and repeated.
SM: I also noticed that you opted for male instead of the traditional female muse for this collection. What was your intention with that?
RH: I was thinking about that a lot, actually. They had “pretty boys” in art history. A lot of times they’d be the angels or the gods—all quite young and angelic looking. But it was always men painting them. I just kind of wanted to see a woman do it.
SM: So, the women in your paintings, are they supposed to be you?
RH: Kind of…kind of not. They don’t look like me, but the stories are all ones that I identify with, events that have happened in my life. I put a bit of myself into it, but my identity is hidden behind those women.
SM: Is it hard to put so much of yourself into your work?
RH: Before, I was doing more self-portraits—I was putting way more of myself into the work. Now I can just put the work out there and stand back. It’s still personal, but not so personal that I’m…you know…taking everything personally.
SM: Alright, one last question for the cat aficionados out there: Do you have a favourite cat story?
RH: My cat was an indoor cat, because I used to live near the driving license place and I was afraid of letting him out. He was actually pretty big, almost 20 lbs. or so, and my bed was small. I couldn’t sleep sometimes, so every night I would close my bedroom door. For a small period of a couple months or so, I would hear my cat running around the house as soon as I went to bed. I guess he’d been chasing a necklace of mine that I had dropped on the floor, [because] in the morning, he left it at my door. A couple weeks later, he left this little artificial rose, and then the third time he left me a little teddy bear. You know how cats leave gifts for they’re owners? They’re usually dead animals. I had the best cat—he gave me romantic gifts!
Before there were selfies, there were self-portraits
As a child, Dana Kearley remembers an obsession with deep sea and prehistoric animals.
“I love horror and gore, and I think that came from those creatures,” says the Vancouver-based illustrator. “I love the feeling of being grossed out by something. I would look at books, be grossed out, close the book and then open it again.”
Today, her illustrations aim to give viewers the same uncomfortable feeling of both wanting to look and wanting to look away through ambiguous interactions between humans, animals and hybrid creatures.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Why am I drawing blood?’,” she says. “I don’t know. I kind of want to make people uncomfortable. It’s so gross, but also cool—and it can be cute too, kind of funny in a different way.”
Kearley finds inspiration in the work of Marcel Dzama, a Canadian multidisciplinary artist who is best know for drawings that seem like children’s book illustrations at first glance, but are full of surreal interactions and strange details upon closer inspection.
“He’s in his own little world, and that’s how my work is too,” Kearley explains. “It’s hard to get what’s going on in my head into words, but it’s not hard to get it into images.”
Kearley is studying part-time towards a BFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, majoring in Illustration and Drawing. In addition to her coursework, she has recently completed the album artwork for a split seven inch EP for Sightlines and Crystal Swells.
She also volunteers for Discorder Magazine, creating a monthly illustration for the CiTR-published music magazine.
“I like doing it because it doesn’t have to be completely literal. I listen to the bands first and then go from there,” Kearley explains, saying she’s done illustrations for some of her favourite bands: The Courtneys, Cool and most recently, Skinny Kids.
“I’m really happy with the illustration in this month’s magazine, so I’m going to continue with that idea [little human-ish creatures in leotards and masks, dangling from a hairy arm], but with different body parts,” she says.
“I really like Pussy Riot with their masks,” she continues, pointing out the many characters in her illustrations who also wear masks. “You don’t know who’s under there.”
Kearley’s work can be found in this month’s Discorder magazine, and on her website: danakearley.tumblr.com.
