Peter Sutherland clearly understands the importance of narrative. Just take a look at his website: the landing page is a plainly presented paragraph of scattered childhood reminiscences, with no clear links to a portfolio of his photographs. Forced to read these cryptic half-memories, you’re placed in a trance of sorts, at which point Sutherland sneaks in links to his images. Suddenly these urgent photos of desolate Americana, crooked nature and youthful antics burn bright with the implications of a Universe of ethereal narrative contexts.

Sutherland is a master of all trades– photography, curating, filmmaking– he does it all. But somehow his artwork seems best suited to the printed page. Maybe that’s because it’s so immediate, kinetic, candid, organic. You smell the exhaust fumes of Sutherland’s wanderlust and you feel the dried up mud caked on his camera. Flipping through the pages of his books feels like peeking at a freshly developed roll of film, filled with a hundred impossibly lucky snapshots from the best adventure you’ve never gone on.

He’s been publishing zines and art books for years, through a veritable cross section of my favorite small presses: Nieves, Cederteg, JSBJ, and Gottlund Verlag to name a few. Now, Sutherland has put together a deluxe package of printed (and digital) matter called Work(ed) through Future Shipwreck megafriend Jesse Hlebo‘s press, Swill Children. Work(ed) is comprised of four elements: a risoprint on newspaper poster, a 36 page photo book, a 32 page collage zine, and an online component. Made in an edition of 193, the first 50 ordered come with a free Magic Grip jar opener, which “also removes lint from your clothing.” All that for $20! Take a look at the madness after the jump, and I’ll leave you with these words that Sutherland uses to describe the project:

clouds of dust
tarps
innersections of technology and nature
sketchy dudes
4×4 situations
blades
alien arrangements
hot springs
road dogs
summits
escape

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Art, in one very limited sense, is an economy of symbols and materials. In today’s bustling digital marketplace of aesthetics and ideas, Andrew Laumann’s work is like your favorite neighborhood corner store, perpetually well-stocked with Millennial fantasies of absolute power with no responsibility. Punks rocket through a boundless void or drop from trees like overripe fruit, totally prosaic shit like chain-link fences and CD-R cases become symbols of infinity. How to spend this energy? How to use this junk? What kind of feeling can it get us?

The labor of an artist is always bound up in desire, but the wants and needs reflected in Laumann’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and collages seem strangely achievable: getting high, walking through a forest, collecting tokens of good-times-past, refusing to think about death. Yet art is none of these things and while it might make you feel nostalgic or pleasantly fucked-up in an analogous way it’s not about to replace the grand human ventures of exploration and conquest. Laumann’s work is so sublimely satisfying because we want more than the-thing-itself, we want to see it from every angle, experience it from every vantage point, and generally confound that sneaking suspicion that we’ve already done every fun thing that there is to do in this world. Give us little monuments and letters to god and tell us it will always be this great forever.

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Some people spend years searching for their place in the world. Paul Paper just makes it up. He’s a sly Lithuanian photographer with a gifted eye, but he’s also an emissary for the online art world. He provides a catalyst for collaboration and creative cross-contamination that’s so often lacking on the varied fragmented Internet art venues. He’s not just discovering a community of like-minded artists who support each other’s varied creative endeavors– he’s building one.

Paper’s love for cinema led to a great group project we’ve shared here before, Postcards to Alphaville, which featured movie-obsessed artworks from a fleet of artists including FS favorites Michael C. Hsiung and Drew Beckmeyer. He also somehow convinced dozens of amazing artists to create works inspired by the winking riddle “It could be me, but it’s actually Paul Paper.” On top of all that, Paper runs the always on-point directory of global artistic radness, I Like This Blog.

Paper’s latest work is called I Forgot to Forget and features 16 of his original photographs lovingly printed in a staplebound zine. I was stoked to get a copy in the mail a couple months ago, and I’m happy to share it with you here. Unfortunately, only 60 of these were made– so unless you act fast, you probably won’t be getting one for Christmas.

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The colors in Nathan Osterhaus‘ photographs just pop. I especially appreciate the magnificent multiverse of plaid pictured in the portrait grid of painter Shane Walsh, above. It’s a one-man Exactitudes!

Stunning portraits from former Colors magazine creative director Stefan Ruiz. I’m especially enamored of his series The Factory of Dreams, which takes us behind the scenes at Televisa, a top telanovela production studio in Mexico. These images are full of contradictions: Ruiz manages to be at once distant, almost ironic in his compositions, while shockingly highlighting the humanity in his subjects. There’s a strong, sincere sense of empathy here, even when the poses seem awkward, or the framing stiff. It paints a portrait of a photographer who’s, yes, very skilled within his medium, but who also wields an impressive ability to relate to strangers on an intimate level and bring them consciously into the process of creation.

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Despite their pride of place in the filmography of Kenneth Anger, fireworks, like so many other popular aesthetic attractions, have been made into a kind of “bad object” of artistic appreciation. Their appeal is so obvious, their form so familiar what more can really be said or shown about these shimmering, summertime diversions? Well, here comes Pierre Le Hors with a 320-page visual manifesto, appropriately titled Firework Studies. This work, through some miracle of creative willpower and clarity of vision, restores a sense of wonder and, yes, even a tinge of nostalgic melancholy to this well-worn topic.

The images in Firework Studies are characterized by their sharp, almost startling monochrome contrast and an erratic sense of composition which makes even the most firmly centered elements seem strangely isolated. Here, we see each dazzling burst not as a distinct thing-to-be-admired, but as a single moment in the past which is always-already lost. Thanks to Le Hors’s fantastic presentation, one cannot help but be aware, even as they are staring into the face of an explosion, of the coming silence, of the inevitable fizzling out. What we have here is not so much a memorial to a particular time or image or sight that we all know and love, but something more like evidence, an attempt to prove that something existed and, by God, it mattered.

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I ran into the supremely charming artist Ryan De La Hoz at APE last month, and quickly fell in love with his awesome zine, Residual Energy. It’s easy to digest, and yet somehow haunting– filled with mysterious illustrations, grainy photos, and clever nostalgia for those 8-bit afternoons of childhood yore. Ryan’s wonder-filled personality really comes across in their glossy pages. Take a look at both issues of Residual Energy below, along with a gorgeously shot video interview by Paul Nguyen.

If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, don’t miss Ryan’s latest work at Heist Gallery on Saturday night!

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Cali Thornhill DeWitt‘s head lays claim to two things that I covet: his slicked-back hair and his eyes. His eyes work different, they stop and pay real homage to the things that I can only admire in fleeting glances. As much is evident in the photos on his blog, where he focuses on the washed out yellows and pale blues, the pauses of the L.A. expanse, and his gorgeous family and friends who inhabit said space.

Cali’s latest body of work, This Natural World, juxtaposes epic abstractions of picturesque National Geographic landscapes with his own crystalline snapshots of Los Angeles– amplified through rapturous repetition. There’s a true admiration for our city present in these portraits, and their presentation both forces and lulls you into considering the concrete landscape with its musty mattresses as important as the exotic, hyperreal nature scenes he culls from National Geographic.

This Natural World is currently on display at Family, so definitely take a moment to sink into Cali’s vibrant visions when you stop by the Awesome Book of Thanks! release party this Saturday!

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A couple years ago my friend Billy hit a deer driving back to Eugene on one of Oregon’s winding two-lane highways. Always an opportunist, Billy put the doe carcass in his pick-up and took it home, where he skinned and gutted the animal in the side yard between his house and the sorority next door. He made venison chili, but the head was left over, and for months he kept the last evidence of his crime wrapped in a plastic bag in the communal freezer.

This is everyone’s favorite story about Billy; it takes a truly audacious person to turn a tragedy into dinner. And roadkill reclamation has a way of satisfying our morbid curiosity with death and collision—without the ethical implications of rubbernecking at car wrecks or attending human funerals a la Harold and Maude.

The California Roadkill Observation System provides another ethical framework for gawking at roadkill. In the name of science, university researchers and volunteers out of my home town, Davis, California, have been fanatically photographing steamrolled animals in and around the Central Valley. The research will apparently be used to design better highways in the future that would decrease the real-life, recurring episodes of Car vs. Wild (as in the Discovery show, the man and his invention usually prevail over “the wild.” Though everyone loseWeight Exercises when a deer goes through a windshield.)

In its current manifestation, however, the Observation System is most useful as an access point to hundreds of categorized images of dead animals splayed heroically across the state highways. While there are certainly an abundance of gross-out roadkill photo albums online (enough to be spoofed in Nigel Grimmer‘s Roadkill Family Album), this one is uniquely thorough and unapologetic. Better roadside landscaping may be the reason behind the images, but the camera is clearly focused on the animal–the carnage often lining up with the rule of thirds. Which leads the online viewer to wonder: Why is it necessary for the data in this research project to be publicly accessible? When I compulsively visit the “Mammal (large)” section of the “Roadkill Photo Gallery,” will it actually influence whether or not I run over more of my large animal friends in the future?

The photos are stark obituaries for the deceased fauna. In human obituaries, one reads about the mundane hobbies of the dead and wonders in private how it all ended. In roadkill photos, the death scene is our only access to the animal’s life, while everything that came before remains a mystery.

“Both deer had been dead about one week, the first one probably an older kill and the 2nd within one week,” says one entry. “What was curious was that they went all the way down to the lake before dying near each other. Normally deer would avoid another dead deer.”

More photos after the jump; you can’t look but you can’t look away.

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Ruth Swanson, San Francisco champion of ethereal grit and sloppy sensuality, is bringing her stellar photo practice to L.A. I love watching the city I call home reveal itself in golden light and dusty air through Swanson’s fresh eyes. Swanson will be making her public debut as a Los Angeleno at Show Cave’s Corn on the Macabre III, a Halloween-themed show that also includes three of my all-time favorite illustrators: Matt Furie, Aiyana Udesen and Albert Reyes. Don’t miss it this Friday, October 29th!

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