I see zine making as an extension of my art practice and an outgrowth of my interest in art products. I like making little books that I can sell cheaply. And I enjoy the zine community. For many years I participated in Montreal’s Expozine and in 2016 I exhibited at the Vancouver Art Book Fair.
My zines often combine original and found texts and images, with an emphasis on collage, photography, and painting. Some zines, like My Pet Rock, Art Is Food, and I Am Calling Today allow me to share poetic writing while other work like Kunstkammer Field Report and What Good is a Photograph? is more expository. And then you have those zines that are more conceptual like Apotheosis Ruskin and Eight Sonnets.
Pack of Zines
“Pack of Zines” is a collection of zines made between 2006 and 2020. ORDER A PACK
What Good Is a Photograph? (2020)
Kadour uses a photograph of snails eating habanero peppers in his garden and Farm Service Administration photographs taken by Gordon Parks in 1942 and 1943 to raise questions about the role of the photograph in a world flooded with images. Kadour asks the reader to consider how Roy Stryker thought about photographs as powerful tools of justice and how Gordon Parks used photography as a weapon for telling a greater truth about America. In a time of propaganda and misinformation, Kadour asks the reader to consider the role of images in their own life and to allow images to work for truth. Kadour takes a viewer-centric approach to photography, which allows the reader to develop the skills to look at images, to think about them and, ultimately, read the images as poetry. The essay includes discussions of Geoff Dyer, Dorothea Lange, Grant Wood, Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank. ORDER A COPY
Eight Sonnets (2019)
The zine features images from his “Eight Sonnets” series, accompanied by text from “Was I never yet of your love grieved” by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542). In the series, Kadour asks the viewer to consider each of the fourteen fragments composed on the cardboard as a verse in a poem. The centerfold shows the diptych, Strong Men Hold Hands & Other Acts of Kindness. Each zine features a unique for fragment collage on the cover. ORDER A COPY
Kunstkammer Field Report: Rutland (2019)
Operating from Year 2199, The Kunstkammer bends time and history by blending historical fact and imagined fictions to tell a story from the future about the present. The stories and perspective 180 years in the future will be different than what we know today. Knowledge will be gained but it will also be lost. The Kunstkammer invites the viewer to employ what writer Alexis Clements describes as art’s great technology, “to inquire about the world without being limited to facts or logic or notions of objective truth.” It also takes a nod from John Green’s Looking for Alaska, in which he observes, “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” We use our memories to imagine the potential of what may happen, but also what we can accomplish or achieve, to entertain what is possible. I invite you to enter this theater of memory and consider the future of your self and community. Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks about the danger of the single story, how simple narratives of others result in a poor understanding of our complex, shared humanity. This applies as much to the coworker sitting next to us as it does to the people living on a continent across the ocean. And it applies to ourselves when we decide that our story is simple and limited. Every person can write their own story, but to do that, they must imagine all the stories that are possible. The Kunstkammer Field Report: Rutland assembles a collection of stories about the images and objects in the installation of the Kunstkammer during February and March 2019 in Rutland, Vermont. Kunstkammer Field Report: Rutland was shortlisted for Expozine Award in 2019. ORDER A COPY
My Pet Rock: A Tragedy & A Love Story (2018)
My Pet Rock is a tragedy and a love story where the Byronic hero journeys to the Caribbean to Europe to the Middle East. He meet artists and writers, longs for lovers at home, and dies after eating Kentucky Fried Chicken across from the Great Pyramids of Giza. My Pet Rock is a parable about capitalism. With guest appearances by Carl Werner, Louis Marie de Schryver, Eduard Gaertner, Jean-Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, Tears for Fears, Dean Martin, Rudolf Ernst, Antonio Maria Esquivel, Agostino Brunias, Daniel Bell, José de Espronceda, and Duckey. ORDER A COPY
Apotheosis Ruskin (2017)
This zine is an aesthetic rehash of Kadour’s collage series, “The Veneration of Ruskin”, in book form. The series draws on Kadour’s interest in apotheosis, altar making, and still life paintings. The series of eleven collages cannibalize Ruskin’s drawings and Dutch flower paintings. Kadour selected Ruskin because of a personal affinity with the writer and artist, because of his vision of the role of art in society, and because he was “moved by Ruskin’s sadness, the self-torment, and his beautiful mind to venerate him with flowers.” ORDER A COPY
What Will Be of Us (2017)
What Will Be of Us is a continuation of the series, “I Keep Myself Together”, in which Ric Kasini Kadour pairs photographs with texts to evoke a response in the viewer. “I am interested in the isolation of contemporary life and the sometimes intense personal drama that plays out without anyone really knowing. When I watch people, I often make up stories in my head about them. The titles of the photographs are snippets of those stories; moments of dialogue in a full work of theatre. By presenting the images in a circle, I hope to convey to the viewer the sense that they are peeking into a world or looking through a spyglass,” wrote Kadour in 2013. In working this way, Kadour taps into the tradition of text-based works expressed by Lawrence Weiner and Martin Firrell and the text/image collage work of Barbara Kruger. ORDER A COPY
I Am Calling Today…(2016)
This absurdist collage poem in this zine begins “I am calling today to ask, Are you happy with your credit card processing?” It asks, “Are you happy with your resilience, your capacity for evolution?” And then it offers you tulip bulbs. The story is set against Pantone’s Top Colors of 2016 which includes such luminaries as Snorkel Blue, Green Flash, Iced Coffee, Limpet Shell, and, our personal favourite, Peach Echo. ORDER A COPY
Everything That Is Wrong With You and How to Fix It (2015)
This book begins “You are a piece of shit and nobody likes you.” Kadour takes as a point of departure Austrian playwright Peter Handke’s 1966 anti-play Publikumsbeschimpfung during which actors cast insults at the audience. The book is illustrated with Kadour’s photographs of banal objects and New Orleans oak trees. Everything… includes a commentary by Christopher Byrne, “Remembering Everything”. Byrne writes, “Everything That Is Wrong With You and How to Fix It is writing that is meant to be dissected, examined and internalized. Read it how you will.” ORDER A COPY
Art Is Food (2006)
“You cannot pry apart the two chocolate sides of a Georgia O’Keefe painting and lick the creamy vanilla center. The rampant elements of a de Kooning do not make a nice stew. Do not smear Pollock on your organic buckwheat toast in the morning and wash it down with a cup of steaming hot Andy Warhol. Art is food. Our country is hungry.” In 2006, Ric Kasini Kadour created the artist book Art Is Food, which is based on Kadour’s introduction to Art Town Meeting in Burlington, Vermont (February 2005). During the summer of 2006, Kadour illustrated the text. A hand-pulled screen print was made in Montreal, Quebec in August and September 2006. In 2008, Kasini House Books also published a trade edition. ORDER A COPY