Reads

“Garbage” had long been on Gossamer's list of topics to cover in their normally abnormal way. It’s weird, but also deeply sensory—someone says the word garbage and you can immediately picture it (and smell it, too). After an edible and a few puffs, we started to wonder what a different perspective on garbage could look like. Plus, the idea of calling something the “Garbage Issue” just made us laugh. And so, here we are.

Volume Six includes Conversations with chef Sophia Roe, activist Emily Barker, designer Sarah Nsikak, and writer Anand Giridharadas; meditations on space junk, garbage time, houseflies, and loss; and art by Arielle Bobb Willis, Rajni Jacques, Ekua King, and David Brandon Geeting; and much, much more. We hope Volume Six offers some kind of escape. After all, like five o’clock, it’s always garbage somewhere.

Julio Mario Santo Domingo (1957-2009) was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world’s greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic, and rock and roll. A library of more than 50,000 items, it contained everything from rare manuscripts and photos to posters, bottles, letters, opium pipes, and pinball machines. Exploring the innumerable influences of mind-enhancing drugs on art, science, and politics over the centuries, Santo Domingo’s collection contained work by diverse figures including Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Allen Ginsberg, the Rolling Stones, Aleister Crowley, and many more. This extraordinary collection is vividly documented in Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo.

At once comprehensive and fantastical, informative and hallucinatory, this beautifully-designed book highlights pieces from the collection to create a visually stunning and endlessly surprising celebration of the Santo Domingo library. Shedding light on an often misunderstood force in history, Altered States is an unprecedented insight into the effect of drugs on life, politics and popular culture.

About The Editors:

Julio Mario Santo Domingo was born in Rio on October 20, 1957, the eldest son of Julio Santo Domingo, a Colombian businessman, and his Brazilian wife, Edyala Braga. Julio was raised in Colombia, moved to Brazil, then New York and finally Paris before he was nine. He studied law, then moved to New York to obtain a degree in comparative literature at Columbia University, the home of the Beats, whom he came to idolize. It was in New York that he met Vera Rechulski. They married in 1983.

Peter Watts has written for The Sunday Times, The Times, The Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Daily Telegraph, Uncut, Time Out and many more. His first book was Up in Smoke: The Failed Dreams of Battersea Power Station, published by Paradise Road.

Yolanda Cuomo is a designer and art director based in New York City. Her work has included publications on Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol and numerous others.

480 pages, 650 images
9.25 inches x 12.5 inches
Hardcover with slipcase
ISBN 978-1944860-15-8

The Smudge is a monthly newspaper offering articles, interviews, comics, and advice from a range of unique thinkers and creators. At a time when many of us have been searching for ways to contribute, The Smudge decided they'd use the tool they know best: PRINT.

From The Smudge, "We're not activists, we're not editors, but we have a printer and we know how to use it. So, in the spirit of the underground and alternative presses of the 60's and 70's, we hope to offer a unique voice and a different perspective on the issues and events that affect us all. And hopefully we can squeeze some good comics in there as well."

Snail World: Life in the Slimelight is a collection of absorbing snapshots from an alternate universe where snails drink bubble tea at the mall, hit tiny bongs, and get beamed up into flying saucers. 

Real snails and frogs bring to life miniature scenes meticulously created by artists Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland, inspired by moody, cinematic moments and nostalgic Americana. These dreamlike and often hilarious images evoke the melodrama of daily life: a snail alone in an apartment with one last box to move; two snails getting slime all over grandma’s plastic-covered armchairs; a frog doing karaoke in a heart-shaped hot tub. 

With hidden details to discover each time you flip through the pages, Snail World is a quirky celebration of the (very) little things in life.

By Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland. Hardcover with debossed image and spot gloss on cover. 80 pages, full color interior. Published by Broccoli. Measures 7” x 9 ¼”.

Artist Peter Coffin began his work with the iconic designs of LA’s Colby Poster Printing Company in 2008. Over the years, he solicited friends to contribute their dream concerts—invented lineups for impossible gigs—and combined them with the print shop’s famously eye-popping poster backgrounds, resulting in Imaginary Concerts: a stirring, two-volume celebration of music’s vast conceptual universe. Featuring 160 concert lineups from a roster of artists, authors and daydreamers including Yoko Ono, Larry Clark, Quasimoto, Genesis P-Orridge and dozens of others, Imaginary Concerts: Volumes One and Two transport the reader into an uncannily evocative, nostalgia-tinged and personally revealing realm of musical what-ifs.

About the Author:

Peter Coffin has mounted over 30 solo exhibitions with museums and galleries including the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC), The Barbican (London), City Hall Park (New York City), and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco). Coffin’s art can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, among other institutions. Music looms large in Coffin’s work and mind.

Gossamer's Sensible Guide Series is a trio of illustrated, cover stock booklets that approaches cannabis education with a sense of humor and high design.

The trio includes

-A Sensible Guide To Being Too High

-How To Roll A Sensible Joint

-A Sensible Guide to Smoking Weed (Again)

3x5" folded 

Cannabis for Curing Justice is a zine made by Ami Worthen which details how cannabis can be a tool for healing and wellbeing through the lens of equity and justice. This zine was created for an event we hosted in January 2020 called Cannabis Culture. 

This zine is an invitation to the owners and employees of CBD stores, and the users of any product derived from cannabis, to participate in a paradigm-shifting culture of equity and justice. We all will benefit from the collective vitality that can come from an equitable ecosystem, and this zine is a helpful guide for where to get started. 

100% of the proceeds from the sale of this zine will be donated to National Bailout (https://www.nationalbailout.org/)

When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice—one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colorful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalizing world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.

Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art—a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, the site of the exhibition.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.

From perfect pink ladies to rough-skinned russets: a gorgeous study of the wondrous variety of apples

William Mullan’s obsession with apples began when he saw his first Egremont Russet at a Waitrose grocery store outside of London. Fascinated by its gnarled, potato-like appearance and shockingly fresh, nutty flavor, Mullan began searching for, and photographing, rare apple varieties. In Odd Apples, each apple is lovingly rendered and styled according to its individual “personality”—a combination of its looks and its flavors. The apples are set against complementary brightly colored backdrops; they are peeled or unpeeled, cut or whole, skin shriveled or perfectly smooth and shiny.
It is precisely this odd charm combined with the hitherto unknown that makes these photographs fascinating studies of a supposedly commonplace fruit. Mullan embraces its idiosyncratic aesthetic qualities completely, and invites us, in this attractive gift book, to embark on a visual expedition into the world of the apple.
By day, William Mullan (born 1989) works at an artisanal chocolate factory in Brooklyn, and by night, he photographs fruit. British-born, New York–based Mullan came to photography as an autodidact and his talent was quickly recognized. His Odd Apple project developed into an influential and much talked-about series, reviewed by the New Yorker, the New York Times and i-D Magazine, and released as a sold-out run of prints on his website.

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism

Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti.

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group’s artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group’s work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group’s sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.

A definitive survey on the Dada participant and pioneer of abstraction between art and craft, spanning her textiles, marionettes, stained glass, paintings and more

Accompanying the first retrospective of Taeuber-Arp’s work in the United States in 40 years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is a comprehensive survey of this multifaceted abstract artist’s innovative and wide-ranging body of work. Her background in the applied arts and dance, her involvement in the Zurich Dada movement and her projects for architectural spaces were essential to her development of a uniquely versatile and vibrant abstract vocabulary. Through her artistic output and various professional alliances, Taeuber-Arp consistently challenged the historically constructed boundaries separating fine art from craft and design.

This richly illustrated catalog explores the artist’s interdisciplinary and cross-pollinating approach to abstraction through some 400 works, including textiles, beadwork, polychrome marionettes, architectural and interior designs, stained glass windows, works on paper, paintings and relief sculptures. It also features 15 essays that examine the full sweep of Taeuber-Arp’s career. Arranged into six chapters that follow the exhibition’s sections, these essays trace the progression of Taeuber-Arp’s creative production both chronologically and thematically. A comprehensive illustrated chronology, the first essay on Taeuber-Arp’s materials and techniques, and an exhibition checklist based on new research and analysis detail the expansive nature of Taeuber-Arp’s production.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was born in 1889 in Davos, Switzerland, and trained at the interdisciplinary Debschitz School in Munich. In 1914, she began a successful applied arts practice in Zurich, where she also taught textile design and participated in the Dada movement. Starting in the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp completed several architectural and interior design projects, most significantly the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. When she moved to Paris in 1929, she turned her attention to abstract paintings and painted wood reliefs. During the Nazi occupation, Taeuber-Arp spent her final years in the South of France, and died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943.