Celebrate the Autumnal Equinox with us as we release the third issue of Lantern: Work.
Cover Design:
By David Williams
Return to the Quiet
I learned to play guitar on the acoustic when I was a kid. Growing up with heroes like Will Ackerman, Michael Hedges, and Daniel Hecht, I spent my early music years learning finger-style guitar. I picked up the drums and put the guitars away for a long time, then in 2007 started writing for guitar again. This time, however, it was the electric. Trying to create dark, instrumental moods with effects, Sounding the Deep was born. After a few recordings, I felt I reached the end of amplification and high-decibel music. I sold all my gear save my acoustic guitars, drums and amps gone. Trying to find quiet in my spirit and music, I headed to forests, lakes, but mostly my back porch, and began writing on the acoustic again. I felt incredibly nostalgic as I wrote these songs, as if I was re-learning the instrument. I was returning. There are few things in life as good your trusty old guitar and a cold beer, while listening quietly to trees, birds, or just silence itself. I believe this is where you hear God. The guitar is just the instrument I use to express my prayers and meditations. A simple tool made from a tree that can produce tones and melodies gently weaving into the chord of nature and life itself.
[Click play below to listen while exploring the current issue. Right click links below to download.]
By Will Cordeiro
The Canticles are part of an on-going series that investigates the notion of work as process while the work itself remains continually in process. They depict interiorized landscapes shaped by both erosion and accretion, the language manifesting a pilgrimage or erotic quest to some ultimate, asymptotic point-of-no-return. The micro and marginal spaces reinterpret the ecological terrain; the train of the larger narratives foreground their switches, so that the individual junctures are stations glimpsed in transit, between vision and revision, attempting to capture what’s fleeting and plasmatic.
Will Cordeiro’s poems appear in many journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, Sentence, and Harpur Palate.
By M. Dane Zahorsky
Ontological Apology attempts to examine how our attitudes and interactions with work both as individuals and a society have shaped our culture. Whereas for the majority of the modern age we have shirked Ontology [being] for Epistemology [process] this work hopes to bring the question of doing back into relation with meaning where it belongs. I hope to make the case for a neo-teleology born from what we can know via the guideposts rooted in the natural world all around us. By seeking purpose not to transcend but circulate, we may better prepare ourselves for the creativity the future will demand of us.
M. Dane Zahorsky has been exploring the spirit of art, place, and community in the Midwest for over a decade and has worked as an artist, lecturer, community organizer, and teacher with communities at home and as far away as Hawai’i, Beijing, Guatemala, and Roma. More at MOTUV.org.
By Dustin Valen and Elliott Sturtevant
The Perturbation of Mr. Croft is a collaborative piece between two authors working independently in film and mixed media collage. Beginning with the static portrait of an alleyway, the work sets out to reconfigure the image and its content through a series of iterative transformations executed simultaneously in the two different mediums while ruminating on its reconfigured meaning. The work is presented here as a series of distinct, but related parts to reflect the carefully observed process by which the piece was created and provoke a wider variety of interpretations.
Dustin and Elliott study architecture at the University of Toronto; a bit subversive, and a little petulant, their work seeks to ask questions about our contemporary world and to reinvest architecture with desire and the unknown.
By Troy Payne
W[a/o]NDER is a photographic homage to the Croatian landscape and its subtle and striking tones that gave rise to folk art in Croatia and to a place the world has deemed too unique and magical to cede to clumsy modernity.
Troy Payne is a naturalist photographer and nature advocate living on the islands of the Republic of Palau in Micronesia. This submission is a part of his ongoing project to explore the endarkened space of nature beyond the lantern’s glow and to investigate the fear that is associated with dark nature. More of his work can be found at blacklanternsyergy.com and at lanternjournal.org.
By Thomas Hillier
The Emperor’s Castle originates from a mythical and ancient tale hidden within a woodblock landscape scene created by Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker, Ando Hiroshige. It’s a fantastical theatre of surreal spatial thresholds sited in central Tokyo that uses narrative as a vehicle to examine current day cultural and social issues within Japan. The project started its life in blank sketchbooks that were cut, folded, drawn, sewn, glued and collaged together to construct a sequence of improbable marriages between location and fantasy, occupying a world that is both real and surreal.
Thomas Hillier was birthed and raised in the always-sunny County of Dorset in the South of England. In 2008 he graduated with a Masters in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) under the tutorship of Professor CJ Lim. Thomas is a spatial storyteller who attempts to look at architecture from a different perspective, using unorthodox narratives and programmes to create original and surreal observations with a particular interest in how literature can be directly translated into urban and architectural space. Read more spatial stories at www.thomashillier.co.uk
by Lawrence C. Ownley
Chinese Godard vs. Ninja X
This absurdist soliloquy careens through the space between work, which often moves us forward progressively, and a job, which often does not. In my common residency occupying the purgatory between work and job, the creative work of imagination fills in the blanks. Hop in for a ride down Wilshire Boulevard in search of some exquisite Chinese.
By LIONarchitecture
Do Nothing highlights a project by LIONarchitecture at Urbavore Farm in Kansas City, MO. Through narrative and diagram, Do Nothing brings you out of your time-scale as a human and explores the site of the project through the filter of a tree.
LIONarchitecture was started in 2010 by Matt Teismann and Charles Vega. Be it exploring the great symbiosis between natural and the built, or merely discussing the validity of a language of architecture which has persisted through time, LIONarchitecture is not a practice necessarily as much as it is a dialogue. Their work includes the exhibit ‘Urban Green-House Project,’ and publications ‘Futureless’ and ‘Anti-Haptic Experience.’ More at lionarchitecture. com.
By: Troy Payne
Portland, OR
Plane of Plain.
Bearing involves equal parts going and waiting. Both must be done in lieu of the other, yet neither is anything special without its counterpart. Work, at its most fruitful and beneficial, is the successful mediation of initiative and experience. These images are a standing in the sun and a walking in the rain.
Lantern Journal