Cover of Issue #30, "Rebirth" (last issue)
My interpretation of the theme of "30" and "Rebirth" is based on the idea of Portland being a musical town and choosing musicians who died before they were 30, thinking that the magazine had outlived them. I'm partial to the Jim Morrison YMCA "M" and especially to Kurt Cobain in the center.
The type was created by "breaking" a panoramic app on my iphone by photographing moving text on my computer screen. The distortions are a result of the app trying to make sense of the unsual data fed into it.
If you look closely, you can see that the head of the main central figure is that of Frank O'Hara as referenced in other projects.
One of my favorite lines I've written: "Spacewalk through Neurons to gawk at Algebra." If everything we make is as a dream, then there's this impressive act between the act of looking and the act of understanding. Gawking at Algebra—not only the interesting repetition of the "a" sounds, but it strikes me as this dumbfaced "what the heck" expression when approaching the sublime. We don't even know what we are looking at, but we walked through space to get there.
Hand-drawn text done 5-foot tall on a white board with dry erase marker coupled with an oil pastel rendering of my father's false teeth from when he died come together in this mix of life and death, fitting for "rebirth" and resurrection.