Jocko Weyland: Elk

Over the last fifteen years Weyland has produced thirty-four issues of Elk, always in a consistent 5 3/8 x 8” format, saddle-stitched, with a black and white interior and full-color cover. Supposedly themeless, Elk carries on the legacy of minimalist skate, punk, and off-center art magazines of the early- to mid-1980s, with – as Weyland has noted – a “discriminating catholic sensibility”. The zine is simultaneously ruminative and unpremeditated, roughly constructed, built from the spontaneous connections that emerge as found materials are set in relation to one another in sometimes straightforward but often more allusive ways. The publications ask how images can be made to stand on their own.
To this end, each spread of Elk features a set of paired-off image/text excerpts that have been borrowed from various sources: found images from books and maverick periodicals, works of art, historical documents, letters, poems, and advertisements. Working through the immeasurably huge pictorial archive around him, Weyland identifies and isolates images, placing them into new contexts to ferret out unexpected and evocative cultural/subcultural affinities as well as formal and compositional resonances. As Weyland reproduces and re-scales each image, distilling down an archive of strange and challenging source material, he levels notions of “high” art and the underground, creating something that is at once serious and playful.