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knack is dedicated to showcasing the work of new artists of all mediums and to discussing trends and ideas within art communities. knack’s ultimate aim is to connect and inspire emerging artists. We strive to create a place for artists, writers, designers, thinkers, and innovators to collaborate and produce a unique, informative, and unprecedented web-based magazine each month.
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andrea vaca co-founder, photo editor, production manager, marketing will smith co-founder, digital operations ariana lombardi executive editor jonathon duarte design director miljen aljinovic editor fernando gaverd designer, digital operations, marketing jake goodman designer, photographer spreads by jonathon duarte / covers by jake goodman k n a c k m a g a z i n e 1 at g m a i l . c o m
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artist biographies 4 ariana lombardi 11
knack andrea vaca 21
fernando gaverd 29 jake goodman 37
jonathon duarte 45 miljen aljinovic 53
submission guidelines 64
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ariana lombardi
andrea vaca
Ariana Lombardi was born and raised in Northeastern New Jersey. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Santa Fe University of Art Design (SFUAD), and a TESOL certificate from the School of International Training (SIT). Ariana’s work has been published in KNACK, Pasatiempo and The Essential Guide, and her prose piece “Letters to Strangers: Dear David Hume” will be published in the upcoming issue of The Laurel Review. Ariana is currently living in San Francisco and is an identical twin.
Andrea Vaca is 26. She grew up in Chicago and is currently living, working, and learning in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She travels anywhere and everywhere, whenever the chance arises.
homeisalonelyhunter.wordpress.com
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email@andreavaca.com www.andreavaca.com
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fernando gaverd
jake goodman
Fernando Gaverd is an amazing Mexican designer. He creates some of the sexiest work; curves and lines that dance at the intersection of human form and geometry. He has the sensibility of a classic typographer and the curiosity of a graffiti kid. His symbols look like Frank Lloyd Wright inspired alien hieroglyphics, his photography is stunning when used in his own projects and his sensitivity to scale and rhythm and movement are key in his confident mark-making.
When I’m not designing, I can be found drawing, reading, hiking trails, or driving about. My eyes are always open, always observing the world in an attempt to better understand it and put it to paper. buenhombredesign@gmail.com
f@gaverd.com www.gaverd.com www.behance.net/gaverd instagram: Fernando Gaverd
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jonathon duarte 2 ounces Rye whiskey 1/2 ounce Sweet Vermouth 2-3 dashes of Angostura bitters Maraschino cherry for garnish jduarte915@gmail.com instagram: Jonathon Duarte
miljen aljinovic Miljen Aljinovic is a writer and musician living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was born in Yugoslavia and immigrated with his family in the early 90s. He has self-published one novel, “Passerby,” and writes a bi-weekly column for The Santa Fe Reporter, titled, “Born Here All My Life.” flyingpenguin157@gmail.com
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will smith Will Smith is a Los Angeles-based photographer and a graduate from the BFA Photo and Media program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His photographic work investigates space, infrastructure and how these constructions are inhabited.
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a c k a f f t i o n 9
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ariana lombardi C R E AT I V E W R I T I N G
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1. We get to know each other, but less with words and more with feeling, and
I understand you and you understand me and there are so many things we see
we
similarly and so many things we can’t see, but we don’t care because we see
and you want
we
and I am unsure of
we,
but I want you and you want me
and this is everything I have been waiting for.
You are beautiful, kind, gentle, and shiny.
You are freedom.
You liberate me
from that past self who is shrouded, still, in anxious, compulsive control
because I cannot control this feeling that is growing inside of me and
you say let go,
breathe into me. You say,
“I got you, you got this.”
We got this thing going and we’ve got each other. You are in my brain. You will not leave. You are everywhere. Breathe touch breathe touch breath kiss longing fuck 12
it begins where it ends
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breath kiss breath touch longing love
I have fallen into love. With you.
My freedom--
listen to it tapping underneath my epidermis.
We are one in the same.
2. I want to give you everything I have. I am giving you all that I have.
What piece of me would you like? A nibble of flesh; that bulbous part of my lip that you hold onto with your mouth? Maybe a nip from my upper thigh? Or, what about a scoop of brains. My intent-the mealy graymatter. Or do you want the inside-pieces, like organs? The red-purple flesh But what of my heart? That
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cardiovascular pump. Take a piece and hold onto it. Make it yours. This bullet-this thing called love,
it’s deep in my chest.
We become visceral.
I am hooked.
Our heat. This electricity. Bioluminescence
We are one.
3. And what is it that I can say to make it better? You
becoming more of you and less of us.
I still want to ingest your flesh. You don’t offer a piece to eat. I am irrational and madden by your dimming light. I keep throwing myself headlong-into your gloom 14
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and it becomes my gloom and I am in the dark. I am carrying us and you are standing still, waiting for me to understand-as if I could divine it, as if I could be okay with the ever-pervasive silence. I am waiting for you to catch up or you are telling me that I am ahead of you and you will never catch up, or you think you are one step behind or you stopped hearing me when I said we are one in the same. And you still see yourself when you look at me, but you never gave me a piece of your heart to chew on and eat and I have you inside of me but am I inside of you?
Our heat. This electricity. Your bioluminescence was-is a thing of the past.
We. Are.
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4. This journey we started together ends in a departure. The long corridor of that airport. The checkers waiting to check me. The yellow light. Your royal-blue pants. The empty queue. My clammy palms, ice-cold fingertips. The height of your hair. A pack on my back. Your honey-sweet skin and kind eyes. The wave crashing. A kiss on the lips, a kiss on the cheek, and each of your eyelids. A kiss on the lips and, will I ever kiss these lips again?
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Is it the same?
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Our hands holding the other’s. Our arms holding each other. A kiss on the lips, each cheek, each eye, my chin, my forehead.
I walk. You walk.
In all directions-my heart is beating. In all directions-my breath leaves me. You getting smaller. You calling my name across that long corridor. Me turning and watching you walk away, waving and smiling. My smile cracking. You are walking away from me. Is that you walking away from me?
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My heart-that cardiovascular pump, pumping and breaking Where did that light go? I am bound to this body and I don’t want to be bound to you.
We are done.
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5. I am rooted in myself. My heart, that cardiovascular pump. It says, “Stay open. Let the light in.”
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andrea vaca PH OTO G R A PH Y
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broken open new mexico 2014
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waterspace new mexico 2014
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cradle to the grave new mexico 2014
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palo duro canyon in august texas 2014
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for someone special . . . whomever it may be chicago 2015
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fernando gaverd GR APHIC DESIGN
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jake goodman GR APHIC DESIGN
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Καλλιόπη& Calliope& Κλειώ& Clio& Eὐτέρπη& Euterpe& Ἐρατώ& Erato& Μελπομένη& Melpomene& Πολύμνια& Polyhymnia& Τερψιχόρη& Terpsichore& Θάλεια& Thalia& Οὐρανία. Urania. 40
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L O V E (is a four-letter word)
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jonathon duarte GR APHIC DESIGN
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miljen aljinovic C R E AT I V E W R I T I N G
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save the last dance
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Nobody dances any more. For generations, in times when physical contact – especially between men and women – was more of a taboo, dancing was used as a surrogate for other, more intimate physical experiences. Until the sexual revolutions of the 60s, merely holding hands was a social expression of romantic exclusivity among couples. Our grandparents didn’t believe in casual hookups. When discussing sexuality was regarded as perversion, dancing was the next closest thing people had that allowed them to come together and explore the magic of touch. It was the only social activity available to them where people could symbolically unite – in as close to a sexual manner as they dared at the time – and experience each other as parts of a greater whole. Millennials don’t do that so much. I suppose we still dance, but generally, everyone’s dance is more an expression of their individual selves. We don’t dance with one another, so much as we just sort of dance near one another, alone. The closest we come to what was once thought of as dancing is the behavior you see in clubs, where what people are doing can best be described as dancing at one another; the grinding gyration a much less subtle foreshadowing of the participants’ eventual motives. But if you look at it another way, all we do these days is dance. Our every interaction has become a symbolic suggestion of a deeper ulterior intent. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d bet one of the big reasons people my age prefer texting (especially when feeling out new romantic potentials) is that it leaves a certain ambiguity that face to face conversation doesn’t. Our conversations and interactions are all swaddled in layers of pop-culture references, analogies, and representational truths. Simple social interaction has become a dance. I don’t know if this happened because as humans, we need some degree of obfuscation of our intent to feel comfortable going out on a limb. Maybe it’s just a side-effect of the technological disconnect I keep hearing about. That’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that, much like music, dancing was a unique and specific form of nonverbal interpersonal communi-
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cation. You could communicate things, in a dance, that cannot be said with words – things that are either too multifaceted, too esoteric, and that leave people too personally vulnerable to express with black on white. The way you can say “I love you” a thousand times, but it will never quite resonate the way it does with the right single kiss, you could once explore a whole range of emotions with someone you weren’t necessarily ready to kiss. And now we gloss over that very important part of courtship. In fact, we seem to gloss over courtship itself, most of the time. Most of my failed romantic expeditions of the last decade, and most of the ones I’ve watched my friends struggle with, all come back to the specific (if not simple) issue of people not knowing each other well enough before making an emotional commitment. The “dealbreakers” that come up a month or two into a relationship are often subtle personality traits that either should have been spotted earlier, or inconsequential surprises that get blown out of proportion. Maybe a waltz wouldn’t fix that, but if your partner never lets you lead, it may get you thinking earlier about whether you really see eye to eye on life in general. I don’t dance. It feels silly and vulnerable. I lose control at rock shows that move me, but like I said earlier, that’s an isolated expression of my interaction with the music. But I wish I did, because I bet it would be less lonely.
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good night sweet prince: how disney princesses ruined antire engeneration of boys
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It’s probably safe to say that most of the people my age grew up watching Disney movie classics. A lot has been said about the ways in which those movies brainwashed little girls to shy away from feminism and fall in line with chauvinist expectations. I’m not qualified to address that, so I’m going to talk about what those movies did to their male counterparts. Aside from the strong chance that chivalry and feminism might be mutually exclusive (as briefly mentioned in Part 2), Disney movies completely scrambled the way my generation of boys perceived girls. All of the marketing in the 80’s and 90’s focused on the ways in which boys and girls are different and the often hostile ways in which they segregate themselves. From cooties, to Barbies and Hot Wheels, to pink and blue color-coding for unisex items, everything (Literally. Fucking. Everything) I was exposed to in the media until age 12 was designed to remind me that girls were actually space aliens that might one day ensnare me with their evil magic—at which point all fun in the world would be brought to an end and I’d be forced to play with Easy-Bake Ovens until I died. But back to Disney. The biggest way in which I feel fucked over by those Disney movies is the way they prepared me (or abjectly failed to do so) for romantic relationships. From age 0, I and every other boy in America (and much of Europe) was taught that it was our job to sweep girls off their feet and rescue them from their problems. And then we became teenagers and the Internet happened. We stopped calling each other and started texting. We stopped hanging out and just posted things on one another’s Facebook walls. We gained so much information about the world through our computers, we forgot how to interact with each other in their absence. The biggest obstacle for happy romantic relationships turned out to have nothing to do with evil step-parents, nefarious spell-casters, or dancing hippopotami. It’s that we now suck at communicating across gender-lines. Girls my age don’t want to be swept off their feet. At least not any more than guys do, in the sense that any one of us would immediately swoon if we met a single one of our peers who wasn’t as self-obsessed and
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awkward as we ourselves are. Many girls my age have spent the better part of their lives trying to balance on the tightrope of asserting fundamental social equality and defining and redefining their role in society, without completely alienating the beautiful things that make them biologically different from guys like motherhood and better emotional cognition, among others. On top of that nightmare, the overgrown boys these girls have to choose from were all taught that we are supposed to be Knights in Shining Armor, saving them from their troubles, slaying dragons, and dropping charming one-liners along the way. And most of us suck at that. Until I was 25 I couldn’t hang out with pretty girls without having a nervous breakdown from over-thinking how I was supposed to be behaving to make them like me – a tendency that resulted in me behaving like exactly the kind of creep most girls rightly avoid; the kind of diluted shit-bird that makes up most of the Men’s Rights movement (if you can call it that). The worst part is that the only problems we could ever have a hope of “rescuing” our female counterparts from are based in the same generational shortcomings we suffer from ourselves. The only way we can help each other is to realize that the things making us most miserable are universal and gender-neutral, and then first address those issues in ourselves. But that doesn’t make for a good Disney movie.
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nice guys finish last
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I have this friend name Shea. He’s without rival the most genuinely decent person I’ve ever known. To date he’s literally saved my life at least twice, and figuratively more times than I can count. His only and primary motivator is to ensure that everyone he cares about (and in general everyone around him) is safe, comfortable, and happy. He doesn’t swear – ever – because in his own words, “There could be someone around that is offended by those words and doesn’t want to admit it, and I wouldn’t want to unknowingly make them uncomfortable.” He’s basically the exact opposite of me. The most aggravating thing about Shea is that, on occasion, when our group of friends goes out, he goes to the bar when we were most-of-the-way-done drinking and just pay for everyone’s tab without telling anyone. When asked why he did that, his simple reply was, “I wanted to do something nice for my friends.” That’s just the kind of friend Shea is. That’s just the kind of person he is. He never expects reimbursement, or favors in return. He never talks about the wonderful things he does for the people around him. He just does these things, and lives his life knowing that because of his actions, the lives of his friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances are just a little bit better. That knowledge makes him feel good. But nobody trusts it. Girls especially are more often than not creeped out by him. Several times he has had women on whom he made no romantic advancement whatsoever tell him to never contact them again. “Some people obviously think that you want something from them [when you behave that way],” he explains, “Others think that you must think you’re better than them, or that you’re keeping score somehow. I just like doing things for people.” On one occasion, I had a mutual female friend confide in me that she was annoyed by his simple offer to walk her 2 blocks to her house to get a coat one evening, as we all walked to a bar together. Her argument was that his attempt at chivalry implied a certain protective anti-feminism; she thought he didn’t think she could do it on her own. Having asked him why
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he offered, I knew it was because he had nearly been mugged down the street from her house just a few weeks earlier, and would have made the same offer to anyone, regardless of gender. I’d argue that the problems people have with folks like Shea are based entirely on assumption. The assumed correlation between chivalry and chauvinism. The assumption that anyone who is being nice is hiding something. The belief that people who are polite are aloof or creepy. All these things reflect a cynicism that I’ve definitely felt myself, but am horrified by when I see it blatantly displayed like I did so many times when people told me they were suspicious of Shea. He even tries to explain the assumption-based mistreatment he receives in empathetically lucid terms, “A big part of it is the environment you’re in. The big city mentality is about figuring out someone’s motivation and trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong. In smaller towns, people just accept that you’re being nice.” I disagree with him. I think most people in most places these days are looking for the con. Is Shea a creep? At worst he’s awkward and enigmatic. But that’s only an issue until you get to know him, and many people turn themselves off to him before they give him that chance. I know I probably would have if we hadn’t been housemates. And then I would’ve missed out on knowing one of the most unique, honorable, and altruistic people I’ve ever encountered. If that’s not evidence that something is wrong with our society, I’ll never find any.
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PHOTOGRAPHERS, GRAPHIC DESIGNERS & STUDIO ARTISTS Up to 10 high resolution images of your work. All must include pertinent caption information (name, date, medium, year). If there are specifications or preferences concerning the way in which an image is displayed please include them.
WRITERS K NAC K se e ks writing of all kinds . We will eve n conside r re cipes , reviews , and essays (although we do not prefe r any thing that is ac ade mic). We se e k write rs whose work has a distinc t voice , is charac te r drive n , and is subve rsive b ut tastef ul . We are not inte reste d in fantasy or ge nre f ic tion . Yo u may submit up to 2 5 ,0 0 0 words and as lit tle as on e . We acce pt simultan e ous submissions . N o cove r let te r n e cessar y. All submissions must be 12pt, Tim es N ew Roman , do uble -space d with page numbe rs and include your nam e , e - mail , phon e numbe r, and ge nre .
ALL SUBMISSIONS: KNACK encourages all submitters to include an artist statement with their submission. We believe that your perspective of your work and process is as lucrative as the work itself. This may range from your upbringing and/or education as an artist, what type of work you produce, inspirations, etc. If there are specifications or preferences concerning the way in which an image is displayed please include them. A brief biography including your name, age, current location, and portrait of the artist is also encouraged (no more than 700 words).
*Please title f iles for submission with the name of the piece. This applies for both writing and visual submissions.
ACCEPTABLE FORMATS IMAGES: PDF, TIFF, or JPEG WRITTEN WORKS: .doc, .docx, and RTF EMAIL: KNACKMAGAZINE1@GMAIL.COM SUBJECT: SUBMISSION (PHOTOGRAPHY, STUDIO ART, CREATIVE WRITING, GRAPHIC DESIGN )
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KNACK operates on a rolling submission system. This means that we will consider work from any artist at any time. Our “deadlines� merely serve as a cutoff for each issue of the magazine. Any and all work sent to knackmagazine1@gmail.com will be considered for submission as long as it follows submission guidelines. The day work is sent merely reflects the issue it will be considered for. Have questions or suggestions? E-mail us. We want to hear your thoughts, comments, and concerns. Sincerely, Ariana Lombardi, Executive Editor
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KNACK is requesting material to be reviewed. Reviews extend to any culture-related event that may be happening in the community in which you live. Do you
All review material can be sent
know of an exciting show or ex- to hibition opening? Is there an art
knackmagazine1@gmail.com.
Please send a copy of CDs and
collective in your city that de- films to 1107 Don Juan St., Santa serves some press? Are you a
Fe, NM, 87501. If you would
musician, have a band, or are
like
review
material
returned
a filmmaker? Send us your CD, to you include return postage movie, or titles of upcoming re- and packaging. Entries should leases which you’d like to see
contain pertinent details such
reviewed in KNACK. We believe
as
name,
year,
release
date,
that reviews are essential to cre- websites and links (if applicable). ating a dialogue about the arts. If
For community events we ask
something thrills you, we want to
that information be sent up to
know about it and share it with
two months in advance to allow
the KNACK community—no mat- proper time for assignment and ter if you live in the New York or Los Angeles, Montreal or Mexico.
review. We look forward to seeing and hearing your work.
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