Elk began in June 2003, and over the next fourteen years it published 34 issues, always in the same photocopied 5 3/8 × 8" saddle-stitched format, some sixty pages long, with a black-and-white interior and a color cover. Both ruminative and crudely constructed, it relies on a conduit of spontaneous connections gleaned from found materials, assembled in sometimes direct but more often enigmatically allusive associations. Each page presented image-text pairs borrowed from a plethora of sources, photographs from unorthodox books and periodicals, artworks, historical documents, letters, poems, unsolicited emails, briefing notes, and advertisements, placing them in singular contexts with the aim of drawing out evocative metaphorical and metaphysical affinities, embedded in formal vibrations and compositional. Reproducing and rescaling each image or excerpt, the work distills a combination of often unfamiliar source materials that negate notions of distinction between the enclosures of high art and the various subterranean effusions, creating through clarity of intention an ephemeral entity with mysterious origins. Seemingly devoid of any identifiable theme, yet arranged with a distant and discriminating Catholic sensibility, Elk ’s collaborative contents are linked to one another through tangible but recurrent and disquieting methods.
