Genelle Chaconas

Psychedelic Green Eggs and Ham#

Artist’s Statement#

So I was on a very long phone call, one of those where you could be on hold for a few hours. I had a few stacks of old (mid-60s to 70s) photography instructional magazines and books that I’d already determined were of no monetary real value on the table, and I had my X-Acto. I started carving out anything that looked interesting from several different magazines and books. I probably planned them for some collages which I’d made before, but I don’t remember. After the phone call, I put the pieces in an envelope and forgot about it for a little. It so happened that the thing on the phone call wasn’t over and I had to do it again. I picked out the envelope from the mess on my desk and found some construction paper, glue, glitter and a brush and sort of assembled it into a design before gluing everything down.

About the Artist#

Genelle Chaconas is nonbinary, queer, and an abuse survivor, thrives with a mood disorder, and is proud. Their first novel, Plague City, won the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel from the Journal of Experimental Fiction in 2019. They designed the cover art for Plague. They’re head editor of HockSpitSlurp, which is on hiatus but not forever. Their chapbooks include Fallout, Saints and Dirty Pictures (little m press, 2009) and Yet Wave (the Lune, 2017). They co-authored No Titles in the Bounds and The Smoke Bar with Leslie D. Soule to be forthcoming with Nat+1, and co-authored a short play Waiting for Samuel Beckett with Leslie D. Soule forthcoming with Shipwrecked Press. They earned an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in 2016. They’ve been published a lot but don’t namedrop. Their artwork has been sold widely and even served as album covers. They enjoy cheap takeout, drone / noise / industrial music, B-rated gangster and horror flicks, and long walks off short piers. Find their art on Etsy.