Review: “Collaborations and Bootlegs: 10 Years of F Magazine”

F Magazine’s twelfth issue is prefaced by the first-ever letter from the editor, Adam Marnie. In this raw, simply endearing ode to the many creative minds that contributed to the magazine’s corpus, Marnie includes a telling note: “It is human to have opposing views, even in oneself, and spaces that allow that complexity are precious, vulnerable, and increasingly rare.” This ethos encapsulates the collegiality and considerate dialogues found throughout the retrospective exhibition Collaborations and Bootlegs: 10 Years of F Magazine. 

F Magazine was established 10 years ago in New York and has since become a holistic creative endeavor operating out of Houston. The project’s expansive output includes a publishing arm, a bookstore, a free online repository of artists’ exploratory PDFs, and a robust exhibition history — from solo shows to historical presentations, art fairs, and institutional exhibitions. The exhibition, hosted by F’s neighboring gallery, Josh Pazda Hiram Butler, includes roughly 27 artists (replete with collectively authored works and anonymous collaborators). Anchored by the magazine Collaborations and Bootlegs consists of sculpture, video, painting, found objects, performance ephemera, and more. 

This exhibition features selected works that champion the highly personal qualities of collaboration — they exhibit something uniquely psychological rather than only highlighting tangible, final outputs. Take for instance Untitled (2024) by Skylar Haskard and Devin T. Mays. Storage bins are arranged along the wall as if the gallery is in between exhibition and de-installation. They are filled with items that are specific enough to warrant curiosity. Given the exhibition’s context and the work’s materials list, “Haskard’s Jungle Buzzard remnants,” one can find that in March 2024 F presented A Horseshoe Over a Door, a two-person exhibition with Haskard and Mays. The artists’ installation-based practices were paired for that exhibition, therefore, their creation of a new sculpture solidifies the importance of intimate dialogue. 

Houston-based artist Mark Flood often plays with the mechanisms of publicity and promotion in the art world — adopting new aliases or even actors to represent himself in public settings — in a quasi-collaboration with his galleries. Flood’s John Klonos Bio (1992) on view in Collaborations and Bootlegs announces a type of inner dialogue through a screen-printed biography of one of his more pervasive monikers. Keen on how Flood’s persona plays into his work, Marnie wrote an essay in a publication that accompanied the artist’s solo exhibition, Face Index, at F in 2021. 

Prototype (2020) by Liz Deschenes and Alan Ruiz reinstalled here speaks to many levels of collaboration. The sculpture, originally made for the exhibition Real Estate at F is a support structure — artists supporting mutually shared concepts, Deschenes’s photographic practice is supported by Ruiz’s structural reflection and vice versa, the existing architecture is a material collaborator, and Prototype calls attention to the physical space that supports F’s exhibitions and program. 

The camaraderie and diversity so palpable in Collaborations and Bootlegs brought a random phrase to my mind: “We are all in this (bag) together.” This phrase was undoubtedly provoked by the collectively produced edition from Supportgroup123, Grab Bag Group Show (2020), where 21 artists within F Magazine’s universe were invited to contribute 14 artworks for 14 individual plastic bodega bags. Splayed out in the exhibition and on the IG @supportgroup123tributepage (from which the collaborative project arose) you’ll find the idiosyncrasies and erratic social connections of a group of artists through their offerings. 

Collaborations and Bootlegs: 10 Years of F Magazine as an exhibition is best understood in the way that Marnie explains the Magazine itself, “…a protected platform for misfits and outliers, for as many as we can fit as possible.” That is, the filled and fulfilling exhibition is not a surfeit of works in service of some maximal retrospective but rather a glimpse of conscientious and candid inclusivity.

Park Myers is a curator based in Houston, TX, and Brussels, BE.

 

Collaborations and Bootlegs: 10 Years of F Magazine runs through August 24, 2024 at Josh Pazda Hiram Butler.