This latest issue of Trapper Keeper invites fifteen artists from the worlds of underground publishing, zines and comix, installation art, graphic design, and experimental contemporary art to respond to the theme of UTOPIA.
Since the publication of the first issue of Trapper Keeper in the spring of 2014, this project has been dedicated to providing a platform for invited artists to make work that responds to the air of turbulent change, uncertainty and instability that has settled on our planet over the past decade like a black cloud.
The resulting work published in issues 1-4 represented a fairly dystopian response to the political, social and environmental pressures facing humanity. Regardless, the starting point of this publication struck a nerve both with invited artists and within the underground zine and publishing scene.
Part of the original inspiration behind Trapper Keeper was to offer artists a chance to respond to the dark forces that seemed to be assembling around the globe in 2013-the renewed stirrings of nationalism and neo fascism in the west, the beginnings of a sort of techno feudalism, increased authoritarianism around the globe paralleled by the expansion of personal electronics equipped with surveillance capabilities into every second of our waking lives, against a backdrop of a coming collapse of the biosphere.
Now that this dystopian scenario seems to have completely settled across the globe, we are again taking a contrarian approach to our possible collective future.
For Trapper Keeper 5, the theme is Utopia. At Mega Press, we were interested in challenging ourselves and our invited artists to imagine a best possible scenario for future survival and evolution of the human race.
Featuring works by:
Robert Beatty (cover)
Panayiotis Terzis
Benjamin Brubaker
Jonathan Chandler
Jesse Fillingham
Anna Pipes
Gaby Collins-Fernandez
Alvin Yeung
Phyllis Ma
Lala Albert
Molly Colleen O'Connell
Joseph P Kelly
John Gutierrez
Brie Moreno
