Guantanamo questionnaire : Nevada Hill

Entrevista por e-mail, a 05/07/08, a Nevada Hill no âmbito do programa Invisual.

what's your age? 26
did you study art? Printmaking
music? NO
what's your main influences in comix and music? Gary Panter, Fort Thunder, Winsor McCay, Tommi from Boing Being, Durer, David Lee Price.
Music: favorite 6 guitar players of all time Derek Bailey, Arto Lindsey, Jimi Hendrix, The girl from Finally Punk that plays with her thumb, Micheal Morely, Seth Sherman
are you part of any peculiar scene? local? transnational? Zanzibar Snails are a part of the Denton music scene. We play with all types of musicians and non-musicians that are interested in improvisation and experimenting with sound/performance. The scene we are apart of is mainly local we do not have the money or time to tour which is why we use our cd-r label to distribute our tracks around the world. We would love to be apart of a transnational scene. I love to collaborate with other artist and musicians.
how you connect music and comix? I have decided that the Aural and visual are just different tangible states of creative energy. A good example of this is water the liquid when frozen it turns to ice and when heated it turns to steam. It is still H2O but it is just changing its state due to environmental conditions. This is the same with my visual work and aural work, they are interconnected.
how important is silkscreen in rock posters? is it a revival from the 60's or it has been a tradition in the US? Screenprinting is just another method of replicating an image. It is widely used in the U.S. for gigposters because it is cheap (sometimes) and anyone can turn a garage or a apartment room into a screenprinting studio. Also the results can be seen as more valuable then say a Xerox with clip art on it. Most posters that were printed in the 60's are lithos only a few were screenprinted. Screenprinting multicolored gig posters gained popularity in the early 90's in Austin Texas. It has now exploded in popularity all over the U.S., Canada and has been gaining some popularity in the UK.
A theory of why the gigposter has been so popular is that when CD's became the mainstream format, the canvas for designer and artists to create an image shrunk from 12" to 5". So artist had to discover another way to get there ideas/images out to the general public. So now it is worse with the iPOD generation but vinyl is making a come back which is exciting.
you're from Texas, right? how "right wing" or "repressive" is that state, do you have any fear when you create (like something could happen to Mike Diana)? on the other hand a lot of "maniacs" came from there, right? 13th Floors, Butthole Surfers, Red Krayola... how you explain so "fucked up creators" from that land? I was born in Fort Worth and grew up outside of the suburbs. Depending on the town it can be very repressive for creative types that have different views of the arts and life. I can only speak from personal experience that I subconsciously suppress many ideas I have because I feel it is to radical or could be seen as offensive material. I have been trying to abolish these repressive feelings by actually putting some images in my posters that some people may find offensive. I do not do things to purposefully make some one upset. For instance My most recent poster has two male silhouettes that could be seen as giving each other hand jobs. Also my first art exhibition was at a Coffee house in Denton Tx, It was taken down after a week because it made the patrons feel uneasy. There were no out right obscene imagery it was just these line drawings of bean bags and lolly pops. When some people saw them the thought it was scrotums and Harry Pussy. I suppress the out right urge to create some images intentionally for fear of attention.
The Maniacs of the land are all "heros" of mine some people are fearless when they create and that is an admirable quality in an artist. I think they are created because of social and environmental influences. I think because Texas is so large and can be a harsh land. The scenery is also depressing. This creates an uneasiness in people that are sensitive to these types stimuli. Some people though are content with sitting in front of there big screen TV watching Reality Television while eating a tub of cheese cake filing.