Elk began in June 2003 and over the next fourteen years 34 issues came into view, always in a consistent photocopied 5 3/8 × 8” format, saddle-stitched, 60 or so pages, with a black and white interior and full-color cover. Concurrently ruminative and roughly constructed, it built upon a conduit of spontaneous connections gleaned from found materials paired into occasionally straightforward but more frequently enigmatically allusive associations. Each spread featured image and text snippet duos borrowed from a plethora of sources, photographs from books and unorthodox periodicals, works of art, historical documents, letters, poems, spam emails, mash notes, and advertisements, placing them into singular contexts in an effort to tease out evocative metaphorical and metaphysical affinities folded into formal and compositional vibrations. Reproducing and re-scaling each picture or extract, it distilled a combination of often unfamiliar source material that negated notions of the distinctions between the precincts of high art and various underground effusions, creating through clarity of intent an ephemeral entity of mysterious origins. Apparently lacking in any identifiable theme though arranged with a discriminating far-flung catholic sensibility, Elk’s collaborative contents related to one another through tangible yet recurrently uncanny methods.

After a five-year hiatus, and coincidentally on the 20th anniversary of Elk’s first appearance, Elk arrives, containing 274 pages of sometimes jarring but compellingly alluring juxtapositions as well as extensive accreditation and a comprehensive index. Going back to at least 100 B.C., from Slim Aarons to Doug Zyskowski, flitting from Tirana to the Place Saint Sulpice to Paul Revere Middle School to Dunkirk, NY and far beyond, collapsing the territory between Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages and Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life, starring Jesper Fabricus, Lorraine Hansberry, Natalia Goncharova, Keith Levine, Simone Martini, Edna O’Brien, Ringl + Pit, Gee Vaucher, and a host of others, Elk is the summing up, final tour, and swan song. Never say never, but the ultimate, in both senses of the word, manifestation. Not a compilation of old issues but a brand-new enterprise encompassing a staggering range of topics from just about every realm under the sun, reshuffled and recontextualized in a poetical mingling and merging with no discernable precedent. Within these pages Elk reaches its apotheosis as a simultaneously serious and playful attempt to delve into unexpected and suggestive affiliations drawn from the furthest corners of our immeasurably vast communal pictorial and written corpus. Complex entanglements of aesthetic, cultural, sociopolitical, and historical affinities bridge inscrutable spans of time, space, and subject matter, attempting to evince our contemporaneously collective meshing of universally shared and personally secret realities.

Jocko Weyland (b. 1967, Helsinki, Finland) is the author of The Answer is Never - A Skateboarder’s History of the World (Grove Press, 2002), The Powder, Danny’s Lot, Geomancy, and Egg Strike on Orchard (Dashwood Books, 2011, 2015, 2017, and 2021, respectively), and the short story collection Eating Glass, published by 1980 Editions. Other titles include I Heart BJ, Drawings, and The Lake of Death, from Nieves and innen. He started the serial publication Elk in 2003, spawning Elk Books and the itinerant Elk Gallery, where sixteen exhibits were presented in New York, Los Angeles, and Beijing between 2006-11. From 2013 to 2017 he was Chief Curator at MOCA Tucson. His artwork has been shown at Ever Gold, San Francisco, FakeSpace, Beijing, PG4S and Martos, Los Angeles, Franklin Parrasch and Kerry Schuss in New York, and Everybody in Tucson and Chicago. He lives in Northern Nevada.

Slim Aarons • Bernice Abbott • Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi • Nelson Algren • Vince Aletti • Peter Altenberg • John Alton • American Bar Association, Section of Criminal Justice • John Andre • Alyssa Andrews • Adéle Antonsson • Kevin Apetown • Guillaume Apollinaire • Salvatore Arancio • Richard Artschwager • The Associated Press • David Attie • Anthony Baines • McClelland Barclay • Phyllis Barclay-Smith • Ted Barron • Steve Barry • Joseph Baumhauer • John Beeloo • Roy R. Behrens • S.N. Behrman • Charles Bell • Saul Bellow • Dave Bevan • Karl Blossfeldt • Noel Boenzi • Pierre Bonnard • Boy Scouts of America • Lola Alvarez Bravo • Marcel Breuer • Burt Britton • Walter Brooks • Kitty Brophy • Abraham de Bruyn • Shannon Michael Cane • Gerardo Castillo • James Castle • Hannah Charlton • Rick Charnoski • Ann Charters • Christofer Churchill • Mark Churchill • Paul Ciotti • Spencer Clark • Roger Clausse • Aaron Cometbus • Fred R. Conrad • Noel Coward • James Steven Cox • Lucas Cranach the Elder • William Crawford • Quinn Li Crewdson • Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre • Felipe Dana • Jeff Davis • Christopher Davis • Richard Harding Davis • Michael DeCapite • Jay DeFeo • Jonas Delaborde • Stephen Diamond • Otto Dix • Edward Dorn • Leo Durocher • Drix Duryea • P.K. Edwards Jr. • Tim Enright • Jesper Fabricus • Leopold Facy • Niall Ferguson • Fra Giovanni de Fiesole (Fra Angelico) • Sean Flaherty • Former Members of the Gutai Art Association • Jean Fouquet • Kim Fowley • Jean Honoré Fragonard • Nejc Franetič • Aaron Frisby • Shen Fu • Naum Gabo • Gerik • Bruce Gilbert • Justin Goetz • Todd Golnick • Nicolas F. Golux • Natalia Goncharova • Jenny Goodall • Raymond Umar Hall • Brian Harkin • Kate Haug • Thomas Hauser • Sterling Hayden • Renko Heuer • Joe Holland • Jenny Holzer • Curtis Hsiang • Johan Huizinga • Walter Iooss Jr. • Yasunari Kawabata • Georg Friedrich Kersting • Evelyn Keyes • Paul Klee • Christen Købke • Bill Knott • Tadeusz Konwicki • Kelly Kozij • Beth Krumholz • Otto Lang • Jesse Langille • Nicolas II de Larmessin • Fernand Léger • Charlie Leone • Wyndham Lewis • John C. Lilly • Otto Lindig • Ed Linn • Lucy R. Lippard • Lito Tipo Guanabara • Preston Maigetter • Steven L. Maimes • Norman Mailer • Mary Malloy • Robert Mapplethorpe • Tom Marioni • Pilger T. Maritza • Xavier Martinez • Simone Martini • Erik Mavrič • William McCurtin • Fred W. McDarrah • Peter Mecca • Henri Michaux • Chuck Miller • Myriam Missana • Ugo Mochi • Walter Mosby • Stanley Moss • Gerald Murphy • Venetia Murray • Jeff Newton • Arthur Nilsson • Novgorod School • Moritz Daniel Oppenheim • Virginia Overton • Dimitris Papavasiliou • Laurence Parent • Levon Parian • S.J. Peploe • Francis Picabia • Daniel Pineda • Wilbur Pippen • Sylvia Plath • George Plimpton • Richard M. Powers • Public Enemy • Robert Ramacher • Elana Rappaport • The Rappin’ Fireman, aka John Ruiz • Frederic Remington • Alain Resnais • Joseph Rifesser • Ringl + Pit • Marcy Robinson • Wily Ronis • John Rooney • Thomas Rowlandson • Sade • Lucy Sante • Siegfried Sassoon • Lee Savold • Arthur Schnitzler • William Scott • Harrison Sharples • Peter Sharples • Shaw-Walker • Peter Shepheard • Malick Sidibé • Peter Nolan Smith • Southworth and Hawes • Saul Steinberg • Robert Louis Stevenson • Robb Stewart • Russell Stover • Tod Swank • D.J. Syc A.K.A. John • Atsuko Tanaka • Domenico Tintoretto • William Tomkins • Joachim Toppler • Hugh Trevor-Roper • Dennis Tyfus • Eduard Adolph Tyfus • Unknown Portuguese Artist • Alberto Valgimigli • Pieter Vanderlyn • Gee Vaucher • Miki Vuckovich • Bruce Walker • Jim Walrod • Robert Walser • Brian Weil • Jocko Weyland • Ande Whyland • Krzysztof Wielicki • Andy Wilf • Jason Wright • Eugene Zamiatin • Stefan Zweig