Featured Cartoonist Athena Naylor and Meet the Mascot Opens TONIGHT
Our featured artist participated in our previous exhibition, "Exaggerated Gestures"
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
MEET THE MASCOT - Paintings by Trei Ramsey
Opening Reception: TOMORROW, Friday, March 10, 7-9pm
Artist Talk + Black Light Viewing @ 8pm, Light refreshments, Free admission!
Celebrating the DC Rat !
Trei Ramsey humorously explores the fictional origin story of the 'unofficial DC Mascot,' The DC Rat, serving as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on what it’s like to be a resident in DC. Ramsey recreates pop culture in his own image and frequently combines his rat motif with various cartooning references as a way to dive into broader conversations about our feelings and experiences as city dwellers.
UPCOMING FILM SCREENINGS
And be sure to join us EVERY FRIDAY in the month of March (17th, 24th & 31st) from 8pm to midnight for EUGENE EYESOAK,, a twisted mystery screening series of mind-melding animation and cult cinema,, courtesy of BEYOND VIDEO, a nonprofit video rental store in Baltimore, MD! $5 suggested donation. Snacks provided!
DWIGHTMESS
Cartooning & Comics Arts
805 Silver Spring Ave.
Silver Spring, MD 20910
[Entrance on Ripley St.]
OUR FEATURED ARTIST : ATHENA NAYLOR
Athena grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and now lives and works in Washington, D.C. She specializes in autobiographical comics and illustration. Her work has been featured in Nat. Brut and The Washington Post, and in 2021 she received an Honorable Mention for the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) Cupcake Award. Read one of her comics below and get to know her!
A Chat with Athena Naylor
DWIGHTMESS: One of the things you have become most adept at are your daily comics, which are conversational, theoretical, but also profound in their clear-worded-ness in regards to the joys and frustrations that all of us face day-to-day. Why would you say that you've taken on this format as the best possible iteration of your expression through comics?
Naylor: I’ll start by saying that I don’t know if the format of my dailies is the best iteration of my expression through comics! But their format has a lot of practical benefits that probably end up contributing to their effectiveness as vignettes of daily life.
The Dailies started as an exercise to get me back in the swing of making comics after I finished my master’s in art history in 2017. I approached them in a way that would ensure I would finish them, which meant not stressing too much about painstakingly considering the possibilities of the comics page. I instead construct the daily comics in a more straightforward, storyboard way, with each panel having the same size and dimensions. This is because I usually publish them first on Instagram, where readers swipe through images in a slideshow format. I can then compile those square panels into a grid for printing purposes when I make my “Dailies” zines.
When you’re just using squares, and when you initially make these comics considering the 10-image limit of an app like Instagram, it becomes a great editing tool. What can I best depict in a square? How can I pace this story within this limited amount of space? And when you’re dealing with those types of parameters, you quickly realize what aspects of an experience are more important to depict than others to get to the heart of the point, punchline, or emotion that you’re trying to illustrate.
I do also like that the directness of the dailies reflect that they are meant to be relatively quick observations of life. It’s supposed to be a more casual practice, so the standard format of the comics prevents overthinking. I also think that having every panel the same size gives each story beat a more equal weight, so the punchline of the comic (whether it’s funny or thoughtful or something else) is achieved through a process of pacing and cumulative moments. I feel like that’s similar to how we experience life. Some experiences don’t seem all that important at the time, but once you compile all those small, mundane moments together you notice something more profound and impactful has actually happened.
DWIGHTMESS: Thanks Athena! This chat continues in the next Graffo Broadsheet!
DWIGHTMESS COMIC STRIP EXPERIMENTS :
THE PUBLIC LIV-BRARY
