Aysen Gerlach

Just Lookin’ Issue 1 & 2 set

Aysen Gerlach

Just Lookin’ Issue 1 & 2 set

Date

2018

Binding

Stapled

Format

Zine

Dimensions

8.5 × 5.5 × 1 in

Pages

20

$ 20.00

Unavailable


Just Lookin’ Issue 1: Where Did Glam Rock Go?, 2018, Aysen Gerlach. 20 Pages, 8.5in x 5.5in, staple bound.

Just Lookin’ Issue 2: Queer Eye for the Straight Music Video, 2018, Aysen Gerlach. 20 Pages, 8.5in x 5.5in, staple bound.

Aysen Gerlach harnesses several levels of queer experience from her own and others’ lives in her Just Lookin’ publications. Strategically designed to celebrate alternative and queer-leaning subtexts in popular culture, Just Lookin’ humorously engages with media archetypes that are overlooked by some and heralded as icons by others.

Issue No. 1 of Just Lookin’ investigates the historical significance of KISS as a lightning rod for queer visuals in a hetero-centric music industry. Gerlach identifies My Chemical Romance, Panic at the Disco!, and Pete Wentz as the protégés of aesthetic signifiers like ‘guy’ liner, platform boots, and skin-tight clothing – delivering gay and bi-sexual overtones to otherwise fairly heteronormative material.

In Issue No. 2 of Just Lookin’, the tropic complexities of platonic friendship and support are unpacked within the context of four different music videos. The chosen musical artists gesture at the scorn that follows failed (heterosexual) relationships, which Gerlach begins to deconstruct as a decoy plotline to pacify normative expectations of narrative arcs in the commercial music industry. Chock full of images to attest to the projected hypothesis, Queer Eye for the Straight Music Video gracefully spins ambiguous aspects of visual media, setting the pace for its queer-leaning audience to think critically and engage with a storyline that relates to them.