~THE POWDER by JOCKO WEYLAND
‘THE POWDER’ by JOCKO WEYLAND – PUBLISHED 2011 BY DASHWOOD BOOKS
188 pages. soft cover. edition of 500 – $45.
ART DIRECTION & DESIGN BY: HANS SEEGER
JOCKO WEYLAND’S artist book is the latest publication to come up – out of DASHWOOD.
It is “dedicated to the Golden Era of US ski culture in the late 70s and early 80s . . . growing up in Colorado when it was still cool to ski . . . ”
see: ‘THE POWDER’ – DASHWOOD BOOKS
JOCKO WEYLAND recently told me he grew up in Colorado – where his dad, an avid early ski bum – moved his young family – chasing the powder rush . . . and you thought young kick-ass dads just moved their young families to NYC, make that Brooklyn, now – for the art rush . . .
JOCKO sent on a few other powderful words about his new book:
“Definitive depictions from the golden age culled, distilled, and reconfigured into ‘The Powder’ from the pages of ‘The Skier’s Magazine’.
Powder was where it was at, the bible, with luscious color-drenched photographs and advertisements showing the way it looked, what was being done, how it was being done, and where it was being done. From Bridger Bowl. Sun Valley, Squaw, Alta, Jackson Hole and Tuckerman Ravine to Switzerland, Austria, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, the Atlas Mountains and the Cedars of Sinai, when skiing was an unprecedented, untested, and not yet codified phenomena.
The halycon days of long runs and Mach 1 top-to-bottom non-stops, inverted multi-hued aerialists, big face walls with interlocking lines of figure eights seen from afar, solo tracks, or lone skiers breaking away towards unending swaths of untouched virgin snow.
More importantly really, two gloved hands, a bit of pole, and two ski tips bursting out of the snow. Abstract. A tree, some rocks, the sky, spare and minimal. Blue, green, white and blue, elemental compositions with a skier close to absent and just a portion of their head, a glimpse of goggles, a flash of hat.
Could you ski it ? no matter how difficult ?
All aspects of the perfect pastime are represented, encompassing stoner, racer, hot dogger, freestyler, and mountaineers, with mostly anonymous low-profile and boisterous thrill-seeking ski bums mingling with jet-setting socialites. Skiing was downtown then, not uptown, not bourgeois, not declasse. Glades, gates, spread eagles, and of course the lodesar, powder.
An invigorating, constantly changing phase of rapid development full of experimentation and curious offshoots and the literal pushing of boundaries was in full swing.
Wide-open and heterogeneous, that bewitching era was splendidly captured circa 1972-84 and now three decades later its essence and beauty has been purified, synthesized, and sanctified into ‘The Powder’.”
JOCKO WEYLAND is the founder, curator and driving force behind the indie gallery & zine publisher: ELK GALLERY, NYC