"A.Y.P.S. collects three years of drawings, collages and brief negative texts by artist and musician Terence Hannum. "Anno Yersinia Pestis Spiritus" or "In The Year of our Spiritual Plague", was a rare phrase used in the liner notes of black metal albums during the 1990s. Hannum has spent years reflecting on this music subculture - a subculture that vacillates between what is profane and sacred, and how in that abject shadow of the profane, something uniquely sacred is defined. Halos of hair emerge from dark voids, shrines of amplifiers build altars to silence, cascades of xeroxed hair interrupt the page and brief collections of words and phrases are presented and crossed out. The ritual gets fragmented and boiled down, rebuilt and then re-worshipped"-- Kiddiepunk website.

"Call and response is a visual dialogue between Terence Hannum and Scott Treleaven. Over the course of one year, the artists emailed back and forth, trafficking in images both personal and culled from their extensive archives. When the words were stripped away, what remained was a record of an excavation of their own peculiar belief (and disbelief) systems, overlapping and colliding throughout the conversation. Call and response pays homage to their devotion to underground zines, nefarious causes, cults, hours lost and gained, corrupted architecture, and youth pinioned in agony/ecstacy. Hazy stills from videos and films carry over formal concerns and a similar tone of darkness that these two friends share, punctuated by drawings and scrawls, xeroxes and vellum"--Artist's statement from Western Exhibitions website.

" ... Acts of contrition focuses on the live event, combining reproductions of Terence Hannum's drawings and for the first time in the series, his oil paintings, paired together into a dark narrative where the live event becomes the locus of myth, ritual and sacrifice. This locus is communicated by the view of the back of an audience witnessing a live performance, halos of stage lights, illuminations through sheets of fog, silhouettes of backlines with bonfires, candles and masses of hair in mid-headbang"--Western Exhibitions website.

Kristi DeMeester is our featured writer. She brings her new story, "Abide with Me" and we talk to her about Georgia, "December Skin" and her upcoming short fiction collection.Kevin Lucia talks Quiet Horror in the final installment of Horror 101. Fiction from:* Hilary B. Bisenieks* Terence Hannum* Sandra T.* Brian Keene

"For the most part Leadlight is a study of sacred windows, inverted, cut, chopped and reintegrated by ancient ritual instruments, X-acto, scissor, tape and Xerox. The spaces are transformed, profaned, desecrated, elevated and abolished. Forms repeat, echo and collide in the black & white Xeroxes. Framing this amalgamation are cropped Xeroxes on black paper pulled from Terence Hannum's drawings. Normally these holy windows are above shrines of amplifiers or headbanging sentinels, yet here they are removed and presented away to enhance the solemnity of these decorations and portals"--Western Exhibitions website.

"False bloods borrows from the misanthropic screed in Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens' to investigate the combination of amp worship, ritual and death by culling from the source material for my gouache drawings and layering them in the copying process"--Artist's statement from Western Exhibitions website.

"Resonant void focuses on the throne, the axis, the seat, the center of the world - the drum, or for our purposes: the drumset. Here in these drawings the kits emerge from darkness juxtaposed with hazes of stage lights and geometric shapes. But always the void remains, next to some phrases culled from anthropological study of the importance of the drum in ritual"--Artist's statement from Western Exhibitions website.