Text pasted onto decorative background
Skinned heart, Nyky Gomez Zines N665 no.1
Here is an interior page from Gomez’s zine, where she has pasted her text onto a background one could call decorative or illustrative. Here the visual combination of horizontal text with a linear, vertical background (a strung loom) is as powerful a representation of her jarring frustrations with race and privilege as the text itself. By layering the image with the text instead of separating them, the words become part of the entire visual story; the restlessness of being able to ‘read between the lines’ forces us to see the words as if woven into the loom. In this hand- and typewritten and magazine collage illustrated perzine, 29year-old Nyky writes about being sexually assaulted as a child and her frustration with issues of race and privilege. Nyky also writes about bipolar disorder and natural treatments, being questioned on the "authenticity" of her Mexican identity, and the troubling racial attitudes she encounters among those who are supposed to be her allies.