Bijou Karman’s “nonsensical” magazine is a visual dance between 90s punk posters, vintage men’s magazines and old yoga books

When the LA-based multidisciplinary artist Bijou Karman graduated from her Illustration degree at ArtCenter College of Design, her goal was always to be a full time freelance illustrator or designer. In the past decade, however, the creative has worked on all kinds of projects across fine art, commercial illustration and design, with her drawings being featured in campaigns, large scale installations and on the walls of galleries. But amongst all of this, self publishing is the one thing that has been most consistent.

Bijou’s latest publishing pursuit has taken the form of a fictional magazine, Peace Eye, which tells the story of “one woman’s psychedelic and sexual awakening, as she embraces her newfound freedom from men’s patriarchal shackles,” Bijou says. The idea for the DIY publication came to the artist during a rainy week in LA when she had some down time to reflect on what she wanted to explore next in a project of her own: “I wanted to share a new and different part of myself with the world and include some of my interests I hadn’t really shared before in my art,” she says. “I felt compelled to publish something that felt anti fascist and anti censorship, in the spirit of underground and countercultural newspapers of the 1960s.”

Like a lot of the best creative projects, Peace Eye was the result of a week-long stint of obsessively laying out page upon page, blocking out the entire world until the entire zine was complete. The final Riso printed publication’s unique visual world was shaped by quite a few different influences, namely: “Robert Crumb (I had recently read and then reread Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life”), Bijou says, “The Grateful Dead, my love of paper dolls and dollhouses, psychedelic art, feminist publications of the 1970s, and The Beatles’ Revolver album cover, which has been stuck in my brain as one of my favourite pieces of art ever since I first saw it as a kid.” Some other key points of reference for Bijou in this creative endeavour were: underground newspapers from the 1960s, vintage sex and men’s magazines, old yoga books and punk posters.

At the time of working on the project, Bijou had also been sent – “in what felt like an act of faith”– a box of her late grandfather’s belongings from a stranger. A former painter, the box included all sorts of ephemera from his career and life. Peace Eye felt like the perfect catalyst to make use of this material as well as the artist’s ongoing collection of vintage magazines sourced from thrift stores and estate sales in LA. It was this serendipitous combination of found imagery, combined with film photographs and drawings of her own that made up the pages of the artist’s zine.

In one sense, Peace Eye’s collaged narrative can be read as an expression of “the pain and embarrassment of living as a woman under the patriarchy and toxic diet culture”, says Bijou, but it is also an expression of something hidden away in the artist’s inner world that might not be as prescriptive or easy to pin down. “Ultimately I wanted to create something nonsensical that just felt right, the way a poem feels true. I wanted to capture a certain feeling. I didn’t feel any challenges putting this together; it poured out of me obsessively that week and fell into place. I don’t mind if it’s nonsensical, as that’s one of the joys of self publishing,” she concludes.