Artists Alfredo Sainz and Laine Wiesemann’s 415 ZINE is a love letter to artists and photographers in San Francisco. Issue 1, published in Spring 2024, includes work by photographer Ella Matson, painter Heather Robinson, artist Clare Lau, photographer Troy Holden, and several others. The artists' and photographers’ work is a love letter to San Francisco and the Bay Area more generally, and you can feel Sainz and Wiesemann’s love for their contributors in how carefully they lay out the collection, framing the pieces neatly while asking artists to share why they make art. In artists’ care and consideration for the land they call home, 415 ZINE speaks to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Life on Land.
Sainz and Wiesemann describe this project on 415 ZINE’s website as a collaboration born of a years-long friendship, cemented in regular meetings over coffee and tea to discuss their artistic goals. Sainz is a born-and-raised San Franciscan, specializing in photography and, more recently in 2015, painting. Wiesemann is from the slightly further inland Linden, California, having moved and established her artistic practice in San Francisco. Now, they encourage others to be as fully engaged with the art scene in SF by showcasing local work in their zine.
“Get out and see shows and participate. Be inspired. Give your favorites a like and a share on social and buy those pieces that make you smile!” 415 ZINE’s introductory page reads.
Each two-page spread of an individual artist’s work–or, in J.L. King’s case, a multi-page spread–not only displays their work but asks them why they make art and why they have chosen a particular medium.
For Heather Robinson, she has a “magpie-like attraction” to bright, colourful and “decorated objects” while also craving structure. Her art reflects this, incorporating repeated patterns and shapes whose uniformity makes them appear like they are stamped or stenciled over top of a painted canvas. Each piece is chock-full of colour, from deep reds, mustard yellow, chartreuse, and navy blue.
Claire Lau’s “why” is essentially a connection to nature and humanity. A blue hue is inescapable in the paintings on display in 415 ZINE’s pages, and each piece captures a landscape that combines human elements, namely housing, and nature. In the piece at the top of the first page, trees, flowers, bushes, and aloe burst from the side of a suburban road. Human buildings and natural ‘architecture’ are intertwined, leaving us to consider how interconnected humanity is with nature.
In the longer section dedicated to local artist J.L. King (Jennifer L King), 415 ZINE explores her interest in things that are atypical or unconventional. This shows up in paintings that look straight out of a dream: people with marble heads, teacups bursting out from a wall, and the lines on a sheet of paper turning to droplets. King also describes her Hyperphantasia: “When I read the definition I felt like I finally had a word for the almost trancelike state I would go into when I’m visualizing something.” Hyperphantasia is the ability to conjure up extremely vivid mental imagery.
415 ZINE finishes with small profiles of several galleries in San Francisco as well as horoscopes, concluding this edition’s celebration of the SF art scene. Like many other zines, it feels like a work of art on its own, a mix of art styles that inspire.