Magazines

Lotion Issue 10 – Past Lives (52 pages) – Summer 2023
Butler worked on this issue with her longtime friend and mentor, Allen Frame. For both of them poetry is often a part of their practice and they have at times taken poetry workshops together. When the possibility of collaborating on an issue of Lotion came up including their poetry into the mix with their photographic images seemed a given. With this mixture of picture and words a sense of each artists awareness of aging comes to the fore. An overall haunted quality pervades the issue as it investigates what it means to live many lives inside of any single individual life.

Lotion Issue 9 – Date Night (52 pages)
Issue #9 “Date Night” is an illustration of the depravity found at the intersection of artist Alex Blag’s instagram images and text messages collaged with artist Pam Butler’s images of dead and blown up bodies, princesses and beauty queens, scribbled musings, and insects. Insect bites, cow tongues, a shark, and abandoned dolls are set against a backdrop of worn out suburbia and its inherent loneliness. Included are text messages from a brief virtual affair Alex was having during Butler and Blag’s collaboration and a photo of Alex’s son making out with a statue.

Lotion Issue 8 – Be A Happy Person (52 pages)
For issue #8 of Lotion Pam Butler asked her friend Lisa Levy to collaborate. Both Butler and Levy had seen the over lap in their work since Lisa first introduced herself to Butler at an event at Studio10.

In mixing and collaging works from Levy’s word painting series “The Thoughts In My Head” with their cutting irony and self debasing phrases with her own work Butler achieved an issue that screams of low self esteem mixed with cutting social commentary and an edge that almost borders on cruel. A Levy line reads “If I’ve never offended you, we’re not that close.” and a note pulled from an old sketch book of Butler’s reads “I’ll do whatever you want me to do just so you’ll like me”. Words, found, written & painted mingle with peeing dogs, smiley faces, ducks, bunny rabbits and an image taken from the shower scene in Psycho and found posted on the street one halloween.

Lotion Issue 7 – the PamTam issue (52 pages)
Starting with s group of collaborative drawings that Pam Butler and Tamara Gonzales did sometime around 2012 issue 7 adds photographs Butler took at or near the house Gonzales had at the time in Walton NY. As much as a residence Gonzales’ home was an installation of Gonzales’ art collection, doll, taxidermied animals and knick knack collections all reconfigured into a Gonzales art installation which Butler often photographed on her visits there. Added to these are photographs from the local county fair, a few additional drawings by Butler and photographs by Gonzales. All laid out into an issue that is both whimsical and angry, effusive and defaced, sweet and pornographic, exposed and defiantly vulnerable.

Lotion Issue 6 – Infected Fall 2017 (52 pages)
This issue of Lotion was inspired by a history of image sharing via text messages between Pam Butler and the artist Leigh Ledare which often would include a needling of each other to come up with more outrageous or gross pictures. Using a group of photographs taken by each artist and found images that came from the projects each were working on at the time. (Ledare’s project “The Plot” for the Chicago Art Institute and Butler’s show “As Object” curated by LeDare at Baxter Street at CCNY in NYC – both fall of ’17) Butler developed issue 6.

For her starting point she used a picture Ledare took of a port-o-potty next to a billboard advertising pinworm medicine in a Hassidic section of Brooklyn. Vintage porn mix with found images of beauty queens, descriptions of pinworms and how they spread are followed by road kill pictures of rats and somewhere a theme of flying, ballistic missiles and someone playing ping-pong with their dick create a not necessarily optimistic take on the state of the current moment.

Lotion Issue 5 – Hangdoggy Go Go Winter 2017 (52 pages)
Issue 5 began with a drawing Butler found when going through journal’s from her 20s – a line of beleaguered droopy stick figures with the word go repeated underneath. These figures along with an image of a dying chrysanthemum form a rhythm which runs though through this issue. Older drawings and notes from Butler’s old journals mix with photos from a county fair, from bereft window displays, and a found image of a face melted by white phosphorous in the Iraq war and other photos. Towards the end of issue 5, there are two images of a couple in a small town park. She knits, he stares at the camera. In the second image a woman in a burka walks past them.

Lotion Issue 4 – Not Christmas Spring, Summer, Fall 2016 (52 pages)
“Not Christmas”, issue 4 of lotion, takes the 3 seasons not covered in the winter ’16 issue (#3), spring, summer & fall and moves through them sequentially. Layered overtop of the seasons is the pathos of things being not quite right, not really working out. Scraps of paper with lists and notes, pages pulled from Butler’s old journals and drawings are collaged with seasonally appropriate photos – daffodils on the front cover, a drunk laying in fallen leaf strewn grass on the back cover, and in the middle is a photo of a beach, empty save for rows of trash cans and beach parking signs.

Issue 3 – Chickens Winter 2016 (52 pages)
In issue 3 Butler juxtaposes images of winter, Santa Claus, Easter bunnies and chickens with images of lottery logos and thoughts about winning. This issue of lotion is a contemplation of capitalism and its morphing of scared holidays into international tools of consumerism. The play of imagery here implies a trap has been made and we are locked into its vacant hold.

Issue 2 – Étant Donné Fall 2015 (46 pages)
For the 2nd issue of Lotion, Butler took her work in deconstructing icons of the female figure in the modern art cannon, in this issue using Duchamp’s Étant Donné, around which to weave together a contemplation on the female in art as sexualized object scrutinized by and for the masculine gaze. The perspective is personal and feminist as it delves into various aspects of this very complicated piece. Butler uses not just the figure but other symbolic imagery (gaslight, waterfall, etc.) within this work to explore what she sees as her relationship to this piece and it’s seminal importance in post modern art.

Issue 1 – Pageants Spring 2015 (46 pages)
Uses photographs Butler made on visits to two different Miss America and a Miss New York State pageant. Interwoven with these images are images which give a since of the world and in particular of America glossed with an artificial reality behind which we are all rather lost, conned, and confused.