Fresh off the European leg of his WTF Summer Tour,
local artist Bwana Spoons will be stopping through Grass Hut to
celebrate the release of his first book, Welcome to Forest
Island. Aside from his role as part-owner of Grass Hut Gallery and
his design work for apparel companies like Dekline and Select, Spoons
is continuously developing an imagined world of characters, which he
renders into paintings, comic strips, and limited-edition vinyl
toys.
Spoons’ book—a shuffling of comic strips and zoomed-in
full-page paintings—explores this imagined cast of characters and
their home, Forest Island. Opening on a cross-dressing hobo and quickly
ushering in the cornerstone characters, a bat named Steven and a
four-legged whale named Killer, a series of narratives and interactions
are introduced and revisited throughout the manic review of Spoons’
fantasy world.
As other inhabitants of Forest Island are briefly brought into
focus—like a gator named Edward who tries to catch butterflies
with a broken net—the book reads like a camera panning through
the many nooks and perspectives available on Forest Island.
Though it isn’t clear if a linear plot was intended, the final pages
of the book show an image of Killer and Steven romping through fiery
neon and pastel space-hills, Steven painted with his heart glowing
through his chest. In the end, Spoons’ characters receive a little back
story, their pictographic mythology finally collected in a
collectible—though the book never tells us why Steven’s heart
glows. Maybe Spoons’ next book will inform the mystery.