Survival Success

This booklet features Jonathan Canady’s drawings based on illustrations from a 1957 U.S. Army-issued survival guide (reprinted in 1970). Canady’s drawings are paired with scans of some of his source material. The illustrator of the drawings created for the Army is uncredited. Some of the original drawings that inspired Canady are placed alongside his reimaginings, while others are dispersed throughout the booklet in less direct placements or not included at all. In his versions of these illustrations, Canady takes these pragmatic guides to surviving under harsh conditions and transforms them into existential scenes of discovery and recovery. His humans are no longer soldiers that have successfully followed a lesson in a book, but creatures from a less identifiable time whose circumstances have been made strange and unknowable.  

Jonathan Canady’s drawings were produced in 2022 and the design of this booklet was a collaboration that we worked on together over email. Previously he contributed to the Public Collectors project QUARANZINE in 2020. Well known in the experimental music underground, Jonathan Canady began to focus his creative efforts on visual art in 2007. He has been living in Portland, Oregon since 2014.