Sonic youth

Denali Lowder moved to Reno five years ago, when she was 17. For many people who grew up here, Reno might seem more like a town a teenage artist might want to move from, rather than a city she’d want to move to. But for Lowder, coming from what she describes as a “very rural” part of Washington state, Reno was an exciting place to be. She connected with the city’s punk rock scene and felt a need to document her experiences here.

This archivist impulse to photograph every band and save every basement show flier was compounded by the general indifference of most of her peers, who seemed to take the local music and art scenes for granted.

“For me, those years, I just want to document everything that happened to me and everything that’s happening right now, because everyone else does take it for granted at this age—like, ’I’ve got to get out of here!’ Not like, ’Look what’s going on here!’” she said.

Her exhibition Minor Threat, which opens next month in Bibo Coffee Company on Record Street, will feature large, roughly 40-inch-by-60-inch images, which look like blown-up black-and white pages from a homemade, Xeroxed zine. The title of the exhibition, Minor Threat, references the name of a band that broke up before she was born, and the zine aesthetic—personal, homemade collage magazines—also seems to harken back to an earlier, pre-internet era.

But it’s an aesthetic Lowder relates to directly. She spent her teens making zines and fliers for local punk bands, and documenting their shows with her camera. She likes the physicality—paper and staples—of zines more than the standard digital look of a blog. For her, it’s equivalent to the music fan that prefers to listen to vinyl records rather than digital files. She likes the time-consuming labor of making zines.

“The reason that I love zines so much is probably the same reason that I love collecting things and making prints,” she said. “It’s an extremely laborious process where you spend so much time making everything perfect, and you make this beautiful physical copy and there’s no digital copy. If people want it, you have to actually see it and hold it and feel it.”

And most of the bands she photographs are not nationally-known touring bands, but local groups whose shows might not otherwise be documented. She also has a radio show on Wolf Pack Radio, the university’s radio station, called Radio Chip Chip

The images in Minor Threat include photographs of houses around Reno that hold sentimental power for her and images of local bands, like Thee Indoors and Prescription. The zine style collages have intentionally teenage-sounding titles, like, “House of Darkness, House of Angst.”

In addition to the reference of one of the all-time great punk bands, the title of her exhibition is also an homage to her youth, and particularly the years between 17 and 21, which this show represents for her.

“You’re 17 and you see people that are 22 and you’re like, wow, he’s so old!” she said “You look around and think, I’m so stupid looking. These people are so cool! When you’re that age everything seems so much cooler.”

It’s an age when everything seems like it’s part of some grand, epic narrative. Everything seems important. A random mid-week basement show with a couple of no-name bands might seem like the discovery of the lost ark. Lowder spent those years here in Reno, but moving here from a smaller town gave her an outsider’s perspective that allowed her to see the minutia of the experience, to experience things while simultaneously admiring the experiences from afar.

“I think that’s a reason why I appreciate all these things and want to remember them,” she said.