Feel the Darkness

Upturned crosses and corpse-painted faces, naturalistic small birds and flowery fields. Dokument Press and Vice present the book Feel the Darkness - the work of Ragnar Persson 2006-2009. The scenes in Ragnar Persson's pictorial world might have been lifted from a teenager's diary. A time and place where you sneak out into the woods, smoke a cigarette and think "Nobody understands me". Ragnar Persson was raised on heavy metal, and discovered drawing through album covers. He also draws inspiration from old scenic painting. Incorporating childhood memories, he creates his own world of pictures, a world that tells who he is, and in which all can recognise themselves. This is true for writer and curator Johan Kugelberg, American Riot Grrrl icon Amy Kellner, and Vice editor Elin Unnes, who all contributed texts. Hard and soft are counterposed, as are morbid mysticism and loving tenderness. The liberating effect of Naivism is combined with refined artistic technique and sketchy salvoes altern

Ragnar Persson is a regular contributor to the international edition of Vice Magazine, and has been featured both as a photographer (with the cover for the 2007 Vice Photo Issue), as an artist and as an interviewee. Ragnar Persson was born in 1980 in a small village in the north of Sweden. Today he lives in Stockholm and works internationally as an artist. He graduated from the School of Arts, Crafts and design in Stockholm in 2007. He has published more than 10 critically-acclaimed artist books and zines. Persson has exhibited in Reykjavik, Berlin, Istanbul, The Hague and Stockholm.

Johan Kugelberg is a writer/editor/curator living in New York. Recent books include "Born in the Bronx - A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop", "True Norwegian Black Metal" and "Daido Moriyama: Vintage Prints the 1980's". Subjects of recent curated exhibits include Daido Moriyama, Peter Beste and Carl Johan De Geer. His next books are "The Velvet Underground - New York Art" (Rizzoli October 2009) and "Street Posters of the May 1968 Student Rebellion" (Four Corners, Fall 2010). He is currently working on a monograph and exhibit tracing the history of the punk aesthetic for 2011.

Modern riot girl icon, Amy Kellner is the managing editor of Vice magazine and was Vice's music reviews editor for several years beforehand. She also produces a show called "The Cute Show" for Vice's online TV network, VBS.TV. She used to manage the aNYthing brand store, curated a few art gallery shows, and worked as a sex educator in a women-run sex shop. She was editor-at-large for Index magazine in the late 90s. She's written a few essays for some art books, and used to write for a bunch of other publications. She ran a now-defunct photoblog, teenageunicorn.com.