This collaborative zine project was created by Caren Florance and Peter Lyssiotis during the COVID19 pandemic. Florance, an artist writer and academic is known for her text-based, poetic practice that is rooted in handset letterpress, and spans the spectrum of book publishing and design. Lyssiotis is best known as photographer/photomonteur, filmmaker, writer and book artist. Under the imprint Mastertheif, Lyssiotis has worked for over 25 years in the book art field. Lyssiotis’ practice is firmly analogue, using scalpel, scissors and glue to reconstruct visual language.

'Getting away with it' is a direct response to sentiments of frustration that both artists feel toward media representation (or misrepresentation) of pertinent social and environmental issues. A playful dialogue, the artists use digital collage to mishmash broad print from the Murdoch conglomerate, pointedly questioning media agendas. Produced as a low-cost digital zine, this book is presented in a way that encourages mass distribution, another elemental response to the artists’ critique of mass spread of (mis)information through the media.

Of the work the artists write, “The starting point for this poster/book project was Peter Lyssiotis's notebook full of angry, frustrated collages, and looking at them all Caren Florance and Peter could think of was the wilful, deliberate damage that the Murdoch conglomeration has achieved over the last four or five decades, and it doesn’t even feel like it was only for profits: there’s a sense of pure arsehattery about it, a tinkering for the fun of it. And that applies to anyone who plays with anything that screws things up for the rest of us: oil, bitcoin, minerals, water rights. We matched some of the images with posters, and then used the rest as digital mashups. This artist book is the real deal: cheap and in no way cheerful. It starts at either end and meets in the middle with a howl of rage:
They’re getting away with it. What are we going to do about that?”

Artspace Mackay 2022