Wasteland, the new art novel by Jason Haaf and Scooter LaForge, is a space you enter knowing you may not want to leave. Part book, part visual archive, part psychic terrain, it unfolds as a collaborative experiment in queer intimacy, desire, repetition and unrest. Released on 24th February via Doable Guys, Wasteland brings together painting, prose, poetry and collage in a work that resists fixed narrative, instead operating as a place, a condition, a shared state of mind.
The project emerged organically from a chance encounter. While working at The Strand Bookstore, Haaf noticed the final copy of his debut novel Harsh Cravings disappear from the LGBTQ table. The buyer turned out to be LaForge. A message followed, then a meeting, then a decision to collaborate — not by layering one practice over another, but by dissolving boundaries entirely. What followed was a sustained exchange: handwritten texts passed back and forth, surrounded, altered, interrupted and expanded through paint, ink, pastel and further writing.
Rather than illustrating one another’s work, Haaf and LaForge created a third space. Words sit inside images; images interrupt language. Nothing is resolved. Meaning accumulates through repetition, friction and emotional residue. Across roughly 80 works, Wasteland becomes less a book than a living organism — a site shaped by longing, anger, eroticism and the compulsion to stay with difficult feelings rather than escape them.
For Haaf, the process transformed personal journal entries into something collective, asking larger questions about dissatisfaction, desire and the urge to imagine elsewhere. For LaForge, the collaboration unfolded instinctively, driven by raw response rather than concept, resulting in a body of work he describes as “alive” — charged by the rare chemistry of two artists meeting at the right moment and saying yes.
Published by Doable Guys, a homoerotic art collective committed to community, experimentation and unapologetic creative expression, Wasteland sits comfortably between literature and visual art, intimacy and exposure. It is queer in nature, but expansive in reach — a reminder that collaboration can be less about agreement than about entering uncertainty together.
Wasteland is released on 24th February. MORE: @doableguys
