TIME TRAVELERS
On behalf of the Time Travelers Union, we welcome you to this emerging fellowship. You are now a member of a growing collective of souls committed to breaking linear time. For too many centuries time has been fractured and squeezed, flattened into homogenous chunks of moments all lined up like good little soldiers—all bound to march endlessly in one direction, and one direction only: forward.
With our voices in a joyous and riotous chorus, we say No More! Together, we can restore the inner mysteries of time. We can remember that time moves in all directions at once, and we can learn to let it move us in the same way. No longer will we live our lives by the constraints of progress. Together we can remember how to be changed by what we do not know and how to learn from what has come to pass.
The final step of your orientation is to step through this portal. We are with you. You are with us—and we are overjoyed that you are here, with all your infinite selves traveling through time and space.
We’ll hit you up next month, whenever that happens.
About the Image
January’s time traveler comes to us from our very first calendar, “2012: The Last Calendar You’ll Ever Need.” This early collaboration played on the popular conspiracy theory at the time that the world was ending because the Mayan calendar supposedly ended in 2012. It featured a variety of animals triumphing over the human world and its artifacts—crows scattering bricks from a ruined building, a polar bear destroying a bicycle, and this caribou stepping through an astrolabe into a starry sky.
We’ve wanted to revisit some of these earlier images for some time—when we first began making art together Corina had already experienced some success as a solo artist doing primarily black and white line work, while Jo’s art practice was mostly large scale oil paintings. Corina, the perpetual elder sibling, discouraged Jo from painting within the bodies of the animals so these early images have a strange collage-like style with black-and-white line drawings of animals supported by graphic and simple colored backgrounds.
In our theme this year of going back to the past to revisit what went wrong and learn from previous mistakes, we created this sibling caribou as a true collaboration every step of the way. Corina redrew the sketch, Jo printed out this new drawing and painted it by hand in gouache, and Corina took the raw painting and refined the colors and edges digitally, then added digital line work and text.
Making this first image of the 2026 calendar was a non-linear process. Redrawing the caribou to be coming through the astrolabe toward us was trickier than it seemed, and painting it for the first time from our poor reference images from 2012 was also challenging. We were still not entirely sure we’d be making a calendar for 2026, so each setback seemed like perhaps a reason not to continue. But when it all clicked into place and we started to solve the creative problems, every other image flowed so easily. In that way, this portal-jumping caribou also helped us jump through the portal of making The Time Travelers Union Welcomes You.
2012 Caribou
2026 Caribou
