GRAPHIS Folio | Exhibition Catalogue '15

GRAPHIS

Introduction

GRAPHIS offers a look at emerging graphic designers in the Ottawa region, whose work is experimental and responds to design communities from around the world. The exhibition was conceived out of an excitement for the diverse but consistent aesthetic tones that are emerging in our city, and which identify the interdisciplinary creative communities that gravitate towards them.

GRAPHIS focuses on the poster, in a range of styles from minimalist typography to psychedelic illustration.

GRAPHIS begins with minimal, geometric posters

by Pascal Huot, created for the 2016 season of the Ottawa Little Theatre. Daniel’s experimental typography follows with the series Fast. Inside the gallery, Ben van Duyvendyk’s black and white abstractions offer a look at a more illustrationbased style of graphic design, bridging between the artist’s sketchbook and the final, digitallyrendered versions.

Pascal Huot’s Child Unknown Wandering at Large I & II are part of a series of posters designed for Ottawa Fringe 2013. The photographs borrow from missing children reports from Australian police files. As galleries and museums make their archives more accessible to the public, as with the Guggenheim opening over 100 titles of art books for free digital access to the public, artists and curators have an opportunity to reconsider and resurrect historic material.

Bread Head by Daniel Moisan shows a cross-over of formal, commercial design—as the graphic was intended as an album cover—and the artist’s personal rebellion against this form. By using symbolism and absurdity throughout his work, Moisan consistently satirizes the trends and attitudes that dominate commercial graphic design.

Isaac Vallentin’s posters for Herd Magazine and local art-pop band Pony Girl represent some of the artist’s typographic experimentation, showing how words and letters can command a design without relying on illustration.

Throughout the course of the exhibition, a recurring question has been, why put on a graphic design exhibition in an art gallery? The response to this lies in the interdisciplinary experimentation that is being explored by many of the individuals and groups we’ve discussed. It is in the ability to speak of a creative process of individual designers developing an identity through their work—a voice and narrative—and the influence that objects of design have in our social environments. Print design contains the visible imprints of our systems of symbolic value, and our accepted patterns in thinking and communicating. As the first exhibit of print-based design at Studio Sixty Six, the intent is to open the opportunity to perceive local design with a more critical eye, and connect with an international community of artists who are also experimenting with the possibilities of graphic design.

Personnel

Ben Van Duyvendyk ¬ dickstagger.tumblr.com

Ben van Duyvendyk was raised in a burned down swamp along with sheep and earthbound fowl.

He frequented guidance counselor offices for what he drew in the margins of his notebooks.

Since then he’s done graphic design work for the federal government, Drawn & Quarterly publishing, countless album covers, gig posters, and horrible guest vocals for the denizens of the local music scene. He sketches compulsively, paints occasionally, and is irresistibly drawn to new methods of expressing ideas visually so he can do away with speaking altogether.

Currently he’s delving further into the photographic with video work on the way, vainly taking a stab at a short graphic novel, and undertaking a gauntlet of collaborative work with local and not so local artists, musicians and writers.

Daniel Moisan ¬ animalhaus.co

Daniel Moisan (Animal Haus) is fascinated by ideas, he is always looking for connections, new perspectives. He loves all ideas because they are profound, novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre.

He is a futurist, the future fascinates him, he is a dreamer. Recurrent questioning of “What if’s” helps him see around the next corner, to ultimately arrive at the chosen path.

In the professional world Daniel aspires to do things differently. He is driven by passion and the desire to create memorable and functional design solutions.

Pascal Huot and Isaac Vallentin ¬ logcb.com

LOG Creative Bureau is the formal name attributed to the visual work of Pascal Huot and Isaac Vallentin. They met while playing music together in a band called Pony Girl (which remains an active project).

Pascal’s background is in film and illustration. He has additional experience in graphic design and still photography. He is currently most interested in short films and installations for display in public spaces.

Isaac’s background is in graphic design and still photography. He has additional experience in film and web development. He is currently most interested in type-driven projects that have outcomes as books, environmental graphics, or posters.

Guest speaker: Simon Guibord ¬ simong.ca

Simon Guibord is an independent graphic designer who works mostly within the cultural field and specializes in publishing and brand identity. He embraces a rational and meticulous approach, based on research and experimentation.

Curator: Lital Khaikin ¬ litalk.wordpress.com

Lital Khaikin is a writer, editor and curator. She has poetry published in Berfrois, with articles and essays published in Afterimage: The Journal of Arts and Cultural Criticism, REDEFINE Magazine, Herd Magazine, and Guerilla Magazine. She is also a contributing editor and writer for continent. journal, and is working on a novella.

She is pursuing areas of interest in the intersections of artistic media and research around self-determination, collective participation and political resistance in urban spaces.

Index of Work Shown

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Daniel Moisan Pascal Huot Daniel Moisan

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Daniel Moisan Ben van Duyvendyk Pascal Huot Daniel Moisan Daniel Moisan Isaac Vallentin Pascal Huot Daniel Moisan Daniel Moisan Daniel Moisan Daniel Moisan Isaac Vallentin Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Pascal Huot Pascal Huot Isaac Vallentin Isaac Vallentin Isaac Vallentin Isaac Vallentin Ben van Duyvendyk Isaac Vallentin Daniel Moisan Daniel Moisan Ben van Duyvendyk Daniel Moisan Daniel Moisan Isaac Vallentin Pascal Huot Pascal Huot Pascal Huot

Want to Go Fast 12” × 18” One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 12” × 18” Fast 2 12” × 18”

Fast 3 12” × 18” Ed 12” × 18” The Murder Room 12” × 18” Film 12” × 18” Fast 4 12” × 18” They Didn’t Respond 12” × 18” Mouse House 12” × 18” Risk It 12” × 18” Fast 5 12” × 18” Fast 1 12” × 18” Jazz 12” × 18” MB 12” × 18” Cavity 12” × 12” Newspaper Portrait 12” × 12” Desert at High Tide 12” × 12” Pchyolka & Mushka 12” × 12” Orbital Leviathan 12” × 12” Paardenrookvlees 12” × 12” Summer Thunderstorm 12” × 12” Tenpin 12” × 12” Child Unknown Wandering at Large I 12” × 18” Child Unknown Wandering at Large II 12” × 18” Hard Crush III 12” × 18” Hard Crush II 12” × 18” Hard Crush I 12” × 18” Mons 22” × 22” Tangerine Harvest 22” × 22” Working Body 22” × 22” Bread Head 22” × 22” Baby 30” × 48” Canines 30” × 48” Corruption 30” × 48” Chill 30” × 48” Helix 30” × 48” US 2505805 A 12” × 18” US 827297 A 12” × 18” US 118366 A 30” × 48”

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Daniel Moisan Pascal Huot Ben van Duyvendyk Isaac Vallentin Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Daniel Moisan Ben van Duyvendyk Isaac Vallentin Ben van Duyvendyk Ben van Duyvendyk Isaac Vallentin Ben van Duyvendyk Isaac Vallentin Isaac Vallentin Ben van Duyvendyk Isaac Vallentin Daniel Moisan Isaac Vallentin Ben van Duyvendyk

Mama 24” × 36” Anatomy of a Prayer 24” × 36” Lichta 24” × 36” Pony Girl I 24” × 36” Mountain Gate 24” × 36” Vlad 24” × 36” In the Now 24” × 36” Down South 24” × 36” They Asked Me For Science Fiction 12” × 18” Indie City Madness June 13 12” × 18” Daydreams are Mine to Keep 12” × 18” Rose Curve 12” × 18” 1-2-3-4 12” × 18” Aicher 12” × 18” Perforation 12” × 18” Indie City Madness June 12 12” × 18” Saline 12” × 18” And the Other 12” × 18” Pony Girl II 12” × 18” Smith Jones 24” × 24”

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Featured Designers

Tim+Tim ¬ timandtim.com 1

Daring to ask Collisions with the Collection Marta Herford

Tim Rehm and Tim Sürken, an independent creative duo based in Berlin and Bielefeld, Germany. With a focus on art direction and concept development they create projects that occupy the space between art, design and advertising.

TIM+TIM’s creative development has included work for theatre festivals and collaborations with curators and photographers. The duo’s work is characterised by its serious minimalism, and predominantly black and white palette.

Kasper-Florio ¬ kasper-florio.ch 2

Fuyuu Underground Poster 2014

Kasper-Florio is the collaborative experience of Larissa Kasper and Rosario Florio. Founded in 2013 and based in St.Gallen we work locally and internationally. They engage in projects within the fields of culture, art, fashion and music.

Among their collaborators, Swiss agency Kasper-Florio can count A Design Film Festival (Singapore), Dumont Gallery (LA), and Reframe Records (Switzerland). Their work quietly veers towards the experimental, with subtle play on vertical and overlapping typography.

ORDINARY PEOPLE ¬ ordinarypeople.kr 3

#187 — #198

Ordinary People are a South Korean design agency who have created projects in print, for the web, and for exhibition design. Their work more prominently features type, nominated for the Tokyo Type Directors Club in 2011 and 2013.

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Collectif Blanc ¬ collectifblanc.com 4

Bracket, issues #2 – #5

Collectif Blanc is a curatorial platform exploring the new territories of publishing and design in print. They curate thematic exhibitions of local and foreign content and a daily blog of inspirations.

Founded in 2013 in Montreal, CB is the project of Marie-Ève Tourigny (graphic designer) and Catherine Métayer (editor), and has among precious collaborators Annie Descôtaux (librarian at CCA and artist), Marie-Ève Tanguay (graphic designer and lecturer) and Vanessa Duval (graphic designer and writer for La crèmerie, Ma mère était hipster).

Giandomenico Carpentieri (GDC Design) ¬ gdcdesign.tumblr.com 5

Poster for Outdoor Urban Art Festival

Peter Bankov ¬ gdcdesign.tumblr.com 6

forbidden theatre

Giandomenico Carpentieri is a graphic designer based in Rome. His work has included designing art-books with experimental Italian small-press publishing house Yardpress.

“i live in the plane between prague and moscow. that is between professional design and not the professional is interesting to me. between terrible design and beautiful, national and antinational. west slavic and east slavic design, european and asian design.”

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Designing for Print

In his work with Montréal based independent publishing house Drawn and Quarterly, Ben van Duyvendyk has developed typography that mimics handwriting. “The intent,” he says, “is to create type that is as distinctive as a singular voice.”

Typography must have a balanced representation of both the content and the voice of the author.

“That goal could be to create a face that is all but invisible, and allows the reader to immerse themselves in the meaning of the words without coloring them one way or another.

This has a bit of a feedback effect to it, because once a face becomes standardized it becomes even more invisible and that accent is reduced even further.”

A challenge that exists with this requirement in type is achieving the neutrality that is often desired. Where type can be coloured by character, embellishment, or identify too brusquely with a particular time period, the opposite effect can result in a clinical tone.

“These sort of neutral faces are great for applications where communicating the meaning of the word quickly and directly is the focus, manuals, highway signage, any text with the job of quick and efficient delivery. Helvetica is the oft referred to example of this sort of text.

Helvetica is ubiquitous, it’s very well designed to be read quickly and used at any scale.

Industrial applications work out well, and it’s simple and evenly built, so it works well for delivering the content of a book without colouring the text with a strong “accent”. This has a bit of a feedback effect to it because once a face becomes standardised, it becomes even more invisible and that accent is reduced even further. You might notice a Scottish accent in a crowd here in Canada, but in Glasgow it’s invisible. The Swiss school’s sans serif is the

invisible accent of utilitarian communicative design in the Western world. I guess you could argue that Times New Roman and serif faces are similar for print applications. But as they are designed specifically for the application of an ink and paper world -- and that world is in a state of flux, losing some ground to the influx of new fonts widely in demand since the dawn of desktop publishing and reflecting its digital counterpart more and more -- the sans-serifs have it as the invisible accent of the west.

For example, Garamond = a Morgan Freeman or David Attenborough sort of mental narration, versus something like Jokerman which is like Gillbert Gottfiried screaming at the top of his lungs. It’s subjective, sure, but as the designer you must make your best effort to match the content of the text to a voice. Specifically in a situation where you must build a brand for a company or an individual, you must thoroughly understand how they wish to be perceived and model the face to match. Once you have a main face made, and fine-tuned it for layout, you can develop a family based upon it that will act as inflection within that voice.

Subtlety is not the only goal one can seek in creating a typeface however, and instead, one can focus the design on invoking a particular voice or creating a unique identity. The face chosen for a novel, for instance, will establish in the mind of the reader a particular voice.

Which voice matches which face, and to what degree, is largely based upon the associations of the individual. But the designer of the face, and the layout, and flow of the book should always have this in mind.�

Regional Characteristics in Print

What can poster design reveal about the cultural environment to which print work belongs? To begin to answer this question, we can look to the regional characteristics that can be found in choices of colour, pattern, shape, and type. Russian designer Peter Bankov, for instance, plays with the publication nature and commercial functions of the poster so that it becomes a conduit for the personal, challenging himself to create one poster each day. Bankov is based in Prague, and describes his work as bridging between Slavic and European themes, merging eastern and western influence.

We can find traces of the aesthetics of Constructivism or Dada, in shapes and letters that are reminiscent of Soviet propaganda, and Bankov’s anarchic collage of photography, bleeding paint and digital illustration. It is in Constructivism too, that we find the art-object as functional and communicative, so there is a type of subversion of the medium when the relationship of the designer to the poster is changed—in some cases, it is a challenge to the commercial motivations that are often associated with design. The attitude of using the poster as a mode of expression and rebellion is also a motivation behind Daniel Moisan’s work, where some of the most experimental projects are self-commissioned.

Connection to Ottawa: ¬ spinsandneedles.com/printsand-inks-2015-risograph-edition

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Peter Bankov 4th poster for the moscow club “dom”

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Peter Bankov coffee with cigarettes in the morning, bad but so favorite habit

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Ordinary People soaekdacom

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Bomb fish on the seashore 11

Daniel Moisan Corruption

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Daniel Moisan Baby

Possible Worlds featured “Prints and Inks: Risograph Edition”, an exhibit of risographs that included work by the Dutch Knust Press and Extrapool, based in Nijmegen. Traditional motifs and colours, and intricate patterns reveal folk origins of the Netherlands, and by contrasting against aggressive abstractions, these illustrations are reimagined for contemporary print.

Another element that distinguishes the idiosyncrasies of cultural geography in print design can be found in typography, especially between Cyrillic and non-Cyrillic written languages. Both digitally and in print, there are necessary changes in the way designers can convey information, an abstract idea, and character through type.

The logograms of Chinese scripts, Japanese characters, and the adaptations of hanja in Korean allow for a different approach to typographic design and the use of a page. Unlike the English

language, these visual languages are more considerate of the space a character may occupy on a page, and the visual relationships between concepts and their elements. Even with the modernization of Korean written language into hangeul, which is phonetic as opposed to the logographic hanja, words are still arranged in groupings where some letters may be placed above, as well as beside, each other.

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Featured Portfolio: Simon Guibord

For a designer, this allows a different type of distribution of letters on a page, and a more experimental approach to the relationships of these concepts, signs, and sounds, than what is possible with the linear English language. Pictorial approaches to type have greater possibilities with languages where concepts are contained within a single grapheme, rather than being distributed through letters that can lose all meaning based on their distribution across a page.

Typographic design may also respond to a particular relationship to calligraphy as a traditional and practiced form of writing, and the symbolic modifications a brush and a calligrapher’s stroke may have on text. The significance of the text may be changed by the shape of the brush, the lightness of application, or personal embellishment. In creating digital work, designers may have to consider how to preserve some of this identity that is possible by hand, which is important to the content of the writing but is not possible to replicate manually for the form.

Simon Guibord is a local independent graphic designer whose work has included book design for the film and poster exhibition Cinégrafismo at Daïmôn, exhibition catalogue design for Emanuel Licha at the Musée régional de Rimouski, magazine design for illustration-based publication HB, and an immersive soundscape and visual projection called Perceptions irrégulières, for the National Arts Centre, in collaboration with Rachel Monnier and Christian Lapointe.

Simon Guibord’s print design is characterised by a sophisticated attention to detail that has set him aside as a leading designer in the Ottawa-Hull region. Guibord’s print work is always considerate of the material character of print design, such as the binding, or the texture and sheen of paper.

There is a minimalist restraint to his work that comes through in showing only the necessary, reducing palettes and emphasizing a calm character to his work.

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Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués

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Collages mouvants

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Cinegrafismo

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La fin du dialogue: Le Mur

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Political Voice of Poster Design

“Design is understood as a formal intervention in the very structures of our culture. This doesn't just involve various themes and forms of designing, but rather it is about the presentation of an attitude, as it manifests itself in a common interest of artists and designers in cultural knowledge, taking shape in objects and conceptions.”

— curatorial statement by German curator, Thomas Thiel: for the exhibit Beyond Gestaltung (Bielefelder Kunstverein, 2011)

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TIM+TIM

By revealing so many aspects of a cultural environment, whether through the immediate events and individuals projects were commissioned through, or the context of the work’s exhibition, the poster can become the subject of historical archival. Isolated as this example is in our presentation, it reflects a contemporary, artistic response to the physical nature—or the materiality—of the poster, and a subversion of an object of design for historic archival and exhibition. How then, can print design communicate and respond to complex issues of conflict, politics and identity?

[for Ahmet Öğüt’s Apparatuses of Subversion at Horst-Janssen-Museum]

“With Apparatuses of Subversion, Ahmet Öğüt examines the moments when governmental or economic players cross into the territory of the individual in order to regulate public space and thus cement the social status quo. Öğüt addresses not only the responses to protest movements in democratic societies and the application of disproportionate countermeasures but also identifies various sanctions and regulations of state control, surveillance and seclusion. The artist pays particular attention to public space, which he sees as a zone for negotiation and interaction that is in constant need of renewal.”

— from exhibition press release, 2014

The poster designed by TIM+TIM for Ahmet Ögüt’s exhibition cleverly relates to the artist’s critique of crossing the boundaries between public and private space. The exhibit poster first exists in a marginal space between the art and the street. The designer’s concern is that it must respect the artist’s message and aesthetic, while serving as a translation of the context and significance of this exhibit.

TIM+TIM consider the corporate invasion of public and private space with a graphic representation of how marketing is often subtly communicated. The initial simplicity of the poster is deceptive; there is no accessory in the way of illustration or playful typography, the design appears neutral, without character. Neutrality, however, can enable design to be particularly invasive. Responding to Öğüt’s theme, TIM+TIM’s poster is designed to be on the edge of invisibility in the public but, on second look, will reveal something uncanny. Where part of the text is cut off by a black frame, we see that the design can provoke an association with censorship. The context of the poster in the street alludes to the sinister nature of propaganda and state or corporate control of public or private information.

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Apparatuses of Subversion

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Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Goeriege In the recent exhibition Art on a Green Line (Carleton University Art Gallery, 2015), curator Johnny Alam examined the work of two Lebanese artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Their photographic series Faces documents posters of martyrs from the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), showing a progression of decay in the images over time.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige give new context to previously existing posters that remained on the walls of Beirut buildings. Memorializing the faces of martyrs, the posters were public efforts to preserve history at a time when the Lebanese government was actively erasing and rewriting history through the erasure of names, of , of events and the communities that bound them. Hadjithomas and Joreige show how in environments of extreme political conflict, the poster can be repurposed, subverted even, to serve as a historic archival document. Faces is also a reflection of the material nature of posters, highlighting the transient nature of print in public, non-exhibition spaces. We see how easily print material shows the imprint of its environment, be it in the effects of weathering or the destruction left by militarized conflict.

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Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige Wonder Beiruit

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GRAPHIS

Written by Lital Khaikin at Studio Sixty Six ¬ studiosixtysix.ca Designed by LOG Creative Bureau ¬ logcb.com Photo of GRAPHIS vernissage by Isaac Vallentin Published in Ottawa, ON, Canada 2015

All images are copyrighted and property of their respective owners unless otherwise stated.