Pick me up was a contemporary graphic art fair, filled with great young artists and designers. I feel like this exhibition has been the most relevant to my practice this year, as there were displays of various printmaking works and a few graphic design pieces. The fair took place at the Somerset House, this place is quite well known for holding out door cinema viewings and its historical background.
Pick me up was spread across three different levels of the building, as a viewer I felt like the work was leading me through the space because I wanted to see more. The great part of this event was that not only could I be an observer, I was given an opportunity to take part in producing work by participating in various workshops.Having workshops at such event is a great idea! After viewing amazing pieces of work at the gallery I felt very inspired and taking part in creating something on the spot can prove to be challenging and fun at the same time, a good way to test imagination too.
I really admire most work at the fair, but my favourites were all collages by Krisjana S Williams, she uses nature as her main theme for her work. I particularly like a butterfly piece, which has been collaged on to a gold background using various beautiful colourful butterfly wings.
I also really enjoyed a series of small screen prints by Michael Kirkham called 'Inside'. The series contains three prints of the same image screen printed in single different colours.
This fair has motivated me a lot and I also picked up some ideas for future projects, it has given me something to aspire to for the future.
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| John Smith, 'Lord Buckhurst and Lady Sackville' 1695 |
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| Bernard Lens ii, 'The fireworks display' 1695 |
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Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, 'I too lived in Arcadia', Germany, AD 1801
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| "Unknown" Evan Hecox |
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| "Battersea" Evan Hecox |
stolen space gallery
This exhibition took place at the text/gallery, a very small space but I feel like it was perfect for this typographic exhibition as all the works were very subtle. I guess that's the beauty of typography, it has a big impact in every day life but no one truly notices the small details in typefaces.
As a viewer I was able to wonder around the exhibition in any direction, there was no particular way of viewing works or maybe there was an intention of leading viewers in a certain way but in a non obvious way. There wasn't very much information provided about the pieces, so I had to research the ones I liked most online after the visit, despite that it was still a brilliant exhibition.
I really liked all the works on display, the two that stood out most were pieces by Graham Bignell and Beatrice Bless called Mikado, this piece was screen printed the same typefaces in three different colours on top of each other and off set on purpose. I feel like it kind of relates to my own work, printing in four colour separation. Another piece was by Polina Pakhomova called promises, I thought the hand written type made this work much more personal and very strong as she layered sheets of paper on top of each other to create a three dimensional effect.
After viewing this exhibition I was inspired to produce similar pieces to Pakhomova's work, that's where the text layering experimental piece came from in my sketchbook.
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| "Mikado" Graham Bignell & Beatrice Bless |
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| "Promises" Polina Pakhomova |
This exhibition took place at the Kemistry Gallery, which showcased screen printed posters produced for an electronic music event in London by ten different artists. The space for this even was reasonably small, but there was no need for anything bigger as it created an intimate atmosphere between the viewer and these design pieces. I thought that all posters had an element of abstraction to them, there to represent the music and lure you in to attend the event. What was great about them is that they were all the same format, with exact same minimal layout the only parts that changed were rectangles in the middle. I think that small detail like the layout is a great way to tie a series of works together. All artists used screen printing as a way to produce these posters, which gave them this great feel of being one off and precious a limited edition of a kind.
One of my favourite pieces from this show was ‘RA X’ by Simon Cook , the use of layering left me examining the poster for a while and vibrant colour caught my eye straight away. As an event poster it definitely does the job of catching public eye. Another piece was ‘RA X’ by Michael Cina, also some very great detail and layers of bold black and perfect thin lines of colour; I still don’t know how he achieved such perfection. However I thought this poster might not of been as eye catching as the other one, but the craftsman ship was brilliant.
I have been inspired by some of these works to incorporate layering in my screen printing project, because it makes a piece of work look so much richer in tone and colour.
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| "RA X" Simon Cook 2011 |
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| "RA X" Michael Cina 2011 |
I visited this featured exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was great to see so many different artist works of postmodernism in one huge gallery space. As a viewer I felt blown away by the amount of different objects there were in this space, from flat 2D works such as posters to household objects, abstract sculptures, video and 3D simulations. The gallery space itself felt very postmodern, dark walls and dimmed lighting with neon signs leading the public from one room into the other. I think it’s really important to get the space itself right, to suit what is exhibited and V&A got it right spot on!
There were soo many works that I liked it was hard to just pick a few to write about. An amazing poster by Paul Scher ‘The best of Jazz’ was one of them, my liking of typography and passion for the constructivism posters has drawn me to this particular piece. I like the simplicity of it, use of only three colours to screen print and the way it has been mostly concentrated on the type positioning of this promotional music poster. Another piece of work I like was ‘Orchid’ by Robert Mapplethrope, which is a ceramic plate with a black and white Orchid photo print. The perfectly round and thin plate it so elegant and minimal, seems like less is more when it comes to this piece. I also like the way photography has been taken out of its original context and has been applied to tangible object.
Overall I thought the exhibition gave me the real feel of postmodernism and I saw a lot of works that were new to me. Where some works were great I felt like others were a little over the top and there was too much going on at once. I think in the future I would like to try using some sort of untraditional media to display my work, for example traditional printing method transferred on to a tangible object which would never be associated with printmaking.
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| "The Best of Jazz" Paula Scher 1979 |
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| "Orchid" Robert Mapplethorpe 1989 |
