Street poster designed for Brahja Wladman’s Quartet (Quintet for the show) double album launch this Friday at Café Resonance. Howl co-produced the album, and I also designed the CD packaging, images coming soon.
Facebook event here. Photo by the city’s best poster paster-upper, Stefan Christoff.
SSENSE: Beyond Control Editorial
I’ve sadly neglected this blog for a while now, due to some big changes and challenges in my professional and personal life. To my “loyal readership”, my sincerest apologies. The big news is that after a very introspective January, I decided to take on a full-time position as the Art & Design Director at SSENSE, a leading Montreal-based fashion company. The images above are from my first ever fashion editorial!
This is my first in-house job, and I’m quickly learning that the challenges are quite different than those of agency or freelance work, but I’m really excited to be able to dig so deep into, and feel ownership over, a single, unique brand. I’ve also been impressed by how different the fashion industry is from the advertising industry. Obviously, there are a lot of overlaps, but the attention to purposeful craft is very refreshing. The creative team at SSENSE is very talented and there are big plans for the company on the horizon, so please stay tuned. Here’s hoping my immersion into the world of fashion might also improve my wardrobe as well!
One of the highlights of my trip back home over the holidays was the 2 hours of Super 8 footage that my dad had digitised of old home movies he shot back in the seventies and early eighties. My brother diligently edited it down to a shorter compilation, which I scored, and we shared some nostalgia-soaked memories with the family.
As a designer/communicator, nostalgia is something I think about a lot (cue the carousel scene from Mad Men), and I knew I wanted to do something with this footage that explored these ideas. However, I didn’t want to emphasize the personally nostalgic moments, rather, I wanted to focus on the unique aesthetic of the images and the (digitised) film itself. It was quite a trip to sit through all the footage again in order to extract these select images, and I feel they’re somehow imbued with that personal investment. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet, a few will certainly make it into the next issue of Four Minutes to Midnight, but for now I thought I would post them here.
Two years ago today, my friend and poet FA Nettelbeck died. A month earlier Four Minutes to Midnight published his final book of poetry, Happy Hour, with illustrations by Sophie Jodoin. I had planned to perhaps visit him over the holidays that year, take a trip with my brother down to the backwoods of Oregon, with a box of books in tow. Those plans fell apart, and in the new year, I was contacted by his sister Sandra, first to let me know that he was in the hospital, and soon after to let me know that he had died. I didn’t know that he had a sister. She didn’t know that he had a publisher.
I wrote briefly about our time “together” shortly after his death, and today, it’s weighing real heavy on me again. Things are looking pretty ugly to me right now, with a lot of blame to go around in this frigid country. The list is long, and probably not worth mentioning here, but the world looks a lot like he saw it, and I wish he could write it down for me. Set it on the page, or at least the screen.
With the passing of the new year, and all the attendant reflection this entails, I’ve finally taken the time to revisit my portfolio pdf. The main goal of this redesign was to represent the growing diversity of my practice while highlighting the common threads (typography, poetics, collaboration, etc.) that tie my work together.
The process of thinking through my work was surprisingly difficult. Though it’s a new portfolio, it doesn’t actually feature very much new work. This is partly due to the honest fact that my newest work isn’t necessarily my best (something I clearly need to work on), and also due to the desire for the portfolio to act more as a signpost, rather than a comprehensive collection. Nonetheless, there are several exciting new projects included, alongside new documentation of older work. I’ve cherry-picked through my output over the last few years to select pieces that point towards the type of work I want to be doing.
For Expozine this year, John and I pulled together this small zine consisting of two hard-wrought poems. The poems were composed/written by us over the course of 4 days and nights, addressing our tried and true themes of love and loss, gentrification and war, isolation and community, solidarity and suicide.
Despite the short timeline (we were stapling and folding into the wee hours of Saturday morning), I’m really proud of these little poems and the elegantly restrained format and typography. The zine was published in a limited edition of 50 copies.
Download a PDF of 2 poems here.
Please join us on Friday Oct. 5th for the next concert in the Howl series. We’re very excited to showcase Léopard et Moi and Avec le Soleil Sortant de sa Bouche, two local avant-garde rock ensembles working on the creative frontlines of this city.
Members of both groups were deeply involved in the student strike, and we will also take this opportunity to celebrate the victories of the movement with groups that contributed to the material culture of the strike tabling at the event.
3 – demo by lesoleiletsabouche
More info on Howl Arts.
RSVP on facebook here.
photo by Thien V.
With news of the cancellation of the Liberal tuition hike here in Québec today; a stunning victory after many months of mobilising and protest by students, and a rare (if nuanced…) victory for our social movements more generally, I thought I would post this image of the poster Sarah Boris designed (with my “art direction”), and I printed during our residency in Dundee.
I had the phrase bouncing around my head for many months, but never found an image/design to resolve it. The #GGI posters I designed were largely inspired by the desire to find a way to use it, ending up as a series of eight posters, yet none of which used the phrase “Coeur Rage”… It took the synchronicity of travelling to Dundee, and meeting with Sarah, for this design to emerge.
When I got back to Montréal, I used the poster at several street protests, and was often stopped by people wanting to take pictures of it. It certainly struck a chord with many people, and I’m very happy that Sarah and I managed to create this work, as a small contribution to the movement, to a summer of love and rage.
Continuing my collaboration with Cinema Politica, “Selections” presents an extensive catalogue of CP’s Canadian films, artist and project profiles, photos of locals, etc. recapping the last year of the organisation’s activity. It celebrates and details the important work being done by CP, and acts as an engaging tool for outreach and promotion.
Despite the limited production budget, the booklet provided a good opportunity to push Cinema Politica’s visual identity (developed by us last year), through the use of powerful imagery and a cinematic format, a refined typographic palette and layout, and crisp one-colour (interior) printing on a nice, matte stock.
Additional design assistance by Kim Tsui, printing by Kata Soho.
