Awst & Walther - Exhibition Invitation
by Studio Hausherr
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Pick Me Up graphic arts festival cancelled, Somerset House announces
Somerset House has announced it will not continue its annual graphic arts festival, Pick Me Up. The exhibition has been a showcase for established collectives and studios as well as emerging artists in the illustration and graphic design fields since 2010.
According to a statement from the show’s original curator, Somerset House has cancelled the popular event to “focus on new projects”.
Claire Catterall, director of exhibitions at the venue and original curator of Pick Me Up, said: “I am immensely proud of Pick Me Up’s seven-year run and how it became an established event in the graphic art scene’s cultural calendar. It is heartening to see how the public has become more and more engaged with illustration and graphic design, and so many wonderful festivals and events springing up around the UK since the first Pick Me Up in 2010.
“With a host of new champions for this community, we feel the time has come to focus on new projects which are equally energetic and exciting, and look forward to championing great work from new artistic communities through our public programme.
“Although we say goodbye to Pick Me Up, we remain committed to providing a platform for the graphic arts through our diverse programme of exhibitions, talks and events. We will continue to work with many of the artists and designers who we supported through Pick Me Up over the years. We have an impressive group of alumni who have gone onto great things and we will certainly keep a keen eye on what they go on to achieve in the future!”
The last Pick Me Up took place in spring 2016, with a visual identity by Hato.
The institution recently opened Somerset House Studios, its own in-house affordable workspace for creatives.
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Robbie Simon, the jack of all trades and the master of them too
Robbie Simon is one of those artists to be envious of. He’s got his fingers in every paint, print, illustration and design pie there is, with each result being exceptionally inviting. However no matter the medium, each of Robbie’s pieces speaks his voice, one that has a tone of Alexander Caulder, if he’d settled in California. Robbie’s work is a mass of attentively curated colours, often placed on striking darker backgrounds that only this artist would be able make seem natural.
Robbie is predominantly recognised for his artwork for West Coast band the Allah Las. He’s contributed record sleeves, music videos, posters, the LOT, ever since their inception. As the band’s success grew, so did Robbie’s, who has since had solo exhibitions of his paintings, designed a bag for Stussy, and continued creating artwork for several musicians. In addition to all of this Robbie has also set up his own press, Feeling Physical, creating zines of his own prints but will soon be releasing a book of Tim Presley’s drawings.
Design studio TwoPoints’ comprehensive identity for a Spanish design award
Hamburg-based design studio TwoPoints has created this all-encompassing identity and catalogue for the ADI (Association of Industrial Design) in Barcelona. The non-profit organisation and its Delta Awards, which champion innovative product design, were founded in 1960 and the first icon was designed by one of its founding members, André Ricard. It has been adopted, changed and altered year after year for the awards and subsequent prizes set up by the ADI over the years.
TwoPoints was tasked with creating a new symbol for the Delta Award, the ADI Medal and ADI Cutlure, all of which have a distinct and separate history and profile. Unravelling the identity saw TwoPoints create an icon out of a dodecagon as its base and separating the shape into a triangle and hexagon to represent the other awards. These simple, geometric shapes have then been manipulated into a modular typeface for the rest of the identity.
The face is a nod to Paul Renner’s Futura, which was used in some of the first printed materials from the ADI. Easily adaptable from year to year, the identity has been created in different colourways to characterise the different strands. To sit alongside the identity, TwoPoints has also designed a catalogue for this year’s awards, which adopts the same neat, modern aesthetic.
Baptiste Bernazeau’s ode to ruins told through crumbling typography and illustration
Graphic designer Baptiste Bernazeau is currently studying at École de Communication Visuelle (ECV) and his project Ruines is a monochrome zine that takes a “philosophical, scientific, metaphysical” look at the ruins of buildings and unpicks the impact of these crumbling structures.
The zine is the second part of a three volume work called Triple Six which consists of Humain, Ruines and 1-6 Dieux. “The main concept originated from Humain, the first zine I worked on with a friend. We really like scientific, occult and philosophical stuff so we decided to describe humans as a set of six criteria,” explains Baptiste. “We worked exclusively in monochrome and it served us really well in the scientific/esoteric notebook feel we want to create. One month later I worked alone on Ruines, which is connected in terms of aesthetic to Humain.”
Baptiste sees the set of zines as having an encyclopaedic feel to them. For Ruines, he split the publication into six ambiguous chapters like Time, Life, Transformation and Destruction, which has allowed the designer to explore these loose themes using typographic experiments, illustration and graphic icons. “I really like illustration and typography so I focused on that first. The first part is an introduction with a lot of typographic elements, representing ruins in different ways, through highly distorted texts, tilted letters and broken words,” explains Baptiste. The second part of the zine is a range of texts discussing ruins in an academic, philosophic way, around these blocks of information is a composition of a building being excavated and as such becoming a ruin. The last section ends with a series of illustrations by Baptiste made out of digitised materials.
The highlight in the project is the typographic elements scattered throughout. Inventive, experimental and clever, Baptiste uses familiar ruin-themed styles, shapes and materials to create interesting typefaces and graphic formations. “The typography was done with the idea of typographic ruins in my head. I really like to break and transform a basic sans serif typeface to get a more complex form.”
Curve
Winner of ‘Best Short’ awards at both Fantastic Fest and Sitges in 2016, Tim Egan’s 10-min Horror Curve is a dark, minimalist, and truly unsettling film. Simple in premise, but immeasurable in impact, prepare yourself for what is set to be one of the most tense and unforgettable shorts you’ll witness in 2017.
Reminiscent of one of my favourite long-shorts (if an almost 50-minute film can really be classified as a short?), Shinya Tsukamoto Haze, Curve is at its most powerful when putting you inside the headspace of its doomed protagonist. An uncompromising, physical watch, Egan’s film sends shivers down your spine as you imagine your own fingernails desperately clawing to that unforgiving concrete, in hope of getting any kind of traction. It’s really hard not to watch Curve without setting your mind racing about what you’d attempt in that situation – however horrifying and hopeless it might be!
Taking just 8 hours to write, from first concept to shooting script, Curve was inspired by two key moments in the director’s life – the first being hit by a car and the second a conversation with a depressed friend.
“I still remember the feeling of wet tarmac under my fingers” Egan recalls when describing his lucky escape after being knocked into the centre lane of busy traffic, where he gripped the asphalt preparing to be struck by a second car in a matter of seconds. Whilst this first experience was an undeniable physical one for the writer/director, the second influencing experience was a much more mental one.
“She said the earth opened up beneath her and the rest of her day was simply about holding on by sheer force of tension”
Describing a conversation he had with a friend struggling with grief, where she explained that “the only good moments of her day being the seconds after she woke up”, Egan obviously had some more symbolic intentions coursing under the surface of his thoughts when writing Curve. “Her mind was clear and at peace for a few seconds before she remembered her pain”, he recalls. “Then grief rushed in, a feeling not unlike vertigo. She said the earth opened up beneath her and the rest of her day was simply about holding on by sheer force of tension”.
Despite knowing this particular influence on Egan’s script, Curve feels like a film better left unscrutinised. Yes we could talk about all the metaphors (or is it allegory?) in the scenario of a bloody woman clinging to the precipice of life. But Egan’s is a short best enjoyed without all this bullshit. A film best enjoyed in the moment, a film best enjoyed for its raw, uncompromising approach – however uncomfortable that may be.
Samara Scott depicts night-time detritus for Art on the Underground’s Night Tube series
Artist Samara Scott has created the first artwork in a new Art on the Underground commission series for the Night Tube pocket map. The artist – known for her pools of water filled with the detritus of modern culture – has created a photographic collage of night-time-inspired items in cross-section, suspended in way that makes them seem otherworldly.
The items include cut electrical cables, batteries, an open lipstick, a felt tip pen, a bike light, a screw, a USB and a squeezed lemon, which were captured on a domestic scanner. True to Samara’s raw approach, the sweeping purple background was apparently created by shining a light on to an Ikea bag, while the dust on the scanner surface was left to add depth and movement to the image. Much like her existing work, it uses everyday products that surround our lives, depicted as simultaneously grotesque and beautiful.
The map will be released tomorrow (Thursday 15 December) with a special edition print also available. It coincides with the launch of the 24-hour Piccadilly line.
Kiera Blakey, head curator for Art on the Underground, says the new series is “a brilliant opportunity to support early career London-based artists, providing them with the opportunity to make work for our vast audience across the city. Samara made this work specifically for the pocket map format, thinking carefully about scale, function and distribution. That’s why the piece works so well in this medium”.
joekeerys