Annual Curatorial Project

The Black Market Type & Print Shop

23/05/08 - 22/06/08

Curator: Joseph Del Pesco (San Francisco)

Discussion panel: Saturday 31/05/08 at 3pm

with Joseph Del Pesco and special guests Miriam Kathrein (Vienna)

and Isa Tousignant (Montreal)

Opening: Saturday 31/05/08 at 5pm

 

Satellite activities:

Zine workshop: Saturday 14/06/08 at 1pm

Slide show: Saturday 21/06/08 at 3pm

 

With posters by: A Constructed World, Brad Adkins, Amy Balkin, Paul Butler, Harrell Fletcher, Amy Franceschini, Jamie Gili, Sam Gould, Marc Horowitz, Marisa Jahn, Steve Lambert, New Beginnings, Giancarlo Norese, Derek Sullivan and Jeff Ramsey

 

Presented as part of Mini Viva! Performance & Activism in Everyday Life
www.vivamontreal.org

articule's annual curatorial project The Black Market Type & Print Shop, organized by curator Joseph del Pesco, presents typography as a vehicle for the dissemination of art. Looking back to the proliferation of typography in the 90s, this project-exhibition uses the tools of design to explore an overlooked aspect of contemporary art history by creating a functional resource. The project involves an extensive archive, based on appropriated type samples culled from exhibition catalogues and artist publications. All of these fonts have been created without the permission of the artists, and their use is limited to the exhibition. Picking up on the groundwork laid by appropriation art in the Eighties, these types are a byproduct of art production extracted for a second use, but without modification or addition. With an interest in functionalizing contemporary art history, del Pesco seeks to encourage the transmission of cultural production by embedding its histories in distributed media.

Types are appropriated from: Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, R. Crumb, Julie Doucet, Jimmie Durham, Marcel Dzama, General Idea, Thomas Hirschhorn, Chris Johanson, Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Margaret Kilgallen, Duane Michals, Chris Ofili, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, Richard Prince, Dieter Roth and David Shrigley.

Following the completion of the archive, a group of 15 international artists were invited to create a text-only poster using the fonts to be distributed around Montreal. Displaying the archive on the gallery walls, articule's space will be transformed into a production environment with a computer and a photocopy machine. With the help of an in-house technician, visitors will be able to utilize the typefaces assembled in the archive to design and print their own posters in the gallery. The effect of which is a distribution of the aesthetics of contemporary art into the media stream of lost-dog announcements, rock show flyers, for-sale notices and other street-post ephemera. In this way The Black Market Type & Print Shop proposes an unusual inhabitation of preexisting modes of communication, mass production and distribution.