Dear 2011 Annual Report  Project Manager;

I understand you spearheaded the new end of year report that was mailed to residents last week. I serve on the PRC board and am active in the community but am writing solely as a resident who got the report among a lot of other mail.

It is a stand-out.  I want to congratulate you on an outstanding job. It was creative, understandable and very effective at accurately reflecting the good news in our City that is so often missed.

Bad news is easy for people to grasp, but good news takes a lot of work to convey and clearly you did a lot of work here.

Sincerely,
City of Santa Monica resident

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

Please join Edgar Arceneaux, Julian Myers, and Kimberly Varella for a presentation and reception for the book Hopelessness Freezes Time.

8:00pm
Saturday, February 25, 2012
at Department of Graphic Sciences
625 W. College St. #203, L.A. 90012

Produced on the occasion of Edgar Arceneaux’s exhibition at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Kunstmuseum Basel, Hopelessness Freezes Time presents artworks, research, and writing from the artist’s collaboration with art historian Julian Myers. Drawing on the art and culture of Detroit in the long aftermath of the thwarted urban resistance of 1967, the book connects historical events, guerrilla monuments, earthworks, iconoclasm, and the mythic-political techno of Underground Resistance and Drexciya, to create a “counter-allegorical field from which new work might be realized—work that might unsettle the past that historicist allegory attempts to resolve.” Embracing this possibility, the book’s innovative design presents an object complete yet provisional, singular but fragmentary.

Reservations are recommended as space is limited. Please contact Kimberly via email for reservations (kimberly at deptofgraphicsciences dot com).

Directions from L.A. Convention Center

BUS (approx 25 min): Walk to bus stop at Figueroa/12th (0.3 mi) for bus 81 towards Figueroa/La Loma. Exit Bus at Hill/College stop. Walk west on College to Adobe, turn right on Adobe and enter through parking lot behind building.

DRIVING (approx 12 min): Head northeast on S Figueroa St toward Cameron Ln (2.3 mi). Turn right onto Alpine St (243 ft). Take the 1st left onto New Depot St (0.3 mi).  Cross College St which turns into Adobe. Take first right into parking lot behind building.

Studio is on 2nd floor, accessible by stairs or elevator. Free parking.

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

Late in 2011 LACMA hosted its  Art + Film Gala honoring  director/actor Clint Eastwood and enigmatic artist/provocateur John Baldessari. Heartily DGS  accepted a commission to collaborate with John, designing the whole package for a special edition release of his film Script, in DVD form.

Electronic Arts describes Script as such:

Script is the opposite of an improvisational exercise. Seven couples, all amateurs, are handed pages from random movie scripts and instructed to enact the absurd text through force of imagination, without direction or knowledge of what the others are doing.

With this in mind, perhaps we took a lead from George Mancunious with his fluxus boxes, if not Baldessari himself. Besides sneaking in a blue dot of our own at the center of the felt lined case, we lifted Baldessari's own movie scripts to make  liner notes, reproducing them here 1 to 1  as index cards — just as they were presented to the "actors" in the film.

With the cool grey felt on the inside, a color palate dominated by a caution-orange, and that imperceptible actor's stare on the boxes cover (David Salle, to be sure),  the package came together implacably. Much like John Baldessari himself.

The most surprising project for the year here at DGS was this quick true-type font we developed for Supermarché's short documentary on conceptual artist John Baldessarri. We were deep in the trenches designing a  deluxe DVD box of Baldessarri's own film Script for LACMA's  major gala "Art+Film" (for which Supermarché's film was being created as well), when Supermarché  (Paranormal 3, Catfish) asked us about the titles for their doc. In three days we set out to create the font, Wrong. The  letter forms are based off  a group of paintings, executed for Baldessari by a professional sign painter. In some ways that guy is actually the original generator of the font.

The Baldessarri documentary turned out fantastic. We'll be sure to share the link once it hits the public realm. Until then, here are the glyphs and the inspirations.

DGS Awards (2011)

No harm ever done in a good old-fashioned pat on the back. This year we are proud be be a part of Print's Regional Design Annual and FPO's very first award series and publication (due to be released this month).

In FPO (For Print Only): Exhibition catalog for Steve Roden: when words become forms (Pomona College Museum of Art) and brochure for CCF's L.A. Makes Art.

In Print Regional Design Annual: Identity redesign for Pomona College Museum of Art.

Thanks CCF and PCMA for trusting our "strange, messy, wild, [and] beautiful"* ideas! A supreme collaboration, indeed.

The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the Earth’s crust. When one scans the ruined sites of prehistory one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits. A rubble of logic confronts the viewer as he looks into the levels of the sedimentation. The abstract grids containing the raw matter are observed as something incomplete, broken and shattered.
– Robert Smithson

When artist Edgar Arceneaux called us to work with him on a catalog for his new exhibition at the Kunst Museum Basel we couldn’t have been happier. Our earlier project with Edgar, The Alchemy of Comedy… Stupid, offered us the opportunity to get to know this fascinating artist. Large segments of that book are made up of the ephemera of a collaboration between Edgar and the comedian David Alan Grier. Those two elements, ephemera and dialogue, plus Detroit, are essential elements in Hopelessness Freezes Time.

Hopelessness Freezes Time, the book, is many things; a catalog for a museum exhibition in Switzerland, an “ongoing collaboration with art historian Julian Myers”, a collection of ephemera, a unique object.

Topics Covered:
Edgar Arceneaux: bio, artists studio, artworks, artist’s notebooks.
Julian Myers: earthworks, ontology of art history.
Detroit: Institute of the Arts, blind pigs, riots, techno music.
Earthworks: Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson.
Mirror Travel
Sniping
Civil Rights
Riots
Re-diasporas
Distribution of Music
Guerilla Monuments
Great Lakes Aquatic Afro-Aliens
Monoliths *
Aliens *
Startrek *
2001*

*these are direct quotes from a page of Edgar’s notebook, many of which are documented in the book.

Although its references to urban decay are oblique, the piece’s sentiment is clear. The pendulum suggests cycles of time and how the image or reputation of a place — the outsized shadow it casts — may grow or shrink, but is always ephemeral.
—Sharon Mizota, review for LA Times, 12/3/2010.

Containing what is essentially a drift around a string of metonymic relationships surrounding urban decay, Detroit, and an entropy of identifications—this book manages to approach the form of Smithson’s “jumbled museum.” It’s cover, giving the false illusion that its hardbound, is a thick piece of brown chipboard. Its title, stamped with mirrored silver foil, reverberates back the concept of “mirror travel” discussed within. The rest of the book is soft, spilling (relatively controlled) from the spine. Paper  is brown, white, grey, then cold cold blue. The back cover is the image of Dr. Spock and Karl Marx icily staring back out to us.

Inserted into the book are 10 strategically placed flysheets drawing together photographs from the Michael Hiezer’s Detroit based work, Dragged Mass; album art from Detroit techno label Underground Resistance; a vitrine from an exhibition containing artifacts pertaining to Submerge Records; notes regarding the mythology surround Drexciya (an afrofuturist Detroit techno group); photographs of urban ruins. All of these elements relate back to the artist, his dialog with Julian, and the texts within. The flysheets also contain reproductions of Edgar's work which are oddly at home among the jumble.

While it’s easy to archive ephemera and put it in a box, it’s a challenge to hold it within a form that magnifies the spirit of instable enigmatic expression. As an artist, Edgar Arceneaux continually does this. We believe the book we just made with him, Hopelessness Freezes Time, does the same.

You can purchase it through the Kunst Museum and perhaps soon here in the states.

This brochure shows the type of creative alchemy we aspire to here at DGS. “L.A. Makes ART” is a campaign we developed for California Community Foundation (CCF) highlighting the considerable impact donors have on the arts in L.A. County. Included in the collateral is this brochure—a double book made through the use of a “z fold”. One brochure, two agendas: informational and directive.

The first side is a relatively conventional brochure (but you gotta dig that die cut on French’s “Lemondrop” Paper). It explains how funder’s donations help fuel L.A.’s dynamic arts ecosystems. The centerfold, which features CCF’s Fellowships for Visual Artists, was constructed so it can be changed out annually with the new grant recipients. The brochure is designed to last three years, and we’ve already updated a batch with the current crop of artists fellows.

The second side is the segue from a traditional brochure. Its cover announces its uniqueness with spare texts and empty fields for your “notes”, and (the kicker) a cleverly designed pocket holding a pencil inscribed with “L.A. Makes Art Innovative, Vibrant, Transformative.” The booklet radically turns on itself, and becomes a sketchbook with a simple invitation to the donor, “L.A. Makes Art Yours”. The empty rule-lined pages are available for the brochure holder to make notes with their pencil. Each spreads’ lines offer a divergent frame for the note-taker to depart from: the lines go from straight, to gridded, to archly curved, to bulls eyed—fitting the multiply skewed perspectives defining Los Angeles’s creative visions.

We support the vision of CCF and value the arts in Los Angeles, and we are so proud of this collaboration.

Prisoner's Inventions. Book design by Department of Graphic Sciences.

Half Letter Press is the name of the publishing house Temporary Services formed a few years back. They started it because they were “ interested in using this endeavor to build long-term support and expanded audiences for people that work creatively in experimental ways.”

Revolution As An Eternal Dream, by Mary Patten.

This last month Half Letter released Revolution As An Eternal Dream, by Mary Patten. Like Prisoner’s Inventions, this book highlights the work of artists far outside the mainstream. Here it’s the design of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective,  active in NYC during the late 1970s and early 80s. Patten’s narrative discusses her experiences working with this very committed group of anti-imperialist graphic designers. One of the most interesting passages concern the very ideological criticism the group received from there ideological peers regarding their posters hues and palettes.

Congratulations Temporary Services, and keep up the good work.