Modified Practice.
Last Thursday saw the opening of Modified Practice, a show exploring the form and processes within contemporary graphic design. The show brought together two projects, Nomadic Museum by Kevin Boothe and No Masters. No Gods. by Tom Briggs. Below is the shows statement as well as some pictures of the install. A big thank you to all of you who managed to make it out of the course of the past week to view it in person.
Graphic design is a discipline that is best understood through its relations to others. As Stuart Bailey noted, “graphic design only exists when other subjects exist first. It is a not a priori discipline, but a ghost; both a grey area and a meeting point.” Modified Practice can be seen as a response to this constantly fluctuating position. The projects within this show do not deal with graphic design in the most traditional sense of the word, as there is no client, and no brief. Instead, Modified Practice hopes to re-frame viewers’ understandings of what graphic design can be through its explorations of the discipline’s relation to the museum and to film making. By using design as a point of reference, the individuals in Modified Practice seek ways in which new perspectives can be utilized in both of these forums.
Modified Practice- Opening April 21st 2011
If you are in the Toronto area this Thursday, April 21st, please join us in celebrating the opening of “Modified Practice,” a show exploring the forms and processes of contemporary design. The show will bring together two projects, Nomadic Museum by Kevin Boothe and No Masters. No Gods. by Tom Briggs. We will begin the evening with a screening of No Masters. No Gods. at 7:30 and the opening will run until 11 PM. Music will be provided by Trav. The shows statement can be read below.
Transparent Practice- Hugh Scott Douglas
There is nothing worse than when blog authors make long-winded apologies filled with half hearted excuses about why they haven’t posted in so long. We are going to spare both you and ourselves from going through that, and just let you know that while we’ve been too busy to keep Weeklies running on any sort of regular basis, we’ve been working on some interesting projects we are excited to begin sharing with you over the upcoming weeks.
With that out of the way, we are going to start things off with a video we have recently finished in collaboration with Rizwan Ali. Our good friend Hugh Scott Douglas (who contributed one of the special edition prints to Issue One) was kind enough to let us spend a day with him in the studio filming and discussing his work. The results can be seen below.
Seven Days- Cartagena
With the past couple of weeks having had many of us in the more northern parts of the world dealing with particularly treacherous weather, here at Document, we decided it was time for a brief, albeit imaginary getaway. This week’s post features Seven Days worth of photographs from Susana Londono, taken in Cartagena, Colombia. We hope the photos get you excited for warmer days to come.
We Project Onto
2011 has started off as a very busy but exciting year here at Document Magazine. We have a lot of interesting projects planned for the next twelve months that we looking forward to sharing with you. In the meantime, here are a few snapshots of some works that are currently in progress. Stay tuned for more!
Seven Days- Thailand
We hope you had a great holiday, and look forward to resuming the Weeklies posting on a more regular basis within 2011. For this week’s installment of Weeklies, we continue our series of Seven Days, with this edition coming to us from Bangkok via Rob Boothe. We hope you enjoy.
The Last Newspaper Exhibition Review.
The Last Newspaper, a show currently on view at New York’s New Museum traces the historical development of the newspaper as an artistic tool from the 1960’s to the present day. The show examines the rich history of the newspaper, embraced early on by the cubists and futurists as a way to further disseminate their artistic practice, as a source for “artist’s images and language” (newmuseum.org) as well as a tool to transmit both information and ideas.
The Lowe-Martin Group Printshop Visit
Yesterday I had the opportunity to tour the Lowe-Martin Group Printing facilities here in Toronto. Founded in 1908, The Lowe-Martin group has been recognized as the most environmentally responsible printers in Canada 3 of the past five years that the award has been presented. I was lucky enough to visit on a day that they were printing (among other things) the Porter airline inflight magazine, a favorite here at Document. Below are a few low quality cellphone snaps of their operation.
The Inherently Personal Nature of The Image
The power and impact of visual images on humans has long been recognized and respected. From the pre-historic images of the caves at Lascaux to hieroglyphs and illuminated manuscripts, to the hyper saturated 24/7 mediascape of contemporary society, the image has been the method in which human beings have communicated, created, and negotiated their experiences of reality.
“What difference does it make who is speaking?” or Foucault, Authorship, and The Museum
In our continuing series exploring the role that design plays within the museum as both a system, and a category of display, this week we are featuring a short essay that examines some of the ideas posed by Foucault in his 1969 work What Is An Author and applies them to a design based setting.
In Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay, What is an Author, the French post structuralist thinker expands on the idea of authorship and discourse while challenging his readers to re consider many basic assumptions regarding our contemporary perception of the author. This essay, while concerned primarily with the author in the traditional sense (as one who produces a written body of work) raises many questions that could be similarly applied to ‘producers’ across a variety of creative fields including design.