The Black Market Type & Print Shop

Exhibition from May 23 to June 22, 2008
Opening: Saturday May 31 at 5pm

Curator Joseph Del Pesco

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 a window display by Jeff Ramsey

Discussion panel: Saturday May 31 at 3pm
with curator Joseph Del Pesco (San Francisco) and special guests Miriam Kathrein (Vienna) and Isa Tousignant (Montreal)

Satellite activities:
Zine workshop on Saturday June 14 at 1pm
Slide show on Saturday June 21 at 3pm

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. The project involves an extensive archive, based on appropriated type samples culled from exhibition catalogues and artist publications. About twenty 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.

The 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. Furthermore, articule's space will be transformed into a full production environment with a computer and a photocopy machine. With the help of an in-house technician and graphic designer, 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.

The Black Market Type & Print Shop is part of the 2008 edition of Viva! Art Action which focuses on, and celebrates performative and alternative practices that characterize the spring programming of La Centrale, Clark, DARE-DARE, Praxis, Skol and articule under the theme Performance, Activism and Everyday Life. www.vivamontreal.org


articule
262 Fairmount Ouest
Montréal (Québec) H2V 2G3, Canada
T 514 842 9686
F 514 842 2144

info(at)articule.org
www.articule.org
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Opening hours: wed - fri 12 - 6 pm, sat/sun 12 - 5 pm