MTWTF SS

…Chicago in 2010 and has subsequently traveled to many other locations. The two posters that form this pair were created for the New York (2014) and Los Angeles (2017) shows. ¶ Both posters use a 4 x 6 modular grid to present EC’s environmental slides. Under normal conditions, a slide’s mount and transparency are not legible at the same time: the mount requires light to bounce off it, whereas the transparency requires light to pass through it (as when projected on a screen), in order to be read. The posters created by MTWTF present a unique visual interpretation of the slides as a composite of these two different exposures simultaneously referencing the artifact and the content. Photographic windows and typographic frame are rendered in high…

…contrast—a nod to EC’s original black-and-white slide catalogs. ¶ Both posters use color to create a vibrating effect, but do so in different ways. Each is printed with three PMS spot colors, two of which are shared by both; the psychedelic pallet optically pushes mount and transparency apart. ¶ With its green mounts on a blue background, the New York poster creates optical vibration between all of its parts. The Los Angeles poster, with its orange slide mounts on a pink background, creates optical vibration within each slide image. This sense of altered perception resonates with the aim of EC and of the slide sets themselves, to heighten our experience of the designed environment.

…and used by Levine multiple times during the late 1960s, were he portrays himself as a communication artist. The second plate overprints a series of horizontal lines suggestive of the interlacing used for broadcast television (visible whenever tv screens are photographed), in order to exemplify one signature way Levine presented content in one medium within another medium, in his work. For example: A phone conversation, as a photo, as televisual broadcast, as a poster. ¶ The exhibition The Halprin Workshops, 1966–1971 explored a series of experimental workshops presented in the San Francisco Bay area and along the Northern California coast by the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and the renowned dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin. The series brought together…

…designers, dancers, architects and artists to collaboratively develop new approaches to environmental awareness and design. ¶ The exhibit poster designed by MTWTF features two different representations of a single event––a workshop session in which participants performed a series of multi-sensory activities to model open-ended relationships with the beach environment. The back of the poster features the “score,” or loosely structured guidelines, written by the Halprins to facilitate this group activity. ¶ The poster’s front features the same event, only as a documentary photograph. It is printed using two interlocking halftone screens–one at half the size of the other. The printing technique creates additional visual action inside the image.

…clear falsehood contained in both collections of images. ¶ On the front of the poster, MTWTF presents a 6 x 12 grid of UFOs and effigy heads, tightly cropped so that they can be compared as a set, without the visual evidence provided by their backgrounds. On the back of the poster, the caption or annotation that originally appeared alongside each photo doubles-down on its questionable truth claim.
 ¶ Two PMS blacks used to print the poster suggest the variety of papers and range of print qualities included in the exhibit. 
 ¶ Every Building in Baghdad brought together two photographic collections created by the Iranian architect Rifat Chadirji and preserved at the Arab Image Foundation in Beruit. The first collection is Chadirji’s own photo-documentation of the buildings he designed for the Iranian State, many of which were fully or partially destroyed in the second…

…Gulf War. The second features Chardirji’s photos documenting everyday Arab life and social practices within Baghdad’s public spaces, which were endangered by postwar development and beginning to wain. The two collections act as counterpoints within the exhibition.
 ¶ The gridded photos on MTWTF’s poster are from the Arab streetlife collection; specifically, a category labeled “signs,” which features storefronts, street signs, and public political posters from the Arab area in which Chadirji lived. The gridded photos create an graphic streetscape to represent one that no longer exists.
 ¶ This particular design accompanied a version of the exhibition held at Los Angeles’ LA X ART gallery and is printed in bluish-black ink on a white sheet, covered by a light pink flood coat to suggest the vernacular printing techniques from another time and place.