Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2019 från C Magazine

What if a typeface, one of the most ubiquitous examples of visual design in the world, could be a voice for “the other”? Reading is almost a passive activity as eyes scan storefronts or a newspaper spread. What if, instead of implying mechanical perfection, the letterforms expressed imperfection? Would our shared consciousness around ability shift? Shannon Finnegan’s work uses typography and hand lettering as an invitation to participate in the thoughts, emotions and everyday experiences of a person with a disability. Self-Portrait (2017) is a collection of drawings in pastel-coloured pencil on letter-size sheets of paper, which, at first glance appear to be flyers on a busy billboard, filling the window of The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, New York. Together, from a distance, the drawings read as a…

Film First, 2018 What do we mean when we talk about modern Canada? Hockey. Multiculturalism. Natural vistas. Global cities. Humanitarians. And above all, friendly people. Greg Durrell’s documentary film Design Canada is about all of those things and the role graphic design played in forging them. But the film is not only that; it is also a fascinating—if unintentional—look at a world where Canada’s colonial project hides in plain sight. Burton Kramer plays himself as the designer of the original CBC logo. Patrick Reid recounts Jacques St. Cyr’s refinement of the maple leaf that defines the national flag. Hans Kleefeld revisits his minimalist logo for the Toronto–Dominion Bank as a gesture that parallels Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist TD towers. Stuart Ash. Brian Donnelly. Fritz Gottschalk. Rolf Harder. Julien…

Self-published, 2018 In Issue 3 of the web-based design journal The Manual, published in 2012, educator, publisher and graphic designer Paul Soulellis’ bio describes him as a “recovering perfectionist.” His contribution, entitled “Design Humility,” is described in the subhead as an “embrace of chance and vulnerability.” Addressed to both himself and his peers in the graphic design community, Soulellis’ piece makes a call for the development of a new reflexivity within the practice. He opens with a description of a mycological tour he once took at the old Black Mountain College grounds in North Carolina. He was looking for ghosts, he explains, amongst the mushrooms, and despite a certain softness, doing so with a kind of urgency. “I found myself walking slow but looking hard—at tree trunks, along the bottoms…

Buffalo, New York ??–ongoing Somewhere deep inside an industrial kitchen on a university campus, a work-study student is mixing ingredients together for a cookie. It is rolled out from standard sugar cookie dough, hand-cut with a template and prepared for baking on large trays. After the cookie bakes and cools, the student applies a white coating of icing and pipes an outline of royal blue frosting. This cookie is emblazoned with the university logo or, formally speaking, its primary academic mark. “Our primary mark represents the strength and power of the university’s academics. This is the university’s logo and most recognizable mark. It must be presented in its original format, never altered or manipulated, in all communications,” states the school’s website on the topic of its visual identity. So, it…

Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario October 5, 2018–March 17, 2019 Today, lineage, like everything else, has become commodifiable. The recent proliferation of self-service genetic testing kits, including 23andMe, MyHeritage and AncestryDNA have made clear that, for some, ancestry is purchasable and easily ascertained. The unspoken narrative of these testing companies is that identity is genetic inheritance and avoids the messiness of associations being born of emotional labour, relationship-building, kinship and togetherness. Beneath the surface of Crystal Mowry’s thoughtfully curated exhibition I’ll be your Mirror at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery simmers the tensions at the core of recent interests in tracing one’s genetic lineage. The exhibition offers a counter-view to simple and reductive notions of family and social bonds. The photo and video works within the exhibition make visible practices or projects…

Vtape, Toronto November 20, 2018–January 26, 2019 That language is a structure of power is obvious to anyone who’s had an encounter with Foucauldian theory. That the previous sentence is a performance of said power locates a paradoxical problem at the centre of theory-based practices: by the same token that language provides a stage to give voice, it alienates, excludes or subjugates its practitioners. “That’s what I don’t like about art,” my roommate says when I tell him about the exhibition I’m writing about. “Like, only art people will get it. It’s just a circle jerk.” “No, but the show is commenting on that,” I say, kind of annoyed. “There’s, like, a lot of self-reflexivity.” “I never wanted to be wrong about the artist’s intent and so I would read…

“It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.” – Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994) The history of design education in India can be traced to a dialogue between decolonial nationalism and transcultural forces of modernity that began to unfold in the late 19th century. A curious entanglement between the independent legacies of Germany’s Bauhaus and the freedom movement in India planted the seeds for a new pedagogy of design that emerged in 1961, 13 years post-independence, with the establishment in Ahmedabad of the National Institute of Design (NID) as India’s first design school. Founded on the basis of The India Report (1958), a visionary roadmap for Indian…

Times New Roman was created in 1932 as part of a redesign of The Times—a British daily newspaper based in London—and is attributed to Stanley Morison. An autodidactic scholar-designer, Morison had published widely on the history of typography. He was a member of a circle of artists and small-press printers who sought to revive Arts and Crafts ideals in the graphic arts. Times New Roman would later go on to become ubiquitous, used for legal briefs, magazines and encyclopedias. In the late 20th century, the proliferation of personal computers in homes and offices across an increasingly networked world established Times New Roman as the de facto typographic voice of administrative authority. When the redesign commenced in 1929, The Times’ circulation was small but well connected, as the paper was a…

Darling Foundry, Montreal June 21–August 19, 2018 Preserving a memory is an active process, one that requires its keeper to isolate—or inevitably dislocate—its constituent fragments. Berlin-based Canadian conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel grapples with the transmission of memory in this exhibition, which was conceived during a research residency in the Krakow home of the late Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor. A Dream In Which I Am You deviates from the work on institutional critique for which Schwebel is more commonly known. Through Kantor’s namesake foundation, Schwebel studied not only the heritage of the Polish artist but also his absence. A set of diaphanous curtains with imprinted flower shadows greets visitors to the exhibition. Their ethereal quality is echoed by a pile of semi-translucent letters spread meticulously overtop an oblong table. Two pedestals…