Detail of the hellfire attached to the chickenwire.

The word was done using old VHS tape, the fire with red and yellow cellophanes.

This was originally going to be executed outdoors, but I forgot to factor the Wellington wind into my material choice - the cellophane kept tearing and by the time I finished one letter, the one before was torn to shreds.

So I moved proceedings indoors, and used an old coal burner in my neighbour’s basement as the backdrop for my cellophane hellfire on a chickenwire screen, with some of the fire strung between the furnace and the word ‘hell’.

Details of the Post-It sketch.

I felt this was the most effective of the drawings, as the layered Post-It notes would flick up at the edges, giving the impression of turning pages.

The Drawings

Top left: Quick pencil sketch, with pastel smudges to block in basic colour.
Top centre: Line drawing using 2 pencils at once, keeping both moving, lifting neither from the page.
Top right: The orange was done with spray paint on a quick stencil, with the black details applied on top in pencil.

Bottom right: I picked out the distinctive elements of  a penguin book cover and tried to draw them arranged together, without looking. I made the mistake (in terms of accuracy, if not visual interest) of switching between the elements I was drawing, which is why the two distended ellipse shapes are so far off one another
Bottom centre: I drew pieces of one of the books on Post-It notes, ensuring I couldn’t see the other notes to gauge scale, or even what I had and hadn’t done.
Bottom left: I chose one aspect of the book the corner, which over the years had become dog eared and tattered. I zoomed in further each time, adding more detail with each zoom 

I initially set out to do something similar to the Marko Jovanovac piece, by cutting letters out and setting up an installation-based poster, but when I saw the effect of the page with the letters cut from it I thought this served better as a visual for the idea that postmodernism has gotten rid of modernism. The idea to lay the postmodern type over the helvetica came from the piece by Daniel Plateado, who had overlaid a serif and a sans-serif to draw attention to the serif font’s more dressed-up feel.

The Poster

(with a close up comparing the texts in more detail)

The Poster

For my poster I chose to compare modern and postmodern design, showing that postmodern design is tacky and cheap looking, due to the excess detailing piled on to modern design. This was achieved by drawing both captions (Postmodern/Postmortem) in Helvetica, a modern font, then bastardising the postmodern side with superfluous additions, altering letters to make them appear as symbols, in a different case, or just plain ugly.

Wellington has an unfortunate amount of postmodern architecture, some of which I chose to use as the back drop for the poster’s placement in town.

(The caption across the red band in the centre is a definition of postmodernism which reads: “The collapse of modernism beneath the weight of the junk stuck on top”)

The Letter (Detail)

The close-up shows the elevation of the embossing, as well as the burnished text of the closing statement.

The Letter

I wrote to Apple, in reaction to having been to a gig the night before, seeing everyone with their iPod Nanos out taking videos of the show, watching the tiny screens, not the show happening on front of them. What was worse though, is that you could see the people next to them looking around to watch their neighbour’s screen.

I wrote the letter on a typewriter to emphasise the move away from Apple’s current high-tech aesthetic towards a more traditional one. I embossed the shape of the latest Nano’s video camera, incorporating the red circle as a visual prompt to accompany my closing statement “Stop video. Play music.”