It's a Sign: New Bohemia Signs group exhibition
Caitlyn Galloway
Damon Styer
Jeff Canham
Josh Luke
Ken Davis
**Reception: Friday, March 12, 2010 7:00-9pm
Signs, like any kind of advertising, and most of design for that matter, employ aesthetic concerns to achieve directive ends, if not only to tell you where to go, then perhaps to elicit an emotional response, often one conducive to the more rapid flexing of your purchasing muscles. The "signs, signs, everywhere signs" that ever increasingly break up the scenery, whether or not they're even so bold as to call attention to their own physical beauty, typically do so on behalf of some corporate entity, big or small, wishing you to ascribe whatever design sense is evident in the sign, to the quality of their goods or services on offer. The "language" of signage, meanwhile, encompasses a constantly evolving and multiplying variety of materials and methods to communicate ornately complex nuances of meaning to a bewilderingly polyglot populace.
We sign writers, here at New Bohemia Signs, tend to focus more intently on some of the most rudimentary parts of sign language, or any language – the little squiggles, curves and strokes that form our alphabet. Our tool chest holds brushes, enamel, some gold leaf, and not much else. Individually and collectively, we harbor a cultured and intimate familiarity with, and to some extent, an abiding love for letter forms, which themselves take shape from the habits our limbs have fallen into, drawing and painting them again and again and again and again and again.
It's a Sign illustrates something of the path whereby our signs move from idea to sketch, to pattern, to painting; a show that makes apparent the relationship of letter forms to the arc our individual arms take, or to the way we each roll a quill between our fingertips; a show that celebrates, from amidst this digital era of limitless copiability, the joy of fine tuning the only copier that draws its current directly from our hearts. – Damon Styer, New Bohemia Signs
Exhibition dates: March 4- April 3, 2010
Curated by Devon Bella
