Curators: Liz Lessner and Mat Keel
Text: Laura Marris, Courtney P. Taylor
and Dr. Jon Clark
Client: Yes We Cannibal

yeswecannibal.org

Exhibition Publication
96 Pages
7 x 9 in.
Edition of 500

Printed in Canada

The design challenge for this publication put forth by Mat Keel and Liz Lessner was to incorporate a series of different layout structures for each respective section: Works, Written Works, and Programming. In one way this was to prevent the publication from feeling like the typical exhibition retrospective but create a living document that encapsulates the urgency and energy of a specific moment in time.

The artist exhibition section [Works] required the typical artist biography, CV, and short essay. The Essay section [Written Works] contained long form academic and conceptual texts about the show. The Programming section, held in the evening, was to focus on humanity: the audience and those involved that supported, attended, and made the exhibition possible during its run. All throughout the spreads, you’ll find color splashes of green in the gutter, in text and as these section separators, giving a nod to the ecological studies that were the focus of the exhibition.

It was a design challenge for sure that I’m feel succeeds in some ways and in others, feels a bit disjointed. This could read as charm after all, but there are moments upon reviewing the publication again that do not feel right for me. A combination of goings-on in my personal life, the start and stop nature of the project itself and certain budgetary/time constraints contributed to either something graphically interesting or questionably neurotic in its design approach. While Mat and Liz were pleased with the printed publication, it opens the debate of whom the design must work for in the end.

Artist: Simon Berz
Client: Yes We Cannibal

yeswecannibal.org

Publication
8 x 6 in.
28 Pages
Risograph Printing
Saddle-stitched
Edition of 50

Produced in-house

Designed quickly to document the performance of Swiss artist Simon Berz, this special edition Risograph zine was included in the first fifty orders of the Emptiness Ecologies publication.

In keeping with the thematic textural work of Berz’s utilization of volcanic stone and ash, it was important to make a reference to this by printing with over-inked black Risograph screens. This ink flooding process allows for more opportunity to leave residue on the viewer’s fingers as they thumb through the pages since the over-inked page ‘dries’ in an equivalent way that newsprint ink ‘dries.’