Monday 25 April 2011

Promotional Postcard Design

The idea of my exhibition is to distort the gallery walls and floor through the application of collage, coloured paper, and some objects too - perhaps some furniture (anything big and broken so feel free to donate anything to me).  All those things will change the perspective of the room and work against the hum drum method visual art is usually presented:  rectangular panels separated by long expanses of white wall.  You know the type - there's no avoiding this when I usually exhibit in galleries because it is the done thing, so I would play the game and just put a few pictures up alongside everyone else.  Now that I have a solo exhibition I have no excuse to not exhibit my work in a way which is more suitable to what I've always been wanting to do with my work.  Which is to cover the walls in wide expanses of crazy texture and confound the viewer with an overwhelming depth of static, nonsense and contrarily busy void.

One of the problems with this approach is how to promote it - I haven't put this picture together yet, I have all the ingredients prepared but I don't have a photo of what it's going to look like.  So the best I can do is create an artistic impression of a 3D space - annoyingly this artistic impression will be confined to the size of a postcard - a rectangular space.

Anyway I started work on this trying to create 3D spaces just using copies of my texture but this didn't really go very far - it looked too much like it was made on a computer - which it was.  So I readjusted my method and took some photos of corners and corridors and then worked over the top of them with colours and textures.  The results are just below, showing how they were layered step by step:



Now these are okay but they are not really getting across what it is that's going to be happening (even if what is happening ends up becoming a non happening) - they still look quite computery, a bit first year graphic design, even worse, these look a bit psychedelic.

Anyway in the next few images I put these images inside one another and try to make look a little more complex.  I wanted to create something that looked like an interior of a room - but then not too much like a room either - more like a distorted room.... as I'm all about distorting rooms.

So I looped designs into one another over and over again making them more complicated and perhaps less relevant:


As you can see by the bottom image I found something quite relevant... still arguably a little psychedelic though - but at least it gets across some view of a skewed and bizarre interior.   On the back I'll write a little blurb explaining the exhibition - something along the lines of "through massive areas of texture and collage Garth Simmons creates an immersive environment of skewed perspectives and illusive scenery - visually distorting the gallery space and conjuring an atmosphere of colourful and dislocated chaos".  I promise I'll do a lot better than that - though I'm getting pretty good at writing this sort of definition - I think blogging has had the desired effect on my self definition skills.

The title of my exhibition may be a simple one.  I'm thinking it should be called "Dimensional distortions of a room".  I was going to go for something wordy - like the title of my Blog, but then decided against it - people never seem to understand what I mean by my wordy titles.  It's fairly simple to understand - if you are me.  They are also very hard to explain - if you are me.

(One day after posting this I designed the back of my promotional postcard:

It took all evening but I had to get it done so I could take advantage of a special offer at Vistaprint which ran out today - I rather like it though.... many thanks to my house mates for checking whether it was actually good or not, and also in improving my sentence structures.)

1 comment:

  1. Hello,

    Postcards are a multipurpose marketing tool. A postcard basically a blank postcard, where you can insert pictures or cartoons, you would like on to it. Thanks a lot...


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