The Personal Is Beautiful
This project was created in collaboration with our sister painting studio, Atelier Ravel. We designed a small publication to accompany an art exhibition, along with related marketing collateral, that was based upon items an artist found in a box that she opened years later. You can see more of our designs for this project here.
Found in a Box, 2022. Photograph. This photograph shows some of the items the artist found inside an old sealed box in her cellar. These and other texts, photos, and pieces of ephemera were organized into a small exhibition and book.
The challenge of this project was multilayered in its editorial and design approaches. How does one organize a group of items that were not, originally, intended to be ordered? How does one establish an innovative kind of logic to reconsider these objects anew? This was the experiment for both the artist and designer.
On an editorial level, we assessed the writings to find themes—somewhat astonishingly, there were very clear motifs in the texts, which we used to structure the book. We edited out parts that were repetitive or mundane, but otherwise strived to capture the original essence of the writings, including even those passages that the artist found personal or possibly embarrassing as a means of conveying honestly a particular period of time in her life, as encapsulated in the box.
The Memory Room, table of contents spread, published by Éditions Atelier Ravel in 2022
For the design, we looked at the artist’s “constellations” of images that worked together to convey particular ideas. Originally strung for the exhibition in three-dimensional space with crimson twine, these elements were reorganized on a wall for clearer photography. We left the red threads as a nod to the installation and as a compositional motif to help hold the works of the project together in the book’s pages. We created new vintage-like photography to give the publication an aesthetic that was reminiscent of memory or the past generally. We also tried to reproduce faithfully the current conditions of the objects, including any folded pages, tears, crumpling, or stains, in the reproductions to underscore the ages of the various pieces and the passing of time.
Four Polaroids, Two of the Roses (ca. 2010). Collage and photograph, 2022
Flipping through the resulting book, though held together by a clean graphic design strategy, one feels like they are perusing a personal notebook, including notes from reading literature, fragments of stories, and thoughts on the art of painting. We are always pleased when our design can uphold and reinforce an artist’s vision without getting in the way of the initial concept, freshness, and vibrancy of the art itself.
Do you have a personal project or story you would like brought to fruition in the form of a printed or digital book? We offer a customizable array of editorial, design, and production services to help artists, authors, and others share their visions and dreams. Learn more about the different ways in which we can collaborate here.