“It’s not just graphic design anymore. We just don’t have a new name for it yet,” April Greiman once said as she surveyed the field’s function beyond commercial design. Graphic designer Ed Fella had challenged the definition to joined in typographic experimentation, after leaving a long career as a commercial artist, and has since influenced more than one generation of designer. Geoff McFetridge’s is a younger contemporary in a world where design was fused in both fine commercial art––in a time where it seems all you have to do is declare the intent. Both will be on exhibition at REDCAT.
All boring if you do not follow design, or monitor how it switches its duties as visual fodder. If you do follow it, you will see design blogs buzzing about the REDCAT exhibition “Two Lines Align" that looks at “the evolution of graphic design in the context of massive changes in our visual culture.” Opening reception is tomorrow night, Wednesday, February 20 (6 pm).
As guest curator Michael Worthington notes in the catalogue essay, the exhibition explores “the shifts in the perceived cultural worth [of art and graphic design] over time…by placing Ed Fella’s and Geoff McFetridge’s design careers end to end to make one chronological line, one lineage. While Fella’s career reflects how graphic design has historically struggled to define itself in relationship to art, McFetridge follows a path wherein the integration of art and design is taken for granted.”
Representing two generations, Ed Fella (b. 1938) and Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971) have transformed and actively altered the relationship of graphic design to art. Their unorthodox and nontraditional practices, rooted in drawing and the hand-rendered, compel us to question our preconceptions of what graphic design has been, as well as what it might be.
Two Lines Align: Drawings and Graphic
Design by Ed Fella and Geoff McFetridfge
Gallery hours: noon to 6pm or intermission, closed Mondays
Admission Free
Opening Reception: February 20, 2008 6pm Artist Talk 6:30 pm
REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
view [Two Lines Align]
Left: Ed Fella, Sketchbook # 42 (p. 60), 1996, 8-1/4 x 6",Courtesy the artist.
Right: Geoff McFetridge, untitled, 2007, ink, crayon and felt pen on paper, 18 x 24” Courtesy the artist
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