Fine print
Cristal Duhaime and Ali Rahman
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Seripop's poster art gets the totemic treatment (crossed with a bit of Dr. Who style perhaps?)
photo: Alice Phieu
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Seripop moves off the streets and into the gallery - in sculptural form!
"If you're an artist, it's your duty to be aware of what your peers are doing," says Chloe Lum. She and her partner Yannick Desranleau co-founded Seripop seven years ago, and have since seen their screen-printing-cum-poster-design venture become a local institution and international sensation. Their dedication to their craft has garnered attention from the gallery world - and tonight No Henge, their first ever solo show in Montreal featuring sculptural print work, opens at the Emporium Gallery. "You cannot be an island. You cannot be completely self-involved," says Lum. "If you don't have the interest to put yourself into your community then why the hell would you expect anyone to be interested in you?"
It's this grassroots, community ethos that drives the success of Seripop (not to mention Lum and Desranleau's band AIDS Wolf and their drums-and-electronics project Hamborghinni.) Well, that and a whole lot of hard work.
When Lum and Desranleau decided to take up printmaking, there were relatively few people in town producing the ubiquitous artisanal poster work that is now such an integral part of Montreal's music scene. Right from the group's inception, the two understood that if they were to have any success at all they would have to pay their dues and invest some serious time in order to hone their craft - both even quit their day jobs to pursue the art of printmaking full-time. If Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that it takes
10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any domain has any truth to it, then Seripop is well on its way. Though they've slowed down lately, the pair pumped out hundreds of prints in those first few years, and, as Lum recounts, not all of them were good. "We knew that if we wanted to develop as artists we just had to keep producing, even if it meant coming out with shitty work. Practise and critique from peers was so crucial to our learning process."
Without the financial safety net of a "regular" job, the two were forced to advance their art in an entrepreneurial way. With no poster-making business paradigm at their disposal, the two created their own operating model, one that was less deliberately fashioned on DIY ethics and more focused on a practical networking approach.
"Having grown up on punk and hardcore, when we started Seripop we got the word out the same way we did about any band we had: We got in the van and went on tour with our prints, and had art shows in different cities. That's been something really organic for us," Lum explains.
Seripop's almost exclusive focus on gig posters and album covers was the natural result of the social context in which they found themselves - namely the independent music scene. The global visibility achieved with musical projects such as AIDS Wolf simply fed back into their opportunities as visual artists. "A lot of people who are interested in music also happen to be interested in art. The two have been very symbiotic for us," says Lum.
Audio snapshot: Seripop's hardworkin' Chloe Lum
and Yannick Desranleau on art and community |
Devoting most of their printmaking energy to the music scene has allowed Seripop to slowly build their visual aesthetic, one which, Lum justly adds, "is pretty singular." Anyone who has paid any attention to the city's saturated walls and lampposts over the last few years can easily pick out a Seripop poster from the bunch - though finding the right words to describe what separates them from the rest can be tough. On a basic level, there are the trademark psychedelic explosions of colour and mix of figurative and graphic elements, but beyond that it's not a style that easily lends itself to description, even for the artists themselves. "If I were the type of person who could pinpoint this verbally, I wouldn't be an artist, I'd be a writer," Lum jokes.
No Henge is described as a sculptural print installation. Desranleau breaks the work down on a basic level: "There are two main elements, the screen-printed posters on the wall and the central piece which is the sculpture. It's like giant origami with a lot of glued paper on the wall." Lum adds: "It's like you get to walk inside a giant poster."
According to Desranleau, No Henge stems from an ongoing interest in the politics of space in the urban landscape, and comments on Seripop's own position as street advertisers within those same city walls.
Lum describes the milieu in which Seripop operates as fine design, "kind of a bastard child, neither art nor design; occupying an ambivalent space between the two." Whatever category their work may fall into, it's undeniable that it is the product of tremendous effort; after our brief interview with them two nights before the opening, the two returned to their craft, tirelessly cutting and gluing and assembling into the night.
Seripop's No Henge
At the Emporium Gallery (#74-3035 St-Antoine W.)
Vernissage July 2, 7 p.m.; open July 4-5, 12-5 p.m.
