With posters by: A Constructed World, Brad Adkins, Amy Balkin, Paul Butler, Harrell Fletcher, Amy Franceschini, Jamie Gili, Sam Gould, Marc Horowitz, Marisa Jahn, Steve Lambert, New Beginnings, Giancarlo Norese, and Derek Sullivan
Exploring the use of type in recent art practice, the Black Market Type and Print Shop is a collection of 20 fonts culled from contemporary art publications. Picking up on the groundwork laid by appropriation art in the Eighties, these types are a byproduct of art production extracted for a second use, but without modification or addition. All of these fonts have been created without the permission of the artists, and their use is limited to the exhibition. (While the project is called a black market, none of the fonts are available for purchase.)
All of the types are hand-drawn by the artists with only one or two exceptions, and all are readable letterforms except two: the General Idea AIDS logo-type infects the entire typeface, and David Shrigley's "dingbats," a collection of symbols drawn by the artist. A loose selection criteria for this resource was to omit artists employing existing typefaces, or borrowing from other sources. It was also limited to type appearing within a single artwork (or related series) rather than written correspondence or other informal output by the artist.
Utilizing the black market type resource, a group of 14 international artists have been invited to make a text-only poster, to be distributed around Montréal. The resource is also available for gallery visitors to design and print their own posters in the gallery. The project instigates a distribution of the aesthetics of contemporary art into the media stream of lost-dog announcements, rock show flyers, for-sale notices and other street-post ephemera.
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