The McGill Daily: “The rise of the poster child”

The Rise of the poster child

Montreal’s newest form of creativity is also its most accessible. Posters are the medium, streetcorners are the gallery space

By Brooke Rothman

A museum of Jack Dylan’s posters take up a wall of his apartment.
Photo Charles Mostoller / The McGill Daily

Thanks to hard-working independent promoters like Blue Skies Turn Black, Mandatory Moustache, Bonsound, and open-minded venues like Casa del Popolo, Sala Rossa, and Divan Orange, more and more independent and forward-thinking bands are being heard and exhibited…on Montreal’s telephone poles.

With strong ties to the local art scene, a progressive group of musicians is re-merging art and music, long after the psychedelic Fillmore posters of the sixties and raw aesthetics of punk publicity have faded. Today, an array of talented young designers are mass-producing a new wave of brilliantly detailed posters, used not only to advertise, but also to illustrate the mindset and style of upcoming musical performances. According to poster artist Jack Dylan, “There will always be a willing audience, but the only way to get them excited about visual art is to merge art with music.”

A small history lesson: Before the recent hype around Montreal’s growing indie scene, artists like Billy Mavreas and Rick Trembles set many precedents for Montreal’s unique collection of music poster designers. Mavreas is known as the city’s premier poster artist, thanks to his prolific work in the late eighties and nineties for musicians like Rufus Wainwright and Kinnie Starr, and a book of his works called Mutations. Trembles, a cartoonist and current band member of The American Devices, launched his fruitful career, like subsequent artists, as a dude who was just making amateur posters for his own band.

Likewise, for the two featured interviewees, Chloe of Seripop and Jack Dylan, designing posters full-time emanated from a casual hobby. It seems that Jack and Chloe are just naturally cool people. While the friendly and talented Dylan claims, “I’m not cool, like Seripop. I just love doing posters,” he is no doubt one of many hip young artists swarming Montreal in exclusive hidden lofts and refurbished warehouses.

Seripop, the artistic duo of Chloe and Yannick, currently have a monopoly on coolness. Not only are they creating innovative silkscreen posters, album covers, and magazine illustrations for artists in Canada, the United States, Europe, and even an experimental music festival in Hong Kong, but they also play in the band AIDS Wolf. While they are now at the centre of Montreal’s artists’ circle, they entered it accidentally. Before uniting in 2000, Yannick and Chloe were making silk-screened posters and T-shirts to promote shows they organized for their noise-rock band.

Interestingly, Seripop never took a design class; they “thought the design-art students were lame sell-outs,” but “as musicians and artists, doing posters ties it all together.” Now, you can recognize Seripop’s work by the intricate and often incomprehensible overlaps of abstract comic-influenced design and colour, achieved through layers of screenprint.

Unlike mass-produced, Xeroxed, black-and-white flyers, silk screening is suitable for large posters and sheets that would be impractical to run on a traditional press. According to Shawn Petsche, Concordia Art History graduate student and marketing coordinator for Pop Montreal 2006, “More than anything, screen-printing causes a shift in the way a designer thinks about creating a work. It’s not necessarily ‘better,’ but different and interesting.”

This multiple-step process begins by scanning and then assembling drawings or images onto a Photoshop-like program, in order to make the film positive. The positive is then converted into a woven fabric (silk) photoscreen, which is mounted on a large frame. The frame is lowered into silkscreen paint or ink, which seeps into the open image areas of the photoscreen. Then, the print is exposed in a darkroom and placed on special racks to dry. Repeating these steps allows the poster to have colourful layers of images.

Petsche thinks that “there are advantages to each method of poster-making, and each carries with it specific messages – a sort of punk black-and-white, cut-and-paste Xeroxed flyer says something very different than a three-colour screenprint.” Jack Dylan, however, does the Xeroxing thing quite successfully and lives with three other artists in Friendship Cove, formally a dairy factory, now a combined living abode/concert venue.

Beginning by drawing hot girls in grade seven, followed by spoofs of his friends in fake movie or music posters as a hobby, Dylan now gets paid $3 an hour to convert his unique style into promotional art and to live in a house “surrounded by creativity.” Despite being slightly bitter about the elitist attitudes surrounding the small circle of music artists, Dylan loves doing posters so much that he can’t bear to discriminate according to his musical preferences.

Montreal poster art is special because, as Petsche says, “It rests primarily on the shoulders of the artists working here – it’s interesting because they’re interesting. Seripop, bree.ree, Jack Dylan, Johnny Crap, Matt Moroz, Serigraphie 514, etc. I suppose that as well, they’re being given the opportunity (or making their own opportunities) to make interesting work, and not being told how to make posters.”

In fact, Petsche finds the visual messages of Montreal’s poster art so mind-blowing that the poster art of Seripop, and more broadly, Montreal, is actually the subject of his Master’s thesis. For some added mind stimulation, next time you see Seripop’s silkscreened masterpieces on that drunken walk back from the Green Room, try to think of “the visual language employed by [Montreal poster artists] – allowing them to be readable to a very specific audience, while being viewable to all sorts, and acting as both descriptive and prescriptive artistic gestures for the Montreal independent music scene.”

As you can see (or not see), the information provided on Montreal’s poster art goes way beyond the date, time, and location of the noise show you keep meaning to check out.

Check out more designers at www.montrealshows.com or www.gigposters.com for a database of poster artists from Montreal and around the world.