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Pitchfork: Capital Idea Festival

Poster art by Jack Dylan

Nah, nobody spiked your poutine luncheon: that there feller immediately to the left of these here words is none other than Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper hanging-ten in a crowd surf. Nutty revelry of this sort should abound at Ottawa’s Capital Idea! Festival, wrangled together by Canadian music promotion company/blog Mocking Music.

From June 21-30, Some of indie rock’s finest will converge on the city to take in a Lynx game or two, bask in the humid continental climate, or maybe check out a show or two from their fellow festees at Ottawa venues like Barrymore’s Music Hall, Babylon Nightclub, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the Bronson Centre Theatre.

Capital Idea! is only half-formed at this point. Fest organizers promise over thirty acts in total, and the current lineup’s a doozy: the Walkmen, Destroyer, the Wrens, the Fiery Furnaces, Damo Suzuki, Girl Talk, Sunset Rubdown, Xiu Xiu, Frog Eyes, Rock Plaza Central, Crystal Castles, Montag, the Russian Futurists, and Born Ruffians. O, Canada!

LINK >> here.Â

DiSCORDER: “Pop Montreal – Jack Dylan”

“Dude Draws Neat Things”

by Dory Kornfeld, DiSCORDER, UBC news paper, Vancouver BC.

They are all over Montreal, and they are the loveliest of things. Yes yes, of course I mean the Francophone girls with their strange shoes and impeccable haircuts, and the fixed-gear road bikes, and the brick buildings with brightly-coloured front doors, but I also mean the posters of Jack Dylan. Black and white 11×17s are stapled to poles year round, but during Pop Montreal this October, the city was vibrant with full-coloured specimens; so many, in fact, that it seemed as though there was but one poster artist in town. “These are so lovely,” we said to each other, “so lovely indeed.”

Employing a comic-y style, Dylan’s posters promote the local indie rock in that humorous-yet-sentimental way that we have grown accustomed to falling for again and again. Girls in scarves and boots march through the winter while the snow spells out who’s playing; kids at a show smoke cigarettes and complain that they want to go home; the most iconic feature band members wrestling with superheroes. Is there anything that would make you want to go see Islands more than the possibility that Nicholas Thorburn might take on the Green Lantern mid-show? Maybe. But is there anything more exciting about Pop Montreal than the opportunity to purchase, straight from the source, an 11×17 of your very own, pristine, without the corners being wrecked by staples and tape? Certainly not.

Though I only managed to stutter and stammer when chatting with Mr Dylan at his table at the Puces Pop poster show, the man was kind enough to answer my questions post-facto.

Discorder: Did you start off desiring to do posters, or are they just a convenient way to make lots of art?

Jack Dylan: I started off with a serious case of poster envy. I loved posters and novel covers, and found the format to be an open window for a lot of the ideas I had. So my first body of work was 20 large paintings that looked like posters, but all had titles that I had dreamed up for them like, The “Naked and the Dead” or “Eat The Roach.” Essentially, I’ve always been and have wanted to be an illustrator.

How do you feel about being The Poster Guy?

You know, in this town, “Poster Guy” is not such a bad shtick. There are so many musicians, that suddenly this guy who can’t play a note and draws purple cats is actually kind of interesting, kind of a rebel. (Well maybe not that far.) I don’t envy the so-called fine artists who slave for a year on a show of paintings only to have their work seen by a few hundred people in one tiny gallery. Compared to that, doing posters is like playing stadiums. But I don’t want to do this forever. I did a show of paintings this year, and even though it was seen by far less people, I found it very rewarding, and I think that there’s a lot more room to develop in the traditional arts than with illustrations and posters. They can get to be a bit…two dimensional.

Some of your stuff is really self-mocking…I’m thinking of the one with the girls in coats and one is saying something like, “I’m sick of that guy’s illustrations.” Is this something that you’ve actually overheard, or are you just guessing about what they’re saying when your back is turned?

No, I actually did overhear that at a show. One girl said, “I like that guy’s illustrations, but I’m kind of maxed out on them.” Then she turned the corner and said “woopsy” when she saw me. I was elated, and I knew right away that I was going to use it for a poster. Just prior to that I had actually become very paranoid that people we’re going to suddenly turn on me. I had gotten my first taste of success, and it seemed natural that the tide would shift. But when I heard that remark, I felt all better, redeemed by the fact that I had been right, that people really did hate me. I’ve always been a big advocate of self-mocking humour as a form of therapy. And if you really look at the posters, it’s not hard to tell that that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got a poster where I’ve announced that my girlfriend has left me and that I’m suicidal. Posters about how uncomfortable I am at shows, and posters blatantly adorned with my childish fantasies. It’s like by putting your worst fears out there for all to see, you’ve somehow vaccinated yourself against the problem.

How long have you been doing this? Did you go to art school?

I’ve been making show posters for almost 2 years, and I’ve made over 90 of them. I did go to an art school called Beal Art in London, Ontario for two years. It was not a fine arts education though; the school was hands-on technical training, and I earned high school credits. But from what I’ve seen of most university programs in fine arts, I was far better off at Beal. We learned how to do it our self, save money on materials and throw our own shows. They taught us to go out and be working artists. And it was free, a hugely important advantage.

What other artists are you into right now?

I look at a lot of comic book artists, Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine, Chester Brown. And I’ve always got my eye on local poster artists SeriPop. They’re like Picasso to my humble Norman Rockwell. I look a lot at design, billboards, magazines and film, television and books. They’re often the source for the inspiration behind my work. And I people-watch, and I listen. That’s probably the most important thing I take in.

Do you make money from your work?

I haven’t had any other job in three years. When I got out of art school I habitually went to get my old job as a waiter back, but as it turned out I was fired. So I put on my own art shows instead, and I’ve been working ever since.

Are you from Montreal? Would you consider going anywhere else?

I’m from Stratford, Ontario, and I moved to Montreal almost three years ago. I could easily imagine setting up camp here-I’d like to buy a building one day, and set up studios and venue space. I already have that but I rent and the heating is inadequate. But I’ve got to leave here someday. New York would be tempting, Vancouver too. But if I go it would have to be somewhere pretty darn good.

Do you love local indie rock? Do you go to the shows you make posters for?

Yeah, a lot of times I do. I didn’t start off loving music or going to shows. That was something I learned over my time in Montreal. My last girlfriend was a full-time musician and the lead singer in a band, and my best friend has been making music for as long as I’ve been making art. And my home and studio space also houses 8 different bands that jam there.

Which are your favourite posters that you’ve done?

I really like the Joanna Newsom one I just finished. She’s pretty. I think the Art Nouveau Poster for my own exhibition “Jack Dylan is Alive and Well and Living in Montr’eal” sums me up the best though.

What’s the meanest thing anyone has ever said to you?

That’s tough, because in time I’ve come to love all of the mean things people have said to me. I am very sensitive about my terrible spelling though. It’s a very heavy cross for a poster artist to bear.

What kind of shoes do you wear in the winter?

Doc Martens I think. Someone told me that they weren’t cool anymore. Perhaps that’s the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me.

Jack Dylan isn’t just about rock-show posters, he also does paintings and holds exhibitions. You can check out the body of his work at the predictable jackdylan.ca.

Concordia’s The Link: The Jack Dylan Antidote

The Jack Dylan Antidote

Giant evil breasts, Mel Gibson and Strawberry Shortcake–together at last

By Lina Harper

I’m not on antidepressants,” Jack Dylan steadfastly asserts.

But Jack Dylan’s painting might be.

Though Jack Dylan attempted to sabotage the interview and assert his propaganda on peppercorn and peppers’ incestuous relationship, a sunny Saturday afternoon at the Friendship Cove was ripe for a chat about his new solo show, “Antidepressants for the Coming Apocalypse.”

“Conceptually, the ‘Coming Apocalypse’ will put forth political ideas, in easy-to-swallow, candy-coated doses. People don’t want to hear about dark things.”

Indeed they don’t. Insulated bubbles and denial are comfortable places to be. Jack Dylan knows this–and he spoofed classical art, in order to make these scary times less, um… scary.

Using “big, wild colourful visuals,” the pieces in the exhibition are “like looking at the apocalypse with rose-coloured glasses,” he says. He even rummaged through the trash and thrift shops for interesting bed sheets which he used as a base for some of his paintings. Spoofing the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelations, Mel Gibson and a giant pair of “evil tits” somehow made it into the show.

Jack Dylan has been an illustrator for the past year, doing posters for shows and neglecting his painting until now. The cost was a factor, as was time and inspiration. But, thank Jesus, he somehow found it.

“We’ve been [trying] to wipe ourselves out since the ‘50s, … We as a society are on the endangered list,” Jack Dylan says with a deadpan expression.

As part of the Art POP context–a new additon to POP Montreal roster of indie related events–Jack Dylan’s show may astound, seduce, shock, or amuse its audience. Best is to pop a Xanax before you head out.

Antidepressants for the Coming Apocalypse is slated to hit the earth in a feisty ball of fire on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 6 p.m. at L’autre galerie, (4 St-Paul E., corner of St-Laurent). Dishwasher and Miracle Fortress will play some music to ward off the paranoia. www.popmontreal.com/artpop.

Montreal Mirror: “Ordinary Heroes”

Ordinary heroes

Montreal poster artist Jack Dylan rocks
a fine line

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“It’s weird. I was a poster artist but didn’t know it,” says Jack Dylan, a painter and illustrator many Montrealers know as a poster designer first and foremost. Since he moved here in late 2003 at the indirect encouragement of Seripop, Dylan’s designs have become inseparably identified with events at the now-defunct Electric Tractor space and its direct descendent, Friendship Cove, both of which have provided him not only with a home but with a surrogate family of young artists. Moreover, they’ve become immediately identifiable as distinctly his own.

Looking back on his art-school days, Dylan sees the seeds of his poster-art career in the oversize mock posters and book jackets, for Shakespeare plays and his own imaginary crime novels, he was painting at the time. Even his approach to colour, laid down in solid blocks, augured the silkscreened works he would come to have in his portfolio, one less and less related to the hermetic fine-arts world.

“I love the music scene for its energy. Coming from a fine-arts background, I realized that the audiences weren’t in the galleries. They were at the shows. You can get any kind of audience to go see bands in Montreal, all the time. I loved that energy. I wanted to do art shows that were a big event. At my first one-man show, we had can-can and burlesque dancers, absinthe being served, people showing up in costumes.

“In Montreal, just doing fine-arts shows, I wasn’t getting enough of the energy that I wanted. I guess I was greedy, I wanted attention. I noticed that the musicians get quite a bit of attention, and if you want a piece of that, the thing to do is get involved. As someone who can only play the kazoo, I had to find my way.”

Dynamic doodles

In recent months, Dylan has embarked on efforts in the realm of comics, which in turn has blatant precedents in his poster work. His designs, usually photocopied, are characterized by clean, bold linework, deadpan wit and not-infrequent word balloons. They also, as often as not, function within a series of related designs which construct, if not a functional narrative, at least a larger arc imbuing each design with extra impact.

Dylan cites Adrian Tomine and Jaime Hernandez, the comic field’s high-profile observers of quotidian detail, as strong inspirations, but his personal favourite of his own poster series, the “hipsters versus supers” as he calls them, indicate that it goes back way further than that. They show recognizable figures from the local indie scene (including his now-girlfriend, Giselle Webber of the Hot Springs) locked in battle with superheroes from the Marvel pantheon.

“The reason I can draw is because I was drawing comic-book characters for a long time—the Marvel characters in particular. Those battles have been happening in my head for a long time. I was addicted to television as a kid, so these people, Captain Kirk and Spider-Man, are really real to me. They’re ideas that I know very well. I want to be Spider-Man! Making the artwork is the closest I can come to bringing the fantasy to life.

“Also, I’ve always seen a parallel between artists and superheroes, especially a team of artists. I like the idea that one person’s a silkscreener, one’s a sculptor and one’s a singer—and together, they’re a team, a force. Everyone has a different power. At the Electric Tractor and here at Friendship Cove, that’s the idea.”

Really unreal

The hipsters-versus-supers series and other fantastic bursts of pop-culture cool may be cute, and other series offering portraits of political figures and celebrities have their punch as well. But it will be argued that Dylan’s most effective works are those that seem like random panels from a comic book about ordinary scenester life in the 514. Familiar faces and landmarks fuse with captured remarks to blur the line—almost erase it, in fact—between real life and the artist’s simulacrum.

“Anyone who knows me knows that I do impressions of everyone I know. I’m a mimic. Any friend I have, I can do an impression of. I’ve always had a weird way of relating to the world, more as an imitator than as an actual normal person.

“It’s all about observation, really, and seeing life as a story. I think it has to do with the conditioning of watching the world through television in the first place, having that distorted perspective ingrained in me. Not really making the separation between cartoon and reality, seeing people as characters instead of real people. That’s been a problem of mine—girlfriends have gotten mad at me, friends have said, ‘Everyone’s a character in your world, Jack, and it’s not always nice.’”

LINK >>> here.

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.

McGill Daily: “Novel Spaces: Embrace the Lameness”

McGill Daily, March 27th 2006

Reading Montreal: Poaster Art in the Streets

Poster Art in the Streets: An Interview With Jack Dylan
Interview by T. Jeffrey Malecki

Telephone poles are staple objects of the modern cityscape: practically innumerable, often sculptures in themselves, holding up modernity’s favourite means of communication. Jack Dylan’s posters communicate in a different way, and can seen be on poles throughout the city announcing the shows of (and often representing) Montreal’s hipsterati. Characterized by simple and haphazard line-drawings, either absent or baroque backgrounds, child TV stars, his friends, quirk and irony, these posters can by turns be arresting and inane, funny and incomprehensible. We had a brief email correspondence about art, Saddam Hussein and his mother.

Jeffrey Malecki: Do you believe in art?
Jack Dylan: Yeah, sure. Wait. I mean no.

JM: In what way do you see your posters as contributing to the aesthetics of the city? Does their function (as ads) conflict with their aesthetic potential?
JD: No not at all I think. In fact, without the functionality, there is no aesthetic potential, the images wouldn’t exist and the pole would be bare. Who’s going to go around slapping up pictures on telephone polls just for the hell of it? And pictures of the Olsen twins no less! Posters are a very special medium because that [sic] makes room for artwork where art work would otherwise not be [sic].

JM: What is your creative/production processes?

JD: Whatever image I decide on, there always has to be a concept to it, at least one that I can understand. I really don’t like operating without some kind of idea or gimmick behind what I’m doing, and sometimes the brainstorming process can take a long time. The foundation is always more conceptually based than visual, which is to say that I think, not doodle. The criteria for a successful idea are usually based on one question: Is it funny?

JM: One of the more interesting features of your recent work is your incorporation of text. In one respect, the text is a crucial means of conveying important and specific information, but the overall design arguably has more importance. In the street-fight of text vs. image, who wins?

JD: When text is done really well, it becomes an image. There are some poster artists who are excellent at making that transformation, but I’ve never really been one of them. That’s when I slap on a picture of my naked roommate or the Olsen twins, and call it a day.

JM: Do you think there is a problem between your incommensurability between content and form? I mean, many of your images are interchangeable, and could contain the details for any show. Is there a problem with this?

JD: Actually, there is usually a link between the event and the image, but the explanation is often only understood by an elite few. And that’s not done to be elitist, it’s just that I can’t help myself from using/abusing inside jokes in my work. Many of my posters are filled with images of my own friends, and I think I’ve even begun to succeed in making small-time celebrities out of some of these people. It’s all really self-centered I suppose, but those who are involved love it, and it is of course a cheap thrill to watch others stare at a poster on the street and ask themselves “Who the hell is that guy? Am I supposed to know him?”

JM: You have a couple of recent posters of women with exaggerated figures. Tell me about your mother.

JD: She’s a psychotherapist actually, and she’s diagnosed me as a pervert.

JM: Saddam’s disheveled mug is perhaps one of the most striking images of the past year. Do you think you are just adding to the trend that faces are becoming brands and logos? Do we really need to see this face on a poster for an ‘indie-rock’ show?

JD: I guess I believe that I’m commenting on that trend more so than contributing to it. Although I’ll admit that I’m not entirely sure what that comment is supposed to be: “No nukes” perhaps? I think the real point of all that was to take these icons, and to ridicule them simply through a means of exploitation [sic]. I didn’t exaggerate their features and try to mock them the way most political cartoonists do. Instead, I trivialize them by subjecting them to advertise [sic] for my own crappy rock show. It was gratifying, really. I’m not sure if the public got that same satisfaction from it, but I would hope that they did.

The Link: “New Loft Venue Opens”

The Link, October 25th, 2005

The Beacon Harald: “Stratford Artist Hungry for Montreal”

The Stratford Beacon Herald: Thursday October 14, 2004.

London Free Press “Beal Grads Show Their Stuff”

The London Free Press, April 27th 2003