Show & Tell Saturdays at studio, are back. While it always serves to open up new work & people across the group, it is the intersecting themes / reflections / questions that stay long after the cups of chai. Here’s a quick round-up from some of the things that remained with me.

Vidhushri shared 2 wordless books by Flemish painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel—Passionate Journey and The City, with 2 distinct ways of negotiating time and space in a visual narrative. Absolutely spell binding in their pacing, what really got me was this note from an exhibition on his work by Austrian writer Stefen Zweig.

If everything were to perish, all the books, monuments, photographs and memoirs, and only the woodcuts that [Masereel] has executed in ten years were spared, our whole present-day world could be reconstructed from them —Stefen Zweig

Khyati shared the lyrical drawings of Moonassi (Daehyun Kim) from Seoul, South Korea. It’s a pity I think, that there’s a decline in drawing in graphic design curriculum in India at the moment. It is not so much about illustration or image-making as an output, but more so to understand and make sense. Almost ‘meditative’ as Moonassi puts it.

Drawings by Moonassi.www.moonassi.com

Pragun showed Things Organized Neatly, an art project curated by Cincinnati-based designer Austin Radcliffe. The project started in 2010 inspired by the gridded layouts designers used to organize their work and Knolling (the process of arranging related objects in parallel or 90 degree angles as a method of organization). With more than 350,000 blog followers at last count, the project has now become an image appreciation platform, with contributors creating meaning and narratives through their photographic compositions. This for me is one of the best kinds of community art projects, where people participate and elevate the content, by adding meaning and their own narratives.

Siddharth’s piece was called, Futurism or: How we learned to stop worrying and leave the grid. A significant proportion of his talk was about how Futurism was born out of reaction—a reaction and a coping mechanism for artists of all kinds to find a new voice in a time when technology had captured the public imagination. What then, I wonder, will come out a sensory, media overload (to which I contribute in enthusiastic measure, this post included).

Filippo Tomaso Marinetti’s “The Futurist Manifesto” was quoted in good measure, but he had me at “Let us leave good sense behind”.

And lastly, The Fifth Element is one of my all-time favourite films. Ever. So it was a bit of a treat when Shreeya showed the concept art of French artist Moebius a.k.a Jean Giraud for sci-fi and fantasy films.

Until next time!