Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio
Fraser Muggeridge Studio
31 March - 25 April 2010
Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio, an exhibition of 48 new books, co-produced by Samantha Y. Huang.
Fraser Muggeridge studio is responsible for an expansive range of artists’ books, monographs, exhibition catalogues, posters, maps and invites. The studio prioritises artists’ content to avoid a studio signature style. Images and texts sustain their own intent and each project is approached with an elegantly pared-down aesthetic.
Through Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio the ‘new’ books fashion a peculiar retrospective. Each book is, in fact, an amalgam of 48 selected publications dating from 2001 to present, designed for clients including Bookworks, Lund Humphries and Tate Publishing forming a unique volume of a larger series.
Each book becomes a singular visual palimpsest as text and graphic contrast and contradict while books within books challenge each other for meaning. Sequential coherence is transformed into a play between word and colour as pages of different sizes do battle for dominance against disorder.
Eric Kindel provides a contemplative introduction to the concept: ‘... strange combinations, contradictions, arrangements nearly bad; not pastiche, but sort of, not homage, but sort of; history, but now.’
All forty-eight books will be installed at KALEID from 31 March until 25 April 2010, and will be available for purchase alongside an exhibition of the original publications.
For more information please contact samantha(at)kaleideditions.com
FLASH Review Redchurch Idler
The product of secret disbinding by an assistant equipped with hot iron and paring knife, Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio is not just a crafty way to showcase a back catalogue, but hints at a darker agenda: of interbreeding, and recombinance, explicit messing with bibliographic protocols. Designed in 12 sections, the reading experience it serves up is disjunctive and maddeningly modern: pages of shorn text become cliff-hangers, divorced visual images pressed flowers, footnotes stranded data, as incompletion becomes the norm, its jumbled pages research nodes to be explored later; a classic case of what Charles Jencks has called ‘jumping architecture’.
