This was last project of the year where I had to a name randomly, research that person and then do work piece that relates to that person.
Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971)
McFetridge is a artist based in Los Angeles California. Born in Canada, he was schooled at the Alberta College of Art and the California Institute of the Arts. He is part of the Beautiful Losers Exhibition, and makes solo exhibitions from Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, London, the Netherlands and Japan. Instinctively ignoring creative boundaries McFetridge is a truly multidisciplinary artist, ‘an all round visual auteur’. From poetry to animation, from graphics to 3D work, from textile and wallpaper to paintings, McFetridge has complete control over these widely divergent disciplines.
Understatement is central to the impact of his work, inviting participation. It gets through the filters by offering the viewer an opportunity to play with a puzzle for a moment, a puzzle that doesn’t have one simple answer. Often imitated, but never equaled, In the past ten years, Los Angeles-based McFetridge has created in his work and in his commissions a unique imagery, which is detailed and abstract at the same time. Full of hands and teeth, objects and animals, hands and heads.
McFetridge won public acclaim when he was still a student winning awards from the Art Directors Club and ID magazine for his thesis project “Chinatown”. For two years, he was art director of the famous underground Beastie Boys magazine Grand Royal. Since then he has started the design studio Champion Graphics which has done pojects for numerous clients ranging from Nike, Pepsi, Stüssy, Burton Snowboards, Girl Skateboards and Patagonia. He made clips for Plaid, Simian, and recently also for The Whitest Boy Alive, and he created film title sequences for The Virgin Suicides and Adaptation
McFetridge has created a double helix of personal and commercial art projects, blending disciplines and purpose in almost every project he does.
“McFetridge is well-known within the graphic design community for imagery that is economical and spare, yet powerfully communicative. Geoff developed motifs echo themes found in sculpture, such as the relationship between man-made and natural forms, the interplay between two and three dimensional space and visual conundrums” said Michael Darling, Seattle Art Museum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
“He is part of a new generation of designers who are eager to leap the old divides between image and product, design and art, the flat page and the moving image.” Paul Warwick Thompson, Director, Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
Geoff’s work is infused with irony, humor, sadness and imagination that challenges an audience at the most visceral and emotional level. It attempts to manipulate the way people look at and understand the objects that surround them. For example, he displays posters in a gallery as a work of art and then de-empahsizes their value as artworks by hanging several in a row using binder clips.
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Most of his projects begin with writing or sketching, which he then tries to simply down to one statement, written or visual.In his own words, Geoff “uses design to logify ideas.Yet through this reductive process, none of the narratives are lost.His narratives offer us a space to get lost in and engage our own imagination the way we used to when we were children.
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