Blaine Western & Michael Parr: company.
company
Blaine Western & Michael Parr
The Physics Room, Christchurch
December 2012
Text by Henry Babbage
company began when the artists Blaine Western and Michael Parr approached me in late 2012 to produce a set of supplementary posters and other collateral to sit alongside their project at The Physics Room. Their premise was simple: over eight days they would reimagine the gallery by reconfiguring its walls—a response to the unfinished state of the space, which was then moving into new premises—and each night, once they had finished, they would send me a title and a short text about the new configuration, from which I would design a poster to appear on the street outside the gallery the following morning.
Those posters, together with images of each configuration and a text by Henry Babbage, form the content of the publication released at the close of the show.
The posters used a typeface I had designed for The Physics Room to use while it was offsite at Sandyford Street—an awkward, curveless face that I never developed into a working font, its letterforms existing only as vectored shapes.
Since the project marked the end of that typeface’s use, I felt free to distort and alter it, and most of the posters show evidence of that.
The project ended with the gallery in its final configuration and the remaining materials stacked on the floor of the space; with the artists, I designed a simple display system using plan prints and the existing wall structures.
