Design

Dwadle & Gape, Yale’s 2008 Graphic Design MFA thesis book show opens at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing on October 24th. Future dates, both in Europe and the US, are scheduled to be announced later this year.

Taken from the exhibition’s gallery guide (pictured above):

“Books are important for many reasons. In a time of instant communication and instant gratification, books exhort us to slow down and consider things more carefully. Where everything that can be digitized will be digitized, books remind us of our physical, tactile relationship to the world. This is not to denounce the march of progress but rather, to realize that, as the book designer Irma Boom said, “books became much more interesting because of the internet.” New technologies do not replace old ones, they simply co-exist and refocus them.

This exhibition was collectively conceived by the Yale graduate graphic design class of 2008. At the end of our studies each of us produced a thesis book (a catalogue raisonné) which documents a cohesive body of work made over the course of two years, including a designer’s statement. These thesis books represent the cumulative sum of a methodology unique to the MFA graphic design program at Yale.

Josef Albers  established the graphic design department at Yale in 1950, the first degree program of its kind in the United States, and thesis books have been made and archived in the Sterling Memorial Library since 1967. The graphic design thesis at Yale is unique in that, where most programs focus on the elaboration of a single thesis project, at Yale the thesis is conceived of as a loose framework within which an individual develops a unique ‘visual method’, deployed across a large number of diverse projects over two years.

Thesis books are produced in small editions and vary greatly in their form, content, structure, size, and means of production, each calibrated to reflect its particular themes. While some explicate the work comprehensively, others use the work as source material to generate something entirely new. Some books emphasize craft and employ elaborate bookbinding techniques while others emphasize economy and standardization. The end result is a series of unique publications that sit somewhere between an artist’s book and a designer’s monograph.

The seemingly irreverent exhibition title Dawdle & Gape takes its inspiration from advice Sheila de Bretteville gave to our class –- in turn quoting Henry James –- when we began our MFA degrees in 2006. We were encouraged not only to work hard and harness our creative energies, but also to allow time to ‘dawdle and gape’ at anything and everything that sparked our interest in our newfound and incredibly rich surroundings. With this exhibition we hope to share some of the results of those efforts.”

Installation views of Dawdle & Gape at Zero-one Design Center, Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea.