“Send Me Your Pigeons” | Art review

Landland, Untitled (Souvenir), 2012

Courtesy of Landland

This inaugural exhibition of 32 works is a promising first effort from the new kid in Logan Square, Galerie F, a forum for street art and printmaking. Curator Zissou Tasseff-Elenkoff brings together three artists who made their names as designers of concert posters. Together, they demonstrate the strength of this analog medium.

A great gig poster successfully translates sound into image and typography. Landland, the Minneapolis duo of Dan Black and Jessica Seamans, accomplishes this. Black’s work is what would happen if David Macaulay—book illustrator of Cathedral and Pyramid fame—drew the decay instead of the glory of Western civilization, while Seamans’s muted, haunted colors call to mind Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele stuck in Fargo. Their Eric Church poster featuring a decrepit billboard, seen from behind against a forlorn sky, suggests corporate failure, existential isolation and eerie beauty.

Though they share Landland’s chromatic restraint, the show’s two other artists, John Vogl of Denver and Casey Burns of Oregon, differ in their heavy use of the black line. Burns’s noir narratives are like gripping film stills; for a Spoon concert poster, Burns creates a blue-collar rock sensibility by depicting a man working on a car engine. He paws for a gun as a femme fatale approaches with a baseball bat. The font’s and the scene’s angles are sharp and unsettling, and the shadows long. Vogl treads in gritty, woodcut styles for another Eric Church poster in which bucks lock horns by night. Yet his work has an alter ego: With incredible precision, a Lotus poster portrays filigreed, kaleidoscopic flowers referencing the band’s namesake and psychedelic jam-rock.