Exhibition Announcement – Catastrophe

 

Over sixty years after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan, and after the efforts of an entire generation of peace activists, the potential of nuclear war remains a most grave threat to the people of the world. In 2001, Jason Knapp made his first pilgrimage to Japan and began to mourn the bombings.

The perfected Swiss typeface is ubruptly curtailed in an unpleasing manner. This topic is at once academically objective and all too humanly subjective. The choice of face speaks to the acadmic pursuit, and the violence done to it hints at that which still needs grieving.

All-caps lettering is both a formal and conceptual choice. Formal in that the shapes of the letters, while holding as words, also fight to become abstract shapes. The negative spaces between lines of text (being the same as the typeface's stroke weight) also work to both hold the piece together, yet aid in pulling it apart—and there is the root of the conceptual choice—the push and pull of destruction and healing captured typographically.