Exile Poster Project

Sunday, 17 April 2011

Over the last few months I’ve been working on what I hope to be an annual poster exhibition in the city of Portland. The Exile Poster Project aims to confront a specific area of injustice and oppression in the city through visual art. The poster is unique among art forms. It has a long history of taking complex ideas and packing them into a single, potent, and compelling image. Personal and passionate, and therefore viral: posters are designed to incite, to confront, to stimulate response. As such, the poster is potentially a powerful tool by which to create change.

I’ve chosen Exile as the sustaining theme of the show. Exile, grounds each year’s work in broad human experiences like rejection and isolation, brokenness and scarring. Every year a new sub-theme will explore an actual manifestation of Exile in our community. Wherever people are being exiled in our midst – treated as disposable, cheap, or inhuman – the poster show will shine a spotlight, and hopefully broadcast a prophetic call for the community to help the invisible and outcast among us. So while the show’s overt visual statement will change every year, its underlying statement remains the same: no person is a throw-away.

Through a series of conversations with city officials, we heard one issue rise to the top of the list as something that warrants increased awareness and action – the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Though it has been widely recognized that CSEC is rampant in many parts of the world, its existence and pervasiveness in the U.S., and specifically Portland has emerged as a severe problem, and perhaps more importantly, an invisible one.

I’ve invited 20 Portland based designers and artists to create an original poster design. The work will be on display in the Imago Art Space in Portland’s Pearl District (512 NW 9^th Ave), with 2 opening receptions – on April 26^th and May 5^th. In addition, we will be staging “street openings” around the city, allowing for more direct, surprise confrontations with the images. The logo I designed for the project and my poster are below. 

Additional posts showing the 20 posters, info on each artist, pix of the openings, and more information on how to purchase posters will be up in next couple of weeks, so stay tuned. All proceeds will go to the Victims Assistance Fund at the Sexual Assault Resource Center in Portland. A very special thanks to Imago Dei Community for funding and supporting this project.

For more information please contact the studio.