Adventice is the French term for weed and carries a sense of dispersal, adaptability but also of undesirability. Broadly describing plants outside the usual species categories, they’re undesirable in specific contexts. A paradigm classifying them as the loose canons of the plant kingdom (think Alice in Wonderland and the garden of live flowers).
In this sense, adventices are the unexpected in the calibrated gardens, the grain of sand that question a mechanics’ regularity. The term also applies to a written text and defines an incident in the rhythm, extra words disrupting the expected flow of the story told.
This is certainly what Adventice is all about. Disruption and out of the blue visual moments scattered in a superbly arranged layout. The second issue of the magazine, recently presented at the New York Art Book Fair and Offprint Paris focuses on the themes of Industry and Reverie. There is an evident contrast between the two terms but it should be noted that Reverie can also turn into an industry of beautiful imagery only Hollywood or Disney could dream of.
Adventice 02 focuses on the themes of Reverie and Industry, proposing different research with an emphasis on materiality and utopia.
The various contributors have worked on bringing to the foreground mundane and commonplace subjects, giving a singular look into the industrial evolution through the altering prism of imagination, from the modernization of printing techniques to the darkness of Robert Longo’s iconic work.
The visuals are rooted not only in the collective surrealist imagery and influenced by modernist architecture, but draw also from a formal research and experimentation with perception, with the phenomenon of optical illusion – playing with shapes and scales.The radical choice of an issue mainly in black and white with few but strong color interventions, was intended to accentuate this contrast between the dreamy qualities of Reverie and the rough aspects of Industry. It was also a means for us to try out new printing techniques, which would replicate the depth of a charcoal drawing.
Holding Adventice 2 feels like quietly rummaging a room of marvels. The structure of the staple bound magazine advocates for a kind of dreamed industry organizing elements in a long sequence disrupted by full bleed photographs, architectural collages and romantic drawings.
euro 15.00
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