The Woodbury Art Museum is currently holding an exhibit called “What Type?”, curated by UVU professors Jim Godfrey and Brandon Truscott, which explores different ways typography can be used.
“Type is sometimes invisible if you are not a graphic designer,” Godfrey said. “You see it all the time and you don’t really think about it. What we wanted to do was to try and create an exhibit that gets people to notice type.”
The show presents this message through a diverse grouping of mediums, including video, sculpture, graffiti and prints.
The artists who have work in the exhibition consist of four UVU faculty members, a number of UVU alumni, and several other artists.
Gareth Fry, one of the UVU faculty members, created inkjet prints that explore some “unusual facts” about his family history. These posters depict three infamous people in colorful designs that all said: “not without you.”
“Had it not been for a terrorist, a revolutionary, and a dictator, [my father] and my mother would never have met and I, in turn, would never have been born,” Fry writes in his artist statement. “The people… were no less than Gavrilo Princip, Vladimir Lenin, and Adolf Hitler… These posters, then, assert the absurd truth that I have three of the most notorious wrongdoers of the 20th century to thank for my very existence.”
Brandon Truscott, co-curator, said this exhibit is meant to delve into the resurgences of type as a point of interest. He went on to explain that some of the works are conceptual in nature while others are decorative and beautiful.
The exhibit statement reads, “Type presents a way of knowing and seeing — we understand our world through its use and design. Type creates and evokes meaning that facilitates visual communication and bridges intellectual and aesthetic understanding.”
This understanding is exemplified by the artworks throughout the show. They use type in various ways to play off of this theme. Some use type to express very specific messages, like Fry’s did with its inkjet prints. Others presented type’s functionality, such as graphic design for liquor bottles. Some played with the notion of type itself, like sculptures using typographic tools.
This exhibit, which is free to the public, will be up until Dec. 23.
