SPARK Festival / RAMP Gallery present Design&Designers

RAMP Gallery is currently having a facelift and will be moving to their temporary location ~ 124 Alexandra Street ~ during Spark Festival.

RAMP Gallery, in conjunction with Spark Festival, present Design and Designers at their temporary gallery space, 124 Alexandra Street.

Since 2006 Luke Wood and Jonty Valentine have been working together to produce The National Grid, an independent graphic design periodical published in New Zealand and distributed internationally. The National Grid has been reviewed by Rick Poynor and teal Triggs, and has been included in exhibitions of independent publishing in New York, London, Amsterdam, and Madrid.

Now, six years and seven issues later, this Ramp Gallery exhibition will survey artefacts and writing that have been presented in, and/or generated from the pages of The National Grid. Putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak, its editors will present key examples from the publication and peripheral events that together document their particular take on New Zealand graphic design. While the exhibition is on, Wood and Valentine will work to produce issue #8 of The National Grid as a catalogue for the show. This will be released at a closing party at the gallery, and will provide a chance to rewrite and re-consider these objects and artefacts as an index to an extended dialogue with which this project has attempted to engage.

The title of the exhibition: Design and Designers is taken from a publication authored and designed by Max Hailstone in 1985, a chapter of which was reproduced in The National Grid #1. At the outset Wood and Valentine were interested in documenting and critiquing (the lack of) local, critical writing about graphic design.

Closing party / Publication launch - Friday 14th September - 5:00pm