Tina Frank | 35 mm » Design in Miniature
Briefcases, Lightboxes, 35 mm Slides, Handheld Slide Viewers | F.0023.0000
If there can be such a thing as a standard-bearer for the artists represented in '35 mm' it would likely be Tina Frank (though being cast as 'elder statesman' would, doubtless, horrify her). Her work for Mego likely needs no introduction; a house style - in the best sense of the words - it is underpinned by a sense of constant reinvention and change. In short, an unwillingness to sit still or to rest on laurels.
Frank's covers run the gauntlet of styles: from the modem-failure minimalism of Pita's red/blue 'Get Out' to the heightened awareness of the potential of photography-harnessed-to-form evident in Ilpo Vaisanen's recent 'Asuma'. Yet, despite this diversity of approach, each design retains an intangible, yet concrete sense of identity that further enhances Mego's nebulous and fractured aesthetic.
As one third of 'videoband' Skot (with Mathias Gmachl of Farmers Manual and Dr. Voltmer of EPY), Frank creates stripped down "abstract structures… shapes and light, color and pixels". The recent Skot vs. Hecker video/DVD released on Mego is characterised by shredded type and crude pixel magnifications - the look and sound of data gone wrong. Images flutter across the screen, shards of muted greys and blacks, accompanied by an ever-present soundtrack of information surges closely follo w ed by
in form a t
i o n c ol lapse.
What the critics say...
The forced … movement forms a digital maelstrom whose suction pulls the observer deep into it. A system surfacing as though out of a void, steadily plunging through its own dynamic."
Christian Höller, Austrian Abstracts
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