Interview

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Earlier this month, the walls of a back room at Foxy Production gallery in Chelsea were transformed by a dozen neon-saturated, pseudo-psychedelic works of abstraction, labeled posters. These prints, part of the "Abstract Abstract" group show, were created by Max Pitegoff and Travess Smalley, collaborating together under the name Poster Company. Since late summer, they've been uploading the Photoshop-made images to their Flickr account, gaining attention both on and offline.

Creating on each poster separately and posting them without names attached, Pitegoff and Smalley address the project of abstract painting by utilizing that central tool of graphic designers–Photoshop–while re-examining the role of graphic design in art-making. "We make images that express elements of design, but don't give any information or subject," says Smalley. The resulting abstractions occupy in an indefinable place somewhere between painting and design.

Though Poster Company's printed work was on view at the Foxy Production show this fall and will also be seen in December in the "Objects, Furniture, and Patterns" show at Art Since the Summer of '69 gallery in New York , the duo's flavor remains decidedly web-based in spirit. A response to the nebulous world of Tumblr, Flickr, and image blogs, the posters are created with an awareness of the mutable ways images are reproduced, disseminated, and organized on the internet, especially in the context of Flickr. If a website is less static than a real-life gallery, a Flickr account is more mutable still, with the Poster Company images often re-posted elsewhere on the internet almost instantly after their initial upload. "The images often mimic the designs and drawings of artists from the 60s through the 80s, and they might be reblogged right between a John Whitney video and a piece of anonymous 80s found computer art," says Smalley. "We like causing a momentary temporal dislocation for the people who see them."

Poster Company will be on view as part of the Objects, Furniture, and Patterns in Decemeber  at Art Since the Summer of '69 gallery located at 195 Chrystie Street in New York.

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