Art & Exhibitions
At P!, Vivienne Griffin’s Weighty Take on Letterforms
THE DAILY PIC: The letter "i", before it got flattened on a designer's page.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1395): i
i think
i think this is the letter “i” – just as i have now typed it eleven times (not counting the “i” in “times”, or in “counting” for that matter, or in “in”). But of course in today’s Pic it’s been rendered in three dimensions, in granite, by Vivienne Griffin, for a witty exhibition called “Pangrammar” that opened Friday at P! gallery in New York. The show includes works of art that represent all the letters, and uses them to spell “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” the most famous of all alphabet-exhausting pangrams. (The show will be rearranged to form other pangrams before it closes.)
One of the clichés of typography is the desire to turn letterforms into 3D versions of themselves, by adding sides and shadows and other superfluous reality effects. So I love the way Griffin decides to go all the way, by actually turning a letter into a massy object and then letting its dot drop off, as seems to be the first instinct whenever someone decides to make a cutesy animation of the letter in question.
Here the cute gesture has real-world implications: It could break someone’s toe.
For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
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