June 2013 / Mass Produce Original Thought!

Joe Miller

Mass Produce Original Thought! combines found, acquired, and artist-made objects with text and image to comment on the place of the individual in our manufactured environment. In this exhibition, typographic voice is given to a wide range of objects. The skateboard deck, a mass-produced consumer good often associated with the seeking of rebellious symbolism, is employed as canvas for a range of messages from sexual angst to societal yearnings. Street signs, fallout shelter signs, and land mine markers are repurposed in poetic conversations between their original and newly imposed messages. Type is integrated into antiques, vintage family artifacts, as well as new materials, by means of sandblasting, painting, laser etching, toner transfer, and letterpress. The result is a conversation of forms that brushes aside distinctions between art, design, and poetry.