2012 aiga minnesota Design Show

Since 2001, Swedish-born artist Nathalie Djurberg has honed a distinctive style of video animation. Set to music and sound effects by her collaborator Hans Berg, Djurberg’s handcrafted cinematic tales explore revenge, lust, submission, gluttony, and other primal emotions through the conventionally innocent technique of “claymation,” which in her hands becomes a medium for nightmarish yet wry allegories of human behavior and social taboo. Increasingly, Djurberg’s practice has blurred the cinematic and the sculptural in environments that integrate moving images and related set pieces. This publication accompanies the artist’s largest presentation in an American museum to date. The catalogue weaves documentation of Djurberg’s sculptures and stills from her recent films with texts (both original and found) that trace the historical, scientific, and literary threads running through her practice. We chose the plastic cover to reference her material choices with her sculptures, as well as a bird-watching manual. The type was meant to be idiosyncratic like her birds, almost to the point of being anthropomorphised, and drew inspiration from “Le Merle” (The Blackbird), by Norman McLaren. “Le Merle” is based on a French-Canadian children’s song, it’s a story of a bird that loses various body parts and appendages, only to grow three more in its place. The stop-motion animation is elemental: a very simple bird composed of lines and circles, which morphs into to more complex structures with each iteration, and in the end, transforms into something that is unrecognizable from the original. The gradient backdrops in Le Merle were similar to the colorful grounds of Djurberg’s more recent work. In the catalogue, gradients and colors inspired by her sets became a way to identify the individual films, which also played out in other instances of the exhibition identity.

Delivery of Work

The book is selling quite well! The modest size and the low price point distinguishes it from other Djurberg books, which have been consistently expensive.

The Results

The artists and curator were quite pleased.