Interactive “Inter-Print” Exhibition at UGA celebrates graphic design | Arts & Culture

The room is nearly silent aside from an eerie static, but the bright neon colors on the walls are loud as they fill the small gallery from top to bottom with prints. A long wooden table takes up most of the small space, and on top of it are stamps and postcards with a QR code encouraging participation in this art exhibition titled “Inter-Print.”

The “Inter-Print” exhibition is a collaborative show created through the collective efforts of designers Halim Lee and Soo Min Lee and curated by Moon Jung Jang, C-U-B-E director and associate professor of graphic design at the University of Georgia. “Inter-Print” explores the definition of graphic design by highlighting the experimental form-making process and behind-the-scenes aspect of graphic design.

The exhibit is located in the C-U-B-E gallery on the second floor of the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and it will be displayed until Friday, April 11. Admission to the gallery is free, and visitors will be able to create and print their own risograph prints with stamps to take with them or leave at the gallery to share with others.

“We’re using a lot of fun, very performative works, and also very vivid, vibrant geometric patterns,” Soo Min Lee said. “Within this, we hope to broaden the definition of graphic design for sure, and also hope to [make the] audience feel like graphic design can be also participatory.”

A risograph printer was used to achieve the vibrant colors and unique shapes on the walls of the exhibit. Halim Lee described the geometric shapes as having three layers labeled A, B and C, each with random colors. Layer A consists of a checkerboard background, and layer B and C have random widths and heights.

The middle of the gallery room is taken up by a long wooden table. On it are various cards, stamps with the same patterns as the prints on the walls and colorful ink pads, and visitors are free to create prints of their own by stamping each card with the textured stamps.

When asked why a risograph printer was used for this exhibit, Soo Min Lee said the imperfect quality of the prints provide a human quality to the work and can remind the audience that the designers are also human.

“It has like a special brain touch, and also it’s never going to be perfectly aligned,” Soo Min Lee said. “So we’re in love with that characteristic of it not [getting] the perfect outcome of the results.”

The interactive aspect of the exhibit is brought to life through the QR codes alongside its stamps and postcards, which visitors can scan to open an interactive web-generator tool, which will generate a random shape. Visitors are then free to recreate the shape using the stamps and cards on the table, or create their own to share on the web platform linked to the QR code. Visitors can see other shapes people have created and uploaded on the platform, and there are currently over one thousand that have been created since the start of the exhibition.

At the end of the table, a video is projected on the wall displaying the two artists sporting red hats, carefully making and cutting each print for the exhibition. This is intended to show the behind-the-scenes process of this art form, and to counter the misconception about graphic design being only used commercially.

“Some people never think that graphic design could be exhibited in the galleries,” Jang said.

Jang met Halim Lee and Soo Min Lee at a design colloquium at Boston University. Each of them had a shared interest in design education and eventually discussed collaborating for this exhibition.

Soo Min Lee and Halim Lee worked on most of the project from Boston, and designing the space from abroad was a task which required communication and adaptability. Jang sent the room’s measurements to Soo Min Lee and Halim Lee, who then created prints and other aspects of the show before seeing C-U-B-E in person.

“They had to kind of test out what it would look like, envisioning the space,” Jang said. “Then once they arrived in the physical space, they realized that…there was a thermostat, or [they] needed something that [they] didn’t really think about, how [to] attach the prints on the wall, that type of stuff.”

The C-U-B-E gallery at Lamar Dodd is a multi-functional space that was created to focus on experimental and contemporary design practices in 2015. Now, 10 years later, the gallery designs seven to 10 activities annually, showcasing designers and artists’ exhibitions and sharing design knowledge.