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Out of context: Reply #5
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- JamesEngage0
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Siobhan Keaney
Keaney, from London, was asked to uphold the mantle of “Women in Graphic Design.” The convenors of the Type Expo, who are so clueless and/or classless that they didn’t even bother to invite local Toronto type designers like Paul Sych, Nick Shinn, or Val Fullard to speak, decided to fly in a marginally-competent graphic designer who has no type-design experience and who sets everything in Metro or Gill; importing Keaney presumably would offset all those nasty brutish male type designers dominating the conference and poisoning the atmosphere with their Y chromosomes. I suspect that many readers could nominate three or four female type designers each who could have described their work and experiences at the conference. Could Keaney’s selection have anything to do with a recent article about her in How? Were Typo Expo organizers really this clueless? Apparently so.
At a pragmatic level, Keaney’s presentation was borderline incompetent. She had aimed to include videoclips and slides from three designer friends (all women) in England, Holland, and California, but the slides and videos never came together, and of course Keaney was stymied by the fact that Europe and North America use different television systems (though conversions are easy and inexpensive). She did open her lecture with a stultifying and self-indulgent video that would have rated a D+ in any experimental-film course; it told us very little about her work or her attitudes, apart from the entirely credible claim that she’s in design for the money. It certainly can’t be for art.
The opening video was accompanied by a squelchy jungle soundtrack that only called into greater relief the video’s vapid and ostentatiously “deconstructed” editing.
Keaney started out in the field in 1985. She tends to reuse the same ideas over and over. (Care to come up with a list of designers who do so? It would be rather lengthy.) She created a photomontage of floating slippers, bags, and jewelry for Brown’s in the U.K., and another similar montage for Seymour-Powell, a product-design firm.
Keaney slapped a globe on the cover of an annual report of a (Saudi Arabian?) company, Apicorp, that aimed to look and feel global. Apparently Arab(ian) clients understand abstract imagery more directly than Occidentals. Keaney traffics in yet more fuzzy/sharp combinations, with saturated or milky gel-like backdrops or anamorphic manipulated photos as background.
The British designer spent 15 full minutes on every scrap of work she’s ever done for the Mill, a video postproduction house in London. Little cutout cartoons embodying job functions (editors, etc.) festoon the doors of their respective offices. Her Mill layouts invariably involve “postmodern” (but actually Russian Constructivist) rotated axes, with blocks of body copy, nearly always in Metro, contorted into contours. It was kind of readable.
Keaney, improbably, was selected to design H.G. Wells stamps for the British post office in 1995, which she Photoshopped into submission. They were somewhat pulpy, reminding one of 1950s sci-fi (sic) novels. That, of course, was the point.