On October 1, 2004, the Wrens played Chicago’s Logan Square Auditorium. Imagining a poster for that event, you might be thinking: birds, Sears Tower, guitars, big block letters, exclamation points. You probably aren’t thinking: a dozen bear-like creatures examining seven refrigerators from all angles, their wide-set bean eyes and tiny mouth-lines impossibly and yet perceptibly communicating varying levels of discernment, evaluation, focused consideration. It is a dark mustard-based palette, muted, matte and low-contrast. Such is the vision of renowned screenprint poster artist Jay Ryan, whose work depicting bombs falling with bass cabinets, astronauts armed with plungers, bunnies playing floor hockey and cheese wheels stacked on toasters stacked on cats stacked on tiny cars is cerebrally offbeat and apocalyptically adorable. 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels, reprinted in 2010 as an updated edition, is a survey of the first decade of Ryan’s career (1995-2005) and a self-curated tour through curiosities of this artist’s freely associative mind.
It would be enough to just dig into this book unencumbered by annotations, since the posters tell their own stories both literally (“Remember this? Built to Spill touring behind Perfect From Now On? And look at that, tickets were $10!”) and figuratively (the Hum poster of a dolphin outfitted in jet-propelled scuba gear swimming next to a torpedo suggests so many possible plots in just one image). But Ryan’s commentary – minimalist and factual, lighthearted and direct – reveals over the course of 100 posters the logic behind his design choices without explaining the fun out of them. Some images were based on input from the subjects themselves (as in the 14 print series he created for the release of Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs), others were culled from (sometimes misheard) lyrics and several were inspired by the work of artists Ryan was studying at the time (the decaying flowers of Horst Janssen, the illustrations of Rockwell Kent, the boxes of Joseph Cornell). But many – perhaps most – are ruminations on the tangential; gut-level interpretations of a band’s thematic character. And squirrels. There sure are a lot of squirrels.
Humbled and petrified by an early commission for a Fugazi/Shellac show, Ryan admits that the resulting poster of a line of five simple-shape dogs was “very honestly an act of desperation.” The artwork, here as in many others, is unapologetically both preliminary sketch and finished product, Ryan leaving in the rough pencil shapes, rub marks, lettering guidelines and half-erasures. The preservation of attempts and mistakes underlines the unpredictability of what we end up with. That circle that became the dog’s head might have just as easily have turned into a bicycle wheel, a fishbowl or a film canister. Ryan lets the shape realize its own life. In an annotation to a poster for his own band, Dianogah, he hints at the idea that these characters channel themselves when he recalls, “While drawing this poster, I was amused to discover that Kip’s horse had fallen asleep while smoking,” as if to shrug and say, “Don’t ask me, I just draw them.” Amusing too is the horse next to it that appears to be wearing underpants. Ryan’s figures not only talk back, they tell jokes.
This collection is prefaced by three short essays spanning a diversity of viewpoints – the aesthetic art criticism of Debra Parr, the graphic design shoptalk of industry superstar Art Chantry and the crack philosophics of friend/client/musician Steve Albini – that contextualize Ryan’s work within its fanciful knot of fine art, graphic design, independent music, cartooning, typography and advertising. But perhaps most insightful (and wanted) are the words of the man himself, captured in the final 10 pages in the form of a Q&A interview. It’s here that we learn about how Ryan broke through “overthinking” his process and the circumstances under which he stopped using computer type as a base and transitioned to hand-drawn letters, a painstaking DIY hallmark of his contemporary work. The book explains little in terms of the actual printmaking process itself, so notations about the number of screens used on each print may seem irrelevant to those unfamiliar with the discipline, not to mention that a general appreciation of the creative undertaking is lost. In better news, some works have detail treatment on the opposite page, so readers are able decode tiny bits of text or consider closely a visually isolated fragment of the whole.
The prints in 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels are archival remnants of fleeting moments: one night among thousands in your lifetime, a show that you might remember missing or forget that you were at. As documents, they remind: billing, date, venue, all ages, doors open, dollars. And as works of art, they outlast. For lovers of ambiguously specied mammals, underground bands and illustrations of ambiguously-specied mammals watching underground bands, 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels might just be the outré retrospective you’ve been waiting for.
