Poster Expressionists

Courtesy Seripop.

Stroll up the Mile End portion of Montreal’s Boulevard Saint-Laurent or down the gallery-lined sidewalks of Toronto’s West Queen West district, and you’ll likely see them: silkscreened or spray-stenciled posters in a neon rainbow of hues, typically on high-quality paper stock, promoting indie-rock gigs or underground dance parties.

Postering is hardly a new thing — notwithstanding periodic snits by politicians and local business associations, it’s been subculture’s modus operandi for decades. It’s the aesthetic quality of the posters, however, that bears renewed examination. Rarely in the past 20 years have so many bands sought out screen printing, as opposed to that old punk standby, photocopying (or more recently, design-for-dummies software like Photoshop and Illustrator). What’s more, current silkscreened posters are clearly slaved over; they’re detailed, clever and, quite often, utterly gorgeous. Fans raid bulletin boards and poles for them; websites like GigPosters.com allow aspiring and established artists to display their goods and devotees to buy them.

A superficial investigation leads to a single, prolific instigator: Montreal’s Serigraphie Populaire — Seripop for short — a small, five-year-old studio run by noise-rock enthusiasts Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau. So prevalent is Seripop’s vision that one can hardly imagine contemporary Montreal without it. The studio’s unmistakably garish aesthetic — a heavily psychedelic, nearly illegible approach that makes a kind of bloodbath of vintage Push Pin Studio-style graphics — has in many ways become the city’s turn-of-the-millennium wallpaper, coinciding with Montreal’s recent coronation as North America’s hipster metropolis. (Seripop has made posters for ultra-hyped local bands like the Arcade Fire and the Unicorns.)

The studio is gaining such a profile that Lum and Desranleau have embarked on a European gallery tour taking them to Berlin, Paris and Hasselt, Belgium’s Dramarama Festival. And yet, according to Lum, Seripop’s plan “was never grand.” In fact, her angular, screechy band AIDSWolf (in which Desranleau plays drums) takes priority over studio activities. “First and foremost, we were musicians and we wanted to promote ourselves and didn’t want to have to hire someone else to do it,” Lum says. “And a lot of our friends were in bands and we wanted to do the same for them. More people know who we are now, but our day-to-day reality remains the same: 85 per cent of the work we do is still for underground bands.”

Courtesy Seripop.

Truth be told, the Seripop phenomenon is merely a manifestation of a do-it-yourself sensibility that has deep roots beyond Montreal. As designers and musicians, Lum and Desranleau are very much indebted to the thriving arts scene of Providence, R.I. — particularly to Fort Thunder, a collective that, since the mid-1990s, has been successfully marrying loud avant-garde music with paper culture, especially printmaking. An equally strong influence on Seripop is the Marseille, France-based group Le Dernier Cri, whose tentacles spread all over the world. They have a significant Quebec contingent, which includes alternative comic legend Julie Doucet, who has published mainly with Drawn & Quarterly in her native Montreal and has contributed artwork to Le Dernier Cri anthologies.

Seripop’s founding in 2000 coincided with two other key developments on the Montreal screen-printing front: the emergence of Studio Alphonse Raymond, a gathering of similarly industrious artists, and the Mobilivre/Bookmobile project, a traveling trailer library full of zines, small press books, flyers and other ephemera.

Why these methods, and why now? “Punk rockers are growing up,” explains Will Munro, the Toronto promoter, DJ and artist who runs queer dance nights Vazaleen, Peroxide and Moustache, all of which employ spray-stenciled or silkscreened posters. “The aesthetic that we’re seeing comes from a post-hardcore culture, from people who strongly believe in making culture for themselves. We’re living in a time when everything is advancing technologically, but most of it’s boring. It’s a reaction, really. People putting on events are trying to present them as more than just capitalism, so they put forth more effort.”

Circumstance and timing help, too. Michael Comeau, Munro’s promotional designer for Vazaleen, is quick to point out that “Toronto is way behind Montreal” as a hub of the handmade, mostly because real estate in Montreal has always been cheaper, thus allowing silkscreeners to set up shop more easily. Comeau also speaks of Montreal’s ongoing dedication to “low art” principles: a belief that art can and should emerge publicly, anywhere and at any time, without the support of a commercial gallery system to regulate its flow. That might explain why the most important DIY postering scenes of late have cropped up in Providence, Marseilles and now Montreal rather than, say, New York, London or Paris.

Courtesy Seripop.

But undertaking screen-printing as a career is never a breeze, no matter where you are. Comeau and Seripop’s Lum readily admit to the gruelling, unglamorous nature of their passion. Financial commitments aside, the very act of silkscreening is tedious and physically punishing, involving lots of repeated movement: bending, lifting and crouching. Lum and Comeau are full of quasi-Dickensian war stories; chronic knee, back and neck problems abound. Astoundingly, Seripop turns out approximately three multicoloured posters a week, each with print runs of more than 100. The visibility of their work, then, seems as much a sign of roaring success as of masochistic obsession. Earlier this year, Seripop invested in an automated press, which in Lum’s view was a necessity, not a perk; she was developing such bad carpal tunnel that she was beginning to have problems just holding a pencil.

There are also politics at play in such steadfastness. Comeau used to co-run a print shop and gallery in Toronto’s Kensington Market, and expresses intense pride at being able to produce great quantities of work under his own steam. He notes that in the face of increasing corporate outsourcing and automation, he’s a rare breed. Sure, style is part of it — just don’t dare tell him that silkscreening is a quaint trend with retro cachet.

“That you can translate a drawing through serigraphy into something that’s as lush and beautiful as the amount of hard work you’re willing to put into it really means a lot,” Comeau says. “You can subvert the art and advertising industries. You can subvert galleries because you’re showing your work on the street. You can subvert mainstream publishers by publishing your own stuff, and by doing it in a better way than they ever could.”

Oddly enough, Seripop has recently been displaying its posters in galleries across the U.S. and Canada. In October, the group finally made its local debut, co-showing at Montreal’s Madam Edgar with Providence-based artist Gunsho. Seripop has also done illustrations for magazines like En Route and Maisonneuve. Granted, the studio takes on most of this higher profile work selectively and by request. According to Lum, their founding ethos is in no danger of changing any time soon.

“We don’t go after big contracts, or have an agent or a rep — that’s not the kind of work we’re looking for,” she says. “Ultimately, we’re very stubborn people. When we quit our jobs in order to do this, we knew we were going to be broke, but we made the decision that it’s more important for us to do what we want to do every day than to have money. We still scramble for rent, but I could never see myself working for a huge design firm. I think I’d rather be dead than do that.”

David Balzer is a Toronto-based writer.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.