A Post(er) – Toyama International Poster Triennal 2012 Call For Entries

After a few years working on posters as an independent project, Sandy was seriously re-considering his decision. He had been submitting his works to a number of competition, yet have heard nothing back. Then, in 2009, he received a postal package notifying that his work had been accepted in International Toyama Triennale, the first of his many international exhibitions.

In the enclosed catalogue, Koichi Sato, one of the juries of Toyama noted that the word poster is derived from post, which has two meanings: a pillar, upon which a poster is usually placed, or the postal system. Thus, our posters are letters.

A Post(er) is consisted entirely of the graphic elements from the post he received from Toyama and the package itself, photographed against the back of a framed poster. This work was re-entered and accepted in Toyama 2012, thus completing the cycle: the posting of a poster of a poster and posted materials, sent through post.

In it, he expressed his feelings of anticipation and optimism for many young artists in participating in poster exhibitions. Will I receive a package addressed to me? Is my work going to be printed on the catalogue? Is my poster going to be mounted on the museum wall?

This highly self-referential work is more than a clever, yet sincere insider joke between Sandy and the Toyama juries. It is also a statement of the rhetorical nature of posters.

Just as a letter is never written without a reader in mind, a poster artist will never make something that nobody understands.

A letter can be broken down to words and alphabet, handwriting, typeface or stationery. A poster, to its composition, reference, colour, lines and form.

In both a poster and letter the writer is indelible, not in its individual components, but in how these elements work together to express, inquire, appeal – a certain idea, a worldview, a disposition, a sense of humour.

Tia Chandra
Critical Cultural Studies
SOAS, University of London