HIT THE WALL
Hit the Wall! is a unique project designed to showcase the work of graphic designers from New Zealand and around world on the walls of TheNewDowse. The designers’ brief is open – it can be decorative, character or text based – the only given is that they must showcase their talents using vinyl alone.
Currently featured - Team ProAm, Neil Pardington & Lee Jensen
Team ProAm
Ex-pats Simon Endres and John Malcolmson set up business in the Big Apple as TeamProAm a few years back. In New York they’ve courted plenty of cred with their work for clients such as Amnesty International, independent Detroit based label Mahogani, the video gamers’ cable network G4 and Metropolis magazine and books.
www.teamproam.com/
Neil Pardington
Neil Pardington is the Creative Director of Wellington design company Base Two, an integrated design agency specialising in cross media communication and design. Considered one of New Zealand's foremost designers, his work has attracted a cluster of awards including Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Awards and Spectrum Print Book Awards. Of Ngai Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Kati Waewae and Pakeha descent, Neil has been given the task of channeling the pataka Nukutewhatewha for his design for the Pataka Toi wall.
www.basetwo.co.nz
Lee Jensen
Mr Jensen trawls the history of typography and design for the forms and symbols that make up his work. He is inspired by print ephemera, what he calls ‘the dust of design’.
“Ornament, like dust, is what remains, a reminder of past fancies forgotten; and not just ill-remembered, but abandoned, like a child at a fair, youthful cupidity, print ephemera, old pornography in a cupboard. My work starts in this place, a site of some friction and chaffing between worlds. I want to pick up these fragments, bring this “grammar of ornament” into a contemporary context with all its baggage – vapidity, kitsch, the sweet rot of bathos. Can ornament still resonate or suggest a new interpretative vocabulary? Is the symbolic lexicon of decoration still valid, or a site for the production of new forms?”
Lee Jensen completed a Master of Fine Arts from Massey University last year. His recent exhibitions include 'Deliquesce' with Richard Reddaway at Show gallery in Wellington, 'Walk The Line' with Kate Woods at Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, and participation in 'Satellite' in Shanghai, 2006.
He currently lectures in the Institute of Communication Design at Massey University, Wellington.