Reflex Blue

Reflex Blue was an exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios that brought together the individual practices of Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elisa Giardina Papa, and Léann Herlihy. All three artists use language and image-making to disrupt ways of understanding and communication that are supposedly universal. Each artist’s work explores the cultural impact of images and their relationship to storytelling and technology. Using formatting, modification, compositing and erasure, their work seizes instances of multiplicity and mystery.

The exhibition title – Reflex Blue – took its name directly from a specific ink used in commercial printing. This ink colour and ideas of the printing process became a springboard for the design of the exhibition poster which embraced the power and limitations of print media processes. While the graphic layout focused on – and made a feature of – print artefacts such as crop marks, registration lines and gradient swatches, in reference to the image-making and printing process, and the correlation between the two.

The identity played on the impossibility of recreating certain colours and the unintended transformation of colour through different printing and screen processes. The design was risograph printed, then scanned at a high-resolution, blown-up and printed digitally on vinyl, with its final colour being the closest approximation of Reflex Blue given the different process. The poster embraced and enlarged the riso grain and it's imperfections.

The scanned image was then brought back into a digital form for use in social media, completing the circle of production.

An A3 risograph poster edition was produced to accompany the exhibition.