PICTURES – Douglas Coupland – Slogans for the 21st Century

Spotted these on the Guardian – HERE – and had to look them up.

Douglas Coupland – do visit his website, it’s a bit of a delight – is a Canadian author, designer and artist that I’ve been semi-aware of for years (he wrote Generation X: Tales for an accelerated Culture, JPod and Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People), but never really explored properly.

He is part of a group of artists contributing to a new exhibition entitled 24/7: A Wake Up Call for Our Non-Stop World.

Many of us feel we’re working more intensively, juggling too many things, blurring our public and private lives, pushing the limits of our natural rhythms of sleep and waking.

24/7 takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain.

With every moment seemingly an opportunity to connect and work, unrelenting pressure to produce and consume, sleep itself monitored and commodified, how we cope is one of the most urgent contemporary issues affecting us all.

Inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book of the same name, and curated by Sarah Cook, 24/7& holds up a mirror to our always-on culture and invites you to step outside of your day-to-day routine to engage, reflect and reset.

The whole exhibition looks really interesting – I might try and bob down for a viewing, but the posters were what really caught my eye.

Blurb from Vancouver Gallery

These text-based works consist of thought-provoking statements, conceived by the artist, that have been boldly printed on brightly coloured backgrounds that echo the form and colour of standardized papers found globally in office environments.

They are installed in a manner meant to surround the viewer. Proclamations such as AUTOMATED GOVERNMENTS ARE INEVITABLE and A FULLY LINKED WORLD NO LONGER NEEDS A MIDDLE CLASS speak emphatically to contemporary citizens, indicating how much society at large has changed within one generation and hinting at even more dramatic changes to come.

As a writer and visual artist, Coupland has often disregarded the traditional divide between these disciplines. Using letters, words and books as material and content for his art, Coupland harnesses the power of language in the visual realm.