ARTlington Studios and Gallery is a multi-faceted building with historical charm, featuring art studio space on the 1st, 2nd 3rd floors. Members have access to a gallery/event space on the main floor as well as the option to participate in 3 open house/shows/sales per year. The building itself is a work of art and must be seen to be believed.
Some creative friends and I rented shared studio space at ARTlington from 2018 to 2019. During the Nuit Blanche and Culture Days, I contributed to the effort by creating a "pop-up" brand for Artlington in the form of a logo with signage and wayfinding for the two events.
The colours and forms in these logos and graphics are based in part on a stained glass feature above the door.
The Nuit Blanche graphic built on the stained glass concept.
In developing the wayfinding and artist tags, I worked with Hanken Design's Hanken Sans and their since-discontinued Placid Armor. The giant titles are set in the now-ubiquitous Le Murmur from Velvetyne's Jérémy Landes.
I also created a few social media pieces with the new brand.
Capacity may vary
All of ARTlington's external communication and promotion falls to a committee artists working in the building. While they make use of the logo, the idea of an ARTlington brand was never fully taken up, mostly because raising the community's profile and presence in Winnipeg's art scene would take a lot of effort and persistence.
Branding and gentrification
But this may not be a problem. In the years spent since creating these pieces, it has become more clear to me that part of ARTlington's charm and also its affordability has been due to very very slow gentrification, and that in some respects the flowering of an intricate brand for the space could contribute to attention, and then increased demand for space, and ultimately lead to the space becoming unaffordable for its current residents.
In that sense, it is perhaps not a tragedy that this work remains just a really fun two-time exercise in guerilla branding and didn't lead to anything more permanent.
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