GREY SUPREME is a print-based “project platform”, initiated by artist Mark Laliberte as a way to collect his experiments with image, text and hybrid forms. Exploration is a key to the series, which is intended to appear on a yearly basis. The artist will employ a different strategy for every new work, presented as open-ended studies. Though divergent from project-to-project, the works that fill the pages of GREY SUPREME will share certain formal qualities and conceptual concerns. These concerns encompass Laliberte’s multiple interests, some of which are: design as an expanded super-language; the ritual minutae of contemporary subcultures; the pop codification of death from an existential, secular perspective; the logo as a stand-in for god-worship … GS1, released in December 2010 in collaboration with Koyama Press, is composed of the projects “Swallow”, an illustrated suite of “drowning cartoons”; and “Double Rainbow”, a photographic sequence exploring repetition and rainbows. For “Swallow”, Laliberte dives deep into imaginary, illustrated waters. In each work, a silent figure is captured at the moment just before being completely overcome by a watery landscape. Over the course of 18 lush pages, the artist shifts through a diversity of styles and techniques as he explores his obsession with what he calls “the drowning cartoon”, a personal motif that he finds both blackly humorous and visually challenging. “Double Rainbow” is a formalist and brightly hued photographic sequence. It presents a view of a rainbow angled directly over a dormant construction site, then repeats this image over 7 pages, across the distinct bands of the visible spectrum.

Laliberte describes the original scene, which the project relies on, as such: “On August 15, 2008 Toronto experienced a sudden storm. A heavy rain came on that even brought a minute or two of hail, and later, produced a rainbow. The cliché of greeting cards and inspirational posters alike, this natural phenomenon gets a bad rap in today’s jaded society; it’s actually quite stunning to witness a rainbow forming a grand illusion in the sky. Something compelled me to run for the camera. It was a fascinating moment full of contradiction and beauty that I needed to capture — not to make art, just to illuminate a memory.” The resulting work is a graphic manipulation that personifies the kind of illusory hope that man applies to anything he undertakes — we are all compelled to art direct our lives, to dig holes and fill them, to chase rainbows that we have no way of capturing.

Available from Carousel Magazine http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/store.html or http://www.greysupreme.com

Mark Laliberte (b. 1971) is a practicing writer/ visual artist / designer / soundmaker / curator / multi-headed hydra who has exhibited & performed extensively in galleries across Canada & the USA. Laliberte has had pageworks, poems & other printed experiments appear in publications big & small, including: Carousel, Descant, Lantern, Misunderstandings, Other Cl/utter, Pilot, Prairie Fire, Prefix Photo, Rampike, subTerrian, Vallum … He recently completed ‘Au Bruit de la Guerre / (With the Noise of the War)’, a permanent public art project for Toronto Transit Commission (launching Dec 2010, St. Clair Ave at Oakwood Ave). This four-panel experimental “comic-poem” translates the visual energy of comic book imagery (line, word bubble, sound effect, cartoon body parts etc) into a unique graphic code-system — it is a massive work that derives from / reinterprets the small b/w bookwork, Take Away Its Wings and Force It To Fly, self-released in 2008 in an edition of 100 copies. Laliberte is currently working on his next full-sized manuscript, tentatively titled Cloud & Bubble.

Koyama Press was founded in 2007 to sponsor projects with emerging artists. The rationale behind the enterprise is to fund projects with the intention to promote emerging artists. Ideally there will be a product to sell to create revenue. In addition to publishing books, the company has financed such diverse projects as zines, comics, artist designed t-shirts, installations, photo montage work, print folios, letterpress cards.