'Poster Cabaret Bicycle Print Show'
A host of colorful, expertly crafted prints celebrates the two-wheeled world
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., May 27, 2011
'Poster Cabaret Bicycle Print Show'
Gallery Black Lagoon, 4301-A Guadalupe, 371-8838
Through May 30
Poster Cabaret, the online poster design shop of local company Sebastian Foster, presents its third annual "Bicycle Print Show" in Hyde Park's Gallery Black Lagoon. The exhibition runs through the entire gallery – if you've not visited recently, you may have been there a while back, when it was still the Movie Store – and creates a segmented, approximately eye-level stripe of bike-celebrating graphics along the walls of the two main rooms.
Back when the Lagoon space was owned by others than Singer Mayberry and David Lujan and was stocked floor to ceiling with cinematic DVDs and, heh, even videotapes, it didn't seem so big; it seemed, in fact, kind of cramped. Now, though, hallelujah, the repurposed venue is wonderfully expansive, making up for what it might be missing in cathedralesque height with a wealth of floor space and wall space. It works well, all the emptiness in the middle of each room, because there's nothing to compete with the posters themselves, and those posters are complex, attention-rewarding works of wonder, some of them, when they're not "merely" masterworks of well-balanced simplicity.
(Well-balanced simplicity. A decent enough term for the bicycle itself, for the old-fangled velocipede's modern iterations, for the mode of transportation that's such a boon to physical and mental health, such an environmentally sound choice that it ought to be considered holy. And May is, after all, National Bike Month.)
This is an invitational show, with the contributors chosen from among an international panoply of illustrators and graphic designers – the sort of people you can (or eventually will) read about in the pages of, say, Juxtapoz or Hi-Fructose: Invisible Creature, Aesthetic Apparatus, Eleanor Grosch, bee things, Methane Studios, Alberto Cerriteño, Delicious Design League, and so on. Diverse professionals, more than 50 of them, and their creations expertly produced as multicolor, limited-edition screenprints that celebrate the wheels and frames and spokes and everyday folks of the human-powered, two-wheeled world.
Gallery Black Lagoon has expanded its hours for this Poster Cabaret exhibition, staying open Friday through Monday from noon until 6pm, and this is the show's final weekend. Ah, you know you could bike there.
