From Open Collections to Art: Jean-Charles Amey

I have been working on various design experiences and projects for nine years. After a Master’s in Product Design, I started to work as assistant with Pierre Charpin and Robert Stadler. Both work on the border where art and design meet. I had the chance to work on various projects from limited editions to larger scale production and have been thrilled by these experiences of creating and thinking in small studios. Since 2013, I have been concentrating on my own practice and studio in Reims, France. 

 

 

The 100-Day Project was relaunched on the internet, mainly through instragram, by the artist and illustator Elle Luna in 2014, but it goes back to a Yale School of Art Workshop lead by Michael Bierut, where students are asked to choose an action and repeat it for 100 days.

Last year, with #100daysofpois I joined the experience for the first time. Today, after undertaking it a second time, I feel the 100-Day Project is a sort of medium — producing small personal things everyday changes you. I like to compare the 100-Day project to a meditation; you enter into a creative challenge with yourself and explore it. Personally, it has been a way to connect some serious reflections with more lightness. Creativity is an everyday challenge.

 

My quest is to create objects with spirit while reducing my computer work time and regain creative autonomy. I am exploring a way to imagine new experiences with objects, furniture and space using nothing but scissors, paper and a camera.

 

 

By creating these colorful collages, I feel like I’m on a walk with Kurt Schwitters, Paul Rand and Matisse but also with contemporary artist like George Byrne, Takuro Kishibe or Julie Hamilton. It’s such a pleasing moment to take scissors, colors and create a first impression of reality. 

 

First, I collect colours. They arrive at my atelier through magazines, old books, ads, catalogs. They are so diverse that they need to be collected and arranged by size and pattern. Next, I collect images of strong or ambigous gestures that could tell a story. They mostly come from open source collections like UBC Library’s. Unlike the colours, I don’t put the gestures in any kind of order. I put them in a box and stare at them when I start a new prototypa. And so everyday, I pick the one that inspires me the most.

 

I discovered UBC Library’s Open Collections when I was doing a project on ex-libris (bookplates). I was curious about the past of bookplates and a search on Flickr led me to various digitized collections. I was amazed that libraries were considering bookplates as interesting as the others visual elements of a book. They tend to be created after the book is made and symbolize the meeting of a reader and a book at a certain time and space. Perhaps that’s why there is such diversity of forms and story in them.