Juxtaposing Your Week

Include Me Out

Been looking at this blog, Seven Days, for a bit; it's the home page for the work of illustrator Cristiana Couceiro. Couceiro lives, works and is inspired by Lisbon, Portugal. Obviously she is a fan of vintage photographs too, with hopeful images of the past yanked out of context and into collages yielding a suggestion of the past and of meaningful symbols, but essentially just modern enough to not denote anything in particular. The pieces also look a lot like a particular strain of old Penguin paperback covers, do you know the ones I mean? The ones that look like these, basically (especially the one below, labelled It's Not For You to Choose). Same colour palette and use of pale coloured circles, sometimes the font is the same too. Hence an added expectation that the text and the symbols in these pieces will mean something, but still they have only the feel of old pieces of functional graphic design; time and nostalgia turns it all neatly into art.

It's Not For You to Choose

These pieces do continue to make me feel like I'm missing something. Maybe I am? I don't know much about the artist. Maybe these are books covers, I just don't know the books. (Also Couceiro does some conventional illustration, magazines and advertising etc.) The titles seem designed to be confusing too; unless there's another connection I'm missing the titles seem entirely divorced from the content. I also wonder what percentage of the images here are found, and how much made new? Some of the photographs do seem newly posed, modern models in old fashioned dress. It's all really working for me, anyhow. Collage is fun. I would love to see her sketchbooks/scrapbooks.

You've Hit the Button One Hundred Times Before

You Are Everything I Cannot See

Who Can Doubt it Now

When Your Feet Are Living the Ground

Feeling Like a Tape Recorder

To Stay Here Would Be Just Fine

I Find it Hard to Explain How I Got Here

I think I got the Couceiro tip from This Girl Called Automatic Win. Lass has good taste in art (and links, and recaps, and long hilarious soul-searching sessions).