Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street (between Kearny and Grant Streets)
San Francisco, CA 94108

images from Rena Bransten website

“Soft Targets: The artwork of Landland”
February 27 – March 23
First Amendment Arts
(1101 Stinson Blvd at Broadway, NE MPLS)

Grand opening Saturday February 27, 7-10pm
Live music from Best Friends Forever &
BRLSQOTHEQUE DJs
all ages, free admission

SOFT TARGETS
First Amendment Arts is pleased to be displaying a collection of posters, CD packages, and other pieces of art designed and screenprinted by Minneapolis thing-makers Landland (Dan Black & Jes Seamans). With their studio conveniently located just two doors down the hall from First Amendment, Landland has been cranking out tons of gorgeous work and they will be lugging over every single piece they’ve created since their move into the 1101 Stinson Blvd warehouse in 2007. Performing live will be local pop rock outfit Best Friends Forever, featuring Landland’s own Jes Seamans on bass and vocals.

LANDLAND
Completely disregarding the standard template of what a rock poster should look like, Landland’s aesthetic comes from a different world—unusually sized prints, muted color schemes and obsessive drawing mark the steady stream of posters they produce for First Avenue, the Triple Rock Social Club, The Varsity Theatre and assorted basements and hole-in-the-wall spaces in the Twin Cities and across the country.

There is rarely anything simple about their work from the five layers of ink they routinely pull across their prints or the days at a time Dan Black will spend drawing a spyrograph pattern from memory. And they never take the easy way out—there are no puns based on band names or half-hearted attempts to interpret the music abstractly. Instead they create micro-worlds of fantastical domestic structures, scaffolding, decaying rollercoasters, train wrecks and swarms of ghosts. In pursuit of designing advertising for rock shows Landland end up creating works of art—each a singular finished statement that looks like the work of no one else.