Event Flyer
Made by: Amyn Kurani
Creative Direction: MANICFESTO
I found prior writings of mine that talked about how my love of Questlove’s creative practice began. I was reading ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe in high school, and so was startled as I flipped through CDs when I saw that as a title of an album, by a band called The Roots. I wondered if it was a coincidence- but then, as I flipper from one CD to the other, there were a number of same title/album, but different photographs. And the photographs were from the Civil Rights movement. It was the first time for me that history, fiction, and music could all pull from the same source, and reach different aspects of understanding.
Both The Roots & Chinua Achebe had different covers- which the question becomes, does one look at the similarities or the differences between them?
So from then on I always kept an eye out for their work - and in 2002, their album ‘Phrenology’ came out. Yet again, they managed to create an album cover gave so much context of the way with which to consider that particular piece of work. Of course the name itself harkens back to a dark history with the archaic racist pseudoscience, which some would argues continues today in the assumptions we have about different groups. (Note how in what looks like 2 diff editions of the same album- the one on the right looks like a silver metallic foil, which, depending on how you hold the album, makes his eyes open or closed. Genius.)
So for some reason, as I came up with the idea of the first Arcanum Salon (or even just the app aspect)- everyone kept asking me how I got there, what inspired it. So one night, I sketched myself in some kind of retro/comics/sci fi autobiographical image.
Just like The Roots albums listed above- I wanted the flyer to tell a story, a personal one. I think having the physical structure of a medication you take is pretty revealing lol.
Pictured: Lamictal chemical structure (antiepileptic & mood stabilizer for Bipolar 1/manic depression)
Coke Zero/Avocados/ weed/ Organic (gold) American Spirits/books
Concepts on my mind: Identity (because of my memory loss) / Therapy & Art (because both are just as, if not more important than meds)/ and Simulacra (a concept that @kardashian_kolloquium introduced to me- vis-à-vis "The medium is the message" and I will never be the same!)
love & mercy - reminder from the movie of the same name, about Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys and his struggle as he rode the waves of creative output and varying degrees of grasp on reality. Does one have to go to the brink to create work that stands the test of time? (I’d like to get this as a tattoo, as a reminder to myself, for myself.
The Zap! and Circle electrode refer back to the 77 ECT/electroshock therapy treatments I received from July 2018- May of 2019 - resulting in long term memory loss (more info here).
The strange blob shape reaching is a poor reconstruction/adaptation of the below image- because originally this flyer sketch was meant to be a tattoo design- and I wanted to make it more hieroglyphics than realism for the concepts that could be expressed with just images versus words. In this case- because the photograph is of Yumi Shimizu (@yumishmizu), a dancer- and the fact that she’s reaching is what I feel like I’m doing with this idea.
My next sketch added wires, meant to add another reference to the ECT/electroshock, but also conveniently acted as dividers for the names of artists.
I then used Upwork to find a graphic designer- his profile is linked above. Keep in mind that not everyone listed on versions of the flyers actually participated (see profiles for those who did)
