Morbidly Aesthetic: Death Has a Logo (2009), vector collage, printouts in various sizes
I am a rather large fan of logos for bands that play Death/Black Metal, Grindcore and whatever genre of neo-heavy-metal. For years now, the logos used by these bands follow a certain type of design code. A good majority of them are so hard to read they become their own form of art. A simple word can be transformed into looking like a bludgeoned body, a sprawling organic shape or something just vaguely disgusting or intimidating. What I love most is when bands like this play at all-metal-shows and have their logos on flyers or posters you often can't figure out who the band really is but (considering you know the type of music and the visual aesthetic surrounding it) you can easily figure out what to expect. I am also fascinated with the world-wide continuing popularity of the metal scene. In almost every country where you can find a guitar, bass and drums you can find a plethora of metal-bands. Even in places where it seems a scene like this wouldn’t exist, it does. This is why I consider metal to be possibly the most geographic-centric music scene since a large amount of these bands do sound very similar (within their own sub-genres of course) but their geographic location dictates their popularity. For example, a black metal band in Guayaquil, Ecuador may sound exactly like an even more established band from, say, Oslo, Norway, yet it doesn’t matter to the metal-fans of Guayaquil because they have their own version of this band. However, with the mass-touring that most of these bands do, the band from Oslo could play in Guayaquil with the local version of themselves to still the same amount of fanfare (in addition to covering the rest of South America). For this project I have collected hundreds of logos from bands from all 6 inhabited continents and mashed them up in vectorized-format into individual semi-abstract figures. The first 2 were printed in small & large poster-style form and both resemble a kind of skull or skull-cross-section, which is actually completely inadvertent and came out of primarily random placement. This is an ongoing project and I plan to do more variations using more logos, hopefully branching out into other forms of image-transferring.