Best show poster artist 2008

Yo Rodeo

by Sue Carter Flinn

Ya love them for their distinctive hand-screenprinted show posters, but Paul Hammond and Seth Smith, the brains, talents and good looks behind Yo Rodeo, aren’t one-trick ponies, although their poster for Two Hours Traffic’s Polaris Prize nomination makes you scream for more. There were Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards, album-cover art commissions and an exhibition of their prints at the gallery P572 in Quebec City. Yo Rodeo also had one of the biggest draws at last year’s Nocturne arts festival---nine hand-screen printed, anaglyphic (red/blue) 3D images of fantasy worlds. Even though the pair have their squeegees poised on all sorts of projects, Hammond says that there are definitely connecting themes: “Animals are something we tend to work into a lot of our work. Patterns and textures are pretty common for us too.” Next up: two new series of prints, one of which can be cut out and assembled into sculptures.

First runner up: Adam Hartling
Second runner up: Mike Holmes

Halifax Music Goes 3-D

Last year Halifax’s music scene went multi- dimensional. Yo Rodeo’s Three Dee Realms, a series of nine hand-screenprinted spiralling metropolises, had over 1,000 people wearing those blue and red cardboard glasses at Nocturne, the night-long art festival. Paul Hammond, one half of the arty pair along with Seth Smith, says they did a fair amount of research on anaglyphic images before printing. “We read books, and learned a lot about the process before we really got into it. But once we started we found trial and error to be the easiest way to get the best results,” says Hammond. “We actually wore the glasses most of the time that we were working on the images, which really messed our eyes up for a while. But it was worth it.”