CMY no K(ey) is Carolina Izsák's final project undertaken during the Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design at Boston University's College of Fine Arts, which also served as her main thesis exploration. It encompasses all interests and ideas that developed through the course of the program while reading about and experimenting with the push and pulls between Structure + Emotions, Constraints + Creative Freedoms, the Tridimensional + the Bidimensional, her interests in Color, Play, and Serendipity, as well as visual systems, and experience design.
A project befitting to her thesis title Array - parts and parcels, CMY no K(ey) is a set of parts and pieces, part of a greater whole, an ordered series sharing an underpinning rationale by associations and similarities. Paired with a newfound freedom of aiming to understand color through experiences and play as an engine of creative thinking and serendipitous outcomes, the initial form presented on the 4th floor of the Fuller Building at Boston University during the 2024 Spring semester served as a visually attractive and playful way to engage the audience in shape and color creation.
The title, CMY no K(ey), is a play on words in the four-color printing process. Not only is she purposefully leaving K(black) out of the mix, but by doing so, the audience is denied its key (printing plate with most information or guide), freeing it from a prefixed image to which the colors CMY (cyan, magenta, and yellow) would have to align or register to.
The outcomes of the audience's shape and color combinations further generated the basis for the subsequent projects that she would undertake, bringing serendipity into play. In a way, Carolina crowd-sourced the content that would inform and become central to the pieces that she would create further.
The permutations that followed aimed for creative range, to reach wide, and to keep exploring through the expansion of a single unifying concept translated onto a variety of mediums. Using the interactive installation as a launching board, she translated the color mixing concept through the layering of translucent acrylic pieces, onto Risograph prints, typographic laser prints, and woven textiles, in which mixing the three existing colors, CMY, is a true methodological match, as each color is layered on top of, or placed next to each other to create new ones. An added fourth extension is a set of printed fabrics; though not a methodological match, the pieces are once again meant for the audience to create further; a cyclical happening of design opportunities in which the designer and audience feed off each other's creative potential, a true symbiosis.
The public installation consists of two wooden boards: a main (4 x 8)ft piece with 34 pegs placed on a grid and a supplemental (1 x 8)ft board with 9 pegs intended to store the colored acrylic pieces in its initial setup. Both serve as a neutral backdrop and scaffolding to the color-mixing and shape-generating experience.
The colorful shapes were created with scissors using paper as a template while cutting without a particular agenda in mind other than inviting serendipitous outcomes. The process rendered in part an unconscious admiration of the organic and abstract shapes found in artist Alexander Calder’s work and the cutouts by artist Henri Matisse, an outcome contrasting the stern grid of the supporting board, a search for balance between Structure + Emotion.
Using a laser cutter, these shapes were transferred to translucent 1/8” acrylic sheets in the CMY colors. A total of 27 were created each laser cut in all three CMY colors, totaling 81 acrylic pieces to interact and experiment with. These were randomly given a small hole for them to hang on the pegs, adding gravity into play as an added constraint.
The addition of a vinyl title wall completed the installation, inviting the audience to read and engage.
The Risograph's printing process was chosen as the first extension project in which the semi-transparent nature of the ink, when layered on top of each other, would render new colors other than the ones used, matching the color mixing methodology of the acrylic pieces.
Electing the three shapes that mostly reminded Carolina of artist Henri Matisse’s cutouts, pieces referencing natural vegetation, was an intentional choice. Using the negative form, leaving the shapes themselves without color, and printing their surrounding spaces was an iterative opportunity. With them, she created three (11"x17") masters, one per shape and color, and superimposed their prints using Risograph colors fluorescent pink as magenta, cornflower as cyan, and yellow as yellow, rendering an image that resembles vegetation while creating new colors such as purple, green, and orange.
Using the idea of permutations to explore further and test the limits of the set’s possibilities, the three shapes (A,B,C) in three colors (1,2,3) were combined. The outcome was a series of nine prints using only two shapes and two colors at the time, resulting in a cohesive aesthetic and a clear belonging to a family of shapes and colors, a series in itself.
The typographic exploration stems from the same three shapes used for the Risograph print series and is a close relative to the original print in which all three shapes and colors are superimposed. For this iteration, the negative space was generated using capital letters C (cyan), M (magenta), and Y(yellow), once again leaving the original inspiring shapes colorless. The designer chose to print each letter master (11"x17") on top of each other in their defining colors using a laser printer, which rendered a cross-stitch-like texture while successfully generating new colors, this time not through the mixture of the ink but, more interestingly through visual perception.
Permutations also came into play by interchanging the order in which the master layers were printed (CMY, MYC, and YCM), surprisingly rendering different toned outcomes: blueish, purplish, or yellowish, depending on which letter/color layer was on top.
Daring to bring K(black) back, not as key to the printing process or to alter the hue of the colors CMY, instead as its background, is one last form of variation, an iteration to this set. The designer argues that K(black) in this case is the result of combining all three colors, as overprinting cyan, magenta, and yellow renders black. The overprinted K (black) background added an impactful effect, helping the small typographic cross-stitching effect to stand out.
Weaving is a medium, a textile manufacturing methodology that suits the concept of creating new colors by interlacing existing ones, making it a direct methodological match to the initial Interactive Installation concept. A textile woven on a loom is created by mixing vertical (warp) and horizontal threads (weft); therefore, the design is intricately related to the construction of the textile. Blue, red, and yellow threads were used to mix new colors on a white warp (background), a reference to the CMY colors and the white background of the original board. If one looks closer, one notices that what is perceived as orange is woven with red and yellow threads closely placed next to each other; the same is true for purple (red and blue) and green (blue and yellow).
The designer chose to use her favorite shape and color combination created by the audience, the Blob, and used repetition to create a pattern with it, emulating the essence of a woven textile, which is routed in the repetition of the weaving gesture. Further developing this textile on a K(black) background to generate a different effect while still weaving the same pattern with blue, red, and yellow threads was again an iterative exploration, under the premise that cyan, magenta, and yellow render the color black when overprinted. An experiential curiosity on how colors affect each other when next to each other, an idea she takes from her readings on Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color.
The weaving of the throws (42" x 72") was outsourced to a Jacquard Loom specialist.
Even though the production methodology might not be entirely coherent with the original generating concept of superimposing CMY colors to create the new, as the colors are directly overlayed on top of the fabric and no mixing occurs during the process, the set of four fabric prints designed is an ordered series that incorporates the shapes and color combinations created by the audience. Adding meaning to a series of abstract shapes, she chose to interpret two as pebbles and two as vegetation, while exploring ideas on scale, repetition, and permutation in the way patterns were established.
The original idea of designing a set of elements, a kit of parts and pieces to create further, comes full circle with this exploration, as the audience is presented back with a designed element for it to, once again, create further. A cyclical state of transformation that could further turn these jolly and bright sets of graphic prints into garments, pillows, sheets, tablecloths, tote bags, curtains, or anything the user desires to make with it while filling its environment with a bold splash of color. A true symbiosis between designer and audience.
All four fabrics shown were printed on white Performance Linen (54" x 108" each).
Copyright © 2024 | CMY no K(key) | Carolina Izsák - All Rights Reserved.
The izeri bird logo is a Trademark of Carolina Izsák © 2015 - All Rights Reserved.
(all creative projects and photographs presented in this website belong to the author and its reproduction without the authors permission is forbidden)
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