Steven Harrington

Issue No. 0052

Steven Harrington lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Aside from owning and operating National Forest Design with fellow artist Justin Krietemeyer, he still finds time to work on both commissioned and self-inspired art projects of his own.

Influenced by images discovered in Time Life Encyclopedias 1965-1982, thrift stores and Bill Withers, his art might be termed contextual objectivism. He views each piece he creates as a tangible object that is part and parcel of a larger context; the object helps define the context and the context helps define the object. Whatever feel or meaning the observer takes away from the piece belongs to the observer. Nothing is shoved down his or her throat. Discovery is the key.

He has exhibited work in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Montreal, Tokyo, Melbourne, Barcelona, Paris, Milan, and Berlin.

* Watch the Steven Harrington Chronicle

Paris, France issue release event information

Featuring:
Steven Harrington

Essay by:
Mark Owens (excerpt)

Issue photography by:
Brigitte Sire

Designed by:
Steven Harrington & John Carlos Harrington

• 7.5 x 10 In. (19.5 x 25.4 cm)
• 96 pages with spot varnish covers
• Four color offset printed, perfect bound
• Hand packaged & numbered ltd. edition of 1000

• One Feather Bookmark
• One Steven Harrington Scarf
• Designed specifically for this issue edition
• Scarf is wrapped around issue edition
• Produced with generous support from Sixpack France

• Sold out

• Related Item: Arkitip + Steven Harrington + Sixpack France Tee
• Related Item: Steven Harrington Laptop Sleeve
• Related Item: Steven Harrington iPhone Slider

As the British architecture critic Reyner Banham remarked in his pioneering study of the city, Los Angeles is a place whose dynamic of constant movement and open spaces is intimately bound up with a sense of optimism and possibility. Raised in the middle-class suburb of La Verne by a Mexican-American mother and an Irish-American father, Steven Harrington is, in this respect, a representative Angelino. Having grown up skateboarding, biking, and driving the freeways, he is both adept at the particularly mobile, improvisatory ways of being native to Los Angeles, and, not surprisingly, also happens to be incredibly industrious, easy-going, and optimistic. But if Steven's background and disposition are thus typical of L.A., his work is perhaps less so, at least in terms of the ways that graphic design has typically been understood here.

In recent decades west coast culture?s influence on graphic design has tended to emphasize two dominant trajectories. On the one hand, the lessons learned from Las Vegas and the Sunset Strip gave rise to an affirmative postmodernism that took deconstruction?s anti-foundational critique as license for a formal excess that has since been readily absorbed by an omnivorous culture industry. On the other hand, Southern California's culture of self-enclosure -- from the secluded space of the domestic interior and the automobile to the cults of fitness, yoga and meditation -- has fostered a certain brand of graphic hermeticism that, while often compelling, seldom moves beyond celebrating the process of its own creation. For one, graphic design constructs a multilayered text to be deciphered, for the other, it is content to invent a singular, entirely private language.

Read the full essay in Arkitip Issue No. 0052