Peter Halley: Maintain Speed
monograph
concept and book design
Artist Peter Halley is celebrated for his “coloured Day-Glo paintings of square cells and rectilinear conduits, titled with references ranging from the erudite to the pop.”
For the design of Peter Halley: Maintain Speed, the artist allowed us to re-think and re-present his work. Combining Halley’s materials as an artist/performer and COMA’s tools as designers created a new set of symbiotic possibilities.
““Maintain Speed” is gorgeous and brilliantly conceived, a conceptual glove as sumptuous and smart as the work it conveys.”Jane Harris, Bookforum Magazine, Fall 2000
Structured as a large animation, where each ‘shot’ narrates the artist’s work in sequence, the book design navigates readers through the book and its implied 3D spaces: you “walk” through installations, room to room, moving close to a painting, then backing away. The strategy functions as object, exhibition space and flowchart; film, novelistic thriller and rollercoaster.