Nicolas Lobo

Nicolas Lobo’s book, Album Graphics,
the third volume in the [NAME] collection, is here!

Ordering your copy…
here: http://namepublications.org/nicolasbook.html

News: NewTimes

Album Graphics documents Nicolas Lobo’s temporary engagement with the Go-Go scene. Go-Go is a musical subgenre associated with funk that originated in the Washington, D.C area in the 1970s. It remains primarily popular in the area as a uniquely regional music style. Produced as dancehall music, the Go-Go sound focuses on lo-fi percussion instruments and funk-style jamming in place of dance tracks. In fact “Go-Go” refers to the event at which the music is played. While recordings are popular, the substance and definition of Go-Go is the live show. This may explain why Go-Go has never enjoyed wider success through participating in the recording industry.

For a year, Lobo worked as a complete outsider, offering free graphic design services to Go-Go bands and promoters. Because of the informal nature of Go-Go recording and distribution, the graphic identity of Go-Go is spread across a variety of mediums, from T-shirts and Twitter page layouts to jewel box sized .jpg files and animated .gif files culled from VHS tapes. Lobo’s attempts to produce album covers, concert flyers, myspace layouts and other graphic designs were met with varying levels of success and acceptance by the Go-Go scene. The results of his efforts, which marry Lobo’s signature scribbling with some version of the visual language native to the Go-Go scene, along with chat room threads and emails generated during the design process, are the contents of this book. Part hyper-extended liner notes for a non-existent album, part ethnographic coffee table book gone awry, “album graphics” settles in a third place: neither of the Go-Go scene nor entirely outside of it.

Album Graphics is the third volume in [NAME] Publications’ Miami Artists Series.

Nicolas Lobo is a Miami-based artist. He has exhibited his work at North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami Art Museum, Bass Museum of Art, Invisible-Exports, Lisa Cooley Gallery, and Marvelli Gallery. He is represented by Charest Weinberg Gallery in Miami.

[NAME] Publications is a Miami-based non-profit publishing house. It was founded in 2008 by Gean Moreno, with the help of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami. www.namepublications.org