Review by Aggie Toppins

For the month of August, Public Works was on display at Andrew Rafacz gallery. The show featured a collection of art projects by Chris Eichenseer, Justin Fines, Cody Hudson and Andy Mueller. On several evenings, there were featured guest speakers. The first Speaker Night, on August 6, drew quite a large crowd for Chris Kaskie, publisher and chief operating officer of Pitchfork Media, and Jay Ryan, local poster artist and owner of the Bird Machine. After an introduction by Chris Eichenseer of Some Odd Pilot, Chris Kaskie stood front-and-center to discuss the history of Pitchfork, a well respected and popular music publication.

Pitchfork was founded in the mid 1990s by Ryan Schreiber, then fresh out of high school, in his parents' Minneapolis basement. In 1999, Schreiber uprooted Pitchfork and brought it to Chicago to set up shop in a different basement. In the next couple of years, traffic to the site began to build up and the pet project became a business. In 2004, Chris Kaskie became the company's first employee. "We went down into the basement and we had a sandwich," Kaskie said about the day he met Schreiber and joined Pitchfork.

Kaskie paid all due respect to Schreiber's love of music and passion over his project. But, he admitted, "There was a lot that needed to be put in place. Things like payroll, health insurance, accounts payable..." So, five years ago, Kaskie embarked on the process of overseeing the operations aspect of the business. He has been helping Pitchfork grow ever since.

Much of Pitchfork's success can be attributed to the intuition and good sense of its leaders. Kaskie commented that many of the company's brand decisions were made with a self-assuredness that came "inherently natural to Ryan." But more importantly, Kaskie believes, Pitchfork's real differentiator is that it, "showcases something that other people can make their own decisions about." In other words, Pitchfork Media publishes it's own untarnished opinions. They are not influenced by advertisers or other holders of purse strings and they believe that by taking this stance, they encourage others to form their own opinions as well. The result, although not always lucrative, is honest and authentic. It's what contributes to Pitchfork's reputation as an authority in music criticism. Kaskie concluded his talk with a slideshow of past Pitchfork home pages. Since it started in 1995, Pitchfork's history proved to be a little bit of internet history too. With each new technological breakthrough on the Web, Pitchfork made adjustments. Since the room was filled with many artists and designers, Kaskie's showing of the transformation of Pitchfork's logo and graphic identity added a little extra appeal.

After a short break, Jay Ryan began his talk with a visual that certainly acquainted the audience with his special blend of charm. He showed a photo of a greyhound, Ryan's own canine friend Seth, sleeping upside down. Seth has made many appearances in Ryan's posters, as have many other animals.

Jay Ryan started down several paths, from architecture to industrial design to painting, before finding the career he has today. "A lot of my friends were designers and I played in a band," he said. So he found himself making illustrations for band posters. It was when Ryan took a job at Screwball press cleaning screens, that he fell into printmaking. In January 1999, he started the Bird Machine in his basement. Today, Ryan's print shop is in Skokie and band posters are still the bulk of what he produces.

Ryan spent time talking about his influences-- artists and designers like Joseph Cornell, Egon Schiele, Chris Ware and Art Chantry. In fact, Jay Ryan only uses hand-drawn typography because Art Chantry told him that his "computer type sucked." Ryan's process is very old-school. He manually produces his screens using a photo emulsion process and a film-masking material called rubylith. "Besides the smell, one of the things that's unique about our shop is that there are no computers," he joked. Ryan talked about some of his favorite printing tricks, like split fountain printing, and showed beautiful examples.

The audience audibly showed their interest as Ryan went through slides of his posters and a few commercial projects. Boasting goldfish on wheels, bears driving lawn mowers and dive bars rocketing into space, each project is a window into Ryan's delightful imagination. "I like my job," he said several times throughout his talk.

Ryan's business model is simple and genius. "I print 300-500 posters but the band gets 75-100 and they don't see them until they're hanging on the wall. I sell the rest on my Web site for about $20 each, a price that most high school kids can afford." When asked how he received the creative upperhand as such, Ryan cleverly responded, "I get paid very little, so the trade off is 'no input'. As soon as a drummer starts critiquing the way type sits on a page, then I start adding zeros." At the same time, Ryan admitted that the two smartest things he ever did was hire someone to help him print and hire someone else to manage the business side of the Bird Machine, things like answering phone calls and mail orders. "My job is drawing bears," he said. Among Ryan's other accomplishments is a book entitled, 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels: A Decade of Hot Dogs, Large Mammals, and Independent Rock, and the founding of a traveling poster fair called Flatstock, which comes to Chicago via the Pitchfork Music Festival each summer. Flatstock also travels to Seattle, Austin and Dresden each year with the goal of supporting the work of individual poster artists and small print shops like Ryan's own. The rules of Flatstock are simply, "No dealers, no agents, no collectors," said Ryan. The artist must be there, in person, selling their own work.

In the near future, Ryan will release a second book called Animals and Objects In and Out of Water. It can be purchased online at amazon.com and locally at Quimby's bookstore. To purchase any of Ryan's posters, visit www.birdmachine.com.