By Jeff Kollath

Episode three of the Poster Tube takes us a few hours north to Minneapolis and a visit to the studio of Dan Black and Jessica Seamans of Landland. As you will see from their work and from the answers to my questions, the level of detail, care, and thought is off the charts with these two. Incredibly gifted artists, we can only hope that their best is yet to come, which is saying a lot since what they have done so far is remarkable. In our previous two installments, we talked to artists that take cues from the natural world (Marq Spusta) and the literal and real world (Swink, Inc). Now, we move onto a different plane, where construction and destruction exist side-by-side, and where subtle beauty and harsh reality live in harmony.

Tell us a little about your backgrounds and a little about Landland. Are you trained artists or graphic designers, or did you come into the poster world from a different side of things?

JES: I guess I’m not trained in anything, officially. Everything I know about screenprinting I learned from Dan. Type and the design side of postermaking is something I’m still kind of discovering, my interest stems mostly from loving to draw and looking for a kind of more practical outlet for it. Posters are great for me because I have a hard time finishing a drawing if there is no deadline. Each poster is like an assignment, and the more drawing I do in that way, the better I see and feel myself getting at drawing in general. The posters get the ball rolling and then I’m pumped to do more art print-type stuff or to make little books or other projects. The trick at that point is making time for the other stuff…

DAN: I went to art school (MCAD, in Minneapolis) for printmaking and eventually ended up graduating with a degree in graphic design, which sort of explains how I got to what I’m doing now. I guess that’s the short version of the story. I’m pretty sure I found out about the poster world because of an interview that Jay Ryan did a really long time ago for Copperpress…I think it might have been 1998 or 1999? I ended up emailing him a bunch of times to ask tons of questions about how to do this stuff and he was always really supportive and gave me really good advice. That was big, because there wasn’t really enough of a culture around posters for it to really come up much in school, and when it did, it always felt like this pejorative term.

Landland started WAY after all of that…my friend Matt Zaun and I were getting sick of our day jobs and determined to figure out a way to get something else going on. He and Jes and I had been screenprinting in his basement, but it wasn’t really working out for a whole bunch of reasons, so we saved up a little bit of money and built a studio in the breaker room of a warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis. That was in May of 2007. Jes had moved out to San Francisco for the summer, and Matt and I just spent whatever time we could building walls and a huge light table and pretty much everything else that we had complained about not having in the basement. Matt was the one that named the thing “Landland;” we were trying to figure out what to call it, because we had just started This New Thing and it needed a name, and he just kinda blurted it out. It made more sense than whatever else we had on the list, and we like that it wasn’t already imbued with some other meaning or some reference to anything that we knew about. 

On your website, you make several mentions of working/living in Minnesota and its welcoming climate. Like Wisconsin, it can be a land of extremes weather-wise. How have the climate, landscape, and the people of Minnesota inspired you and your work?

JES: I suppose the biggest influence the MN weather has had on my work is that, for about eight months of the year, there is nothing I’d rather do than sit over a space heater and draw. Inhospitable weather is great for keeping me focused. No looking out the window, longing to be running around outside. Of course, then when spring finally comes, I’m so deprived of fresh air and vitamin D that I can’t sit still and draw to save my life, so I have to plan to get nothing done around that time. Minnesota life is all about trade-offs. 

DAN: Jes is pretty dead-on. I know a lot of people get really into puffing their chests about how much they love the cold, and how great it is to have to wear a thousand layers of whatever they can throw over themselves…I’m kind of over it by now. I’d way rather just stay in and draw until I fall asleep, or shut myself into our weird windowless studio and just print all night long than go out and do…whatever it is that people love doing out there. 

Landland does a lot of CD artwork in addition to the show posters. Other than the size of the medium, how different is that process? Talk a little about working with the artists on coming up with something that communicates what their music is all about.

 DAN: I really like working with CD art, and record packaging and all of that. Posters are relatively temporal, or at least that’s how they’re presented…with album art there’s this pretense that the thing is going to be around for a while, and that it’s working directly with the music that it’s housing. There’s also the interesting design problems that come up…how do you deal with all of the information? In which order will people see all of the panels and how will they be handling these things? How can we make the layout totally ridiculous, but stay within budget? 

Working with the artists so far has been pretty great. The people that are asking us to do work for them, I think, are asking us because they’ve seen things that we’ve done before, and trust us on some level to represent them well. With record packaging, I try to ask a ton of questions (moreso than with posters) to make sure that I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what they definitely want to happen, where I can take a few liberties and do what I want, and what would be totally off-base. To be honest, a lot of people just tell us to do what we want, and if something happens that they’re not into, that’s when they’ll step in. 

In looking through your portfolio, a couple of different themes jumped out at me, but especially construction and destruction. The Swell Season posters from December show us a building in progress and other structures stacked a top one another, while the Built to Spill poster from First Avenue shows us a billboard ready to pasted with a new image. The Dillinger 4 poster features a massive train wreck. Can you talk about your inspiration for these posters and what the themes of construction/destruction represent to you?

DAN: The Swell Season posters were a technical experiment that got us really excited about printing for the millionth time. We had been wanting to try 4-color process (CMYK) printing for a while, but never had the guts to do it. We wanted these posters to be really intricate and sort of beautifully complex, and it just made sense to try to tear apart one of Jes’ watercolors for it. I wanted to tie both of the posters we were doing into a sort of loose series, so for the second one, I wanted to try to address the fact that the first poster was a flat 2-D watercolor painting, not an actual three-dimensional impossible building…for some reason this was important…so I pulled a panel of it off, and added a huge scaffold system to call out the flatness of it, and make it look like a giant version of that first poster was being built somewhere. I don’t know why I made that my mission, but it seemed to work out well enough.

The Built to Spill poster was one of those things that I had been thinking about for a while…that thing that happens out in the desert or wherever where the advertisers stop paying for their billboard space, so the owners go out and scramble the message to essentially negate whatever was supposed to be happening. Built to Spill always kinda feels like a scrambled version of something that I should totally recognize, like this weird classic rock that’s been mutated and run through one of those internet translators…where the sentences that the thing spits out sound all choppy and disjointed, but it’s way more interesting than whatever you put into it.

The Dillinger Four / Scared of Chaka poster was originally going to be really violent…kind of like this “what the fuck” mess that happened, because that was pretty much what I expected the show to be like. Dillinger Four are an institution here in Minneapolis, albeit a really sloppy drunken institution, and seeing them play in the 7th St. Entry is really one of the reasons to live here. And Scared of Chaka were on this three-day reunion thing after being broken up for a long time, so I was really excited about the idea of this unexplainable freak collision thing. 

One of my favorite posters is from the Bon Iver show at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. How did you end up with this project and what was it like creating images for a show in a cemetery? What’s up with the saw blades and the pennies?
[Editor's Note: I was at this show and bought the poster]

 DAN: The Bon Iver poster happened (I think) because our friend Kevin Tong recommended us to Mitch Putnam (who does the OMGPosters.com site, among others). Mitch was curating the tour poster series for Bon Iver and asked us to be a part of it. The show was really crazy…apparently it started at six in the morning as the sun was rising. I’ve gotten lots of emails from people that were there and they’ve all said it was incredible. With the poster, I really didn’t want to overstate the fact that it was happening in a cemetery. There’s a tiny little headstone buried in with the text, but that’s it. It would have been too much, you know? Instead, like pretty much everyone else that has ever done a poster for Bon Iver, I guess I was kinda wrapped up in the mythology of this guy hiding away in a cabin. The thing from the press release or whatever…the thing I knew about him before I’d even heard one song. I tried to address that without addressing it…every Bon Iver poster has a cabin on it, or a beard or mountains or whatever. I just skipped that and tried to hone in on what might be lying around.  

 When you both sit down to start working on a poster, what is your number one goal for each and every project? What do you hope to communicate?

 JES: I feel like I’m still getting the hang of all the different elements of screenprinting and design- composition, color, layers, type, illustration. Every time i make a poster, I’m hoping i’ll be a little more successful in one or more of these areas than i was last time– I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting lately and mostly I just want to build on whatever i did last time without completely repeating it.  

 DAN: I don’t know if I’d say I have a singular goal for any of this…I guess it’s to make something that I don’t want to bury under a stack of test prints when I’m done with it. I want the bands to be happy with whatever I’m doing. I’m really just trying to represent what they’re up to, without stepping on their toes or reiterating something they’ve already done. I also try to work within the balance of communicating what I need to about the band or the show, and maintaining a personal aesthetic…at the end of the day, I want our posters to look like a body of work, even if each piece of it is working to do its own thing. We’re still not quite there yet, but like Jes said, we’re always trying to build on the last thing we did and raise our bar a little bit.

 What’s your take on the rising popularity of concert posters both purchased at the show and online?

 JES: I haven’t given it a ton of thought, but I know that, being an incredibly visual person, I’m always longing for more of a physical and aesthetic way to connect or with the music that I love. I’d trade sound quality and portability anyday for a nice big 12-inch record sleeve that offers art that i’m not interacting with through a computer screen, that has weight in my hands and wears away with time and handling. Digital media is incredibly practical, but maybe on some subconscious level the poster-buying demographic are also looking for that more tactile experience with the bands they love. People have always loved memorabilia and perhaps the trend towards the handmade is some kind of tiny rebellion against the increasingly digitized and intangible and cold way things are packaged and presented to us. Screenprinted posters in particular are so physical, each one having been touched multiple times by a human hand, the way the ink sits raised on the paper, etc. Or, maybe people just like buying stuff…

 What’s the next step for Landland? 

 JES: The big move!!! 

DAN: Yeah, we’re kinda getting ready to move our studio and everything out to Philadelphia. It’s going to be totally crazy and hectic, but I think we’ll be in a really good spot and really able to build on what we’ve been doing here in Minneapolis. Everyone I’ve talked to sounds really optimistic and encouraging, and . That’s going to be happening sometime before next winter, probably in the fall. In the meantime though, we have a huge art show at First Amendment Arts, which is run by the people at Burlesque. That opens in about a week (Feb 27th), so we’re scrambling to get our last-minute art prints ready and everything. We’re also going to be in some design books that are coming out this year, which we’re really excited about…I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything about them yet or not though, so I won’t. We’re also in the midst of starting a record label…it’s called Landland Is Not A Record Label. Our first record is a split 12″ with Nate Denver’s Neck and Best Friends Forever, which is Jes’ band. The art opening I mentioned before will hopefully be the release show for this thing, if we can get the sleeves together in time. 

Give our readers three bands/albums that we should be listening to right now.

JES: Oh geez. I’m so bad at these. So, I just drove back from Chicago solo with a lot of time to listen to music. I had an MP3 cd of the Mississippi Records Cassette series vols. 1-10, which are incredible. I alternated that and various R. Kellys, whose lyrical stylings I can analyze endlessly and enthusiastically. At home my recent favorite drawing musics have been anything by Pierre Bastien or Shugo Tokumaru. Also, I have been indulging my urge to listen to the song “knockturne” by Will Oldham on repeat. That’s more than three, whoops. 

 DAN: I just drove back from Philadelphia and didn’t really listen to anything except podcasts. Pretty much just Radiolab and Savage Love the whole way. For music…I listen to Lungfish all the time. I also listen to a lot of the Anticon stuff: Why? and Subtle and Themselves and all of that. I’m really into Parts & Labor from Brooklyn, but I can’t play it at the studio because Jes thinks it sounds like Jane’s Addiction, which is what she says about Lungfish too. Oh, and I’ve also been listening to the second Drive Like Jehu album a lot too. As far as I know, it doesn’t sound like Jane’s Addiction.