Ordinary heroes

Montreal poster artist Jack Dylan rocks
a fine line

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“It’s weird. I was a poster artist but didn’t know it,” says Jack Dylan, a painter and illustrator many Montrealers know as a poster designer first and foremost. Since he moved here in late 2003 at the indirect encouragement of Seripop, Dylan’s designs have become inseparably identified with events at the now-defunct Electric Tractor space and its direct descendent, Friendship Cove, both of which have provided him not only with a home but with a surrogate family of young artists. Moreover, they’ve become immediately identifiable as distinctly his own.

Looking back on his art-school days, Dylan sees the seeds of his poster-art career in the oversize mock posters and book jackets, for Shakespeare plays and his own imaginary crime novels, he was painting at the time. Even his approach to colour, laid down in solid blocks, augured the silkscreened works he would come to have in his portfolio, one less and less related to the hermetic fine-arts world.

“I love the music scene for its energy. Coming from a fine-arts background, I realized that the audiences weren’t in the galleries. They were at the shows. You can get any kind of audience to go see bands in Montreal, all the time. I loved that energy. I wanted to do art shows that were a big event. At my first one-man show, we had can-can and burlesque dancers, absinthe being served, people showing up in costumes.

“In Montreal, just doing fine-arts shows, I wasn’t getting enough of the energy that I wanted. I guess I was greedy, I wanted attention. I noticed that the musicians get quite a bit of attention, and if you want a piece of that, the thing to do is get involved. As someone who can only play the kazoo, I had to find my way.”

Dynamic doodles

In recent months, Dylan has embarked on efforts in the realm of comics, which in turn has blatant precedents in his poster work. His designs, usually photocopied, are characterized by clean, bold linework, deadpan wit and not-infrequent word balloons. They also, as often as not, function within a series of related designs which construct, if not a functional narrative, at least a larger arc imbuing each design with extra impact.

Dylan cites Adrian Tomine and Jaime Hernandez, the comic field’s high-profile observers of quotidian detail, as strong inspirations, but his personal favourite of his own poster series, the “hipsters versus supers” as he calls them, indicate that it goes back way further than that. They show recognizable figures from the local indie scene (including his now-girlfriend, Giselle Webber of the Hot Springs) locked in battle with superheroes from the Marvel pantheon.

“The reason I can draw is because I was drawing comic-book characters for a long time—the Marvel characters in particular. Those battles have been happening in my head for a long time. I was addicted to television as a kid, so these people, Captain Kirk and Spider-Man, are really real to me. They’re ideas that I know very well. I want to be Spider-Man! Making the artwork is the closest I can come to bringing the fantasy to life.

“Also, I’ve always seen a parallel between artists and superheroes, especially a team of artists. I like the idea that one person’s a silkscreener, one’s a sculptor and one’s a singer—and together, they’re a team, a force. Everyone has a different power. At the Electric Tractor and here at Friendship Cove, that’s the idea.”

Really unreal

The hipsters-versus-supers series and other fantastic bursts of pop-culture cool may be cute, and other series offering portraits of political figures and celebrities have their punch as well. But it will be argued that Dylan’s most effective works are those that seem like random panels from a comic book about ordinary scenester life in the 514. Familiar faces and landmarks fuse with captured remarks to blur the line—almost erase it, in fact—between real life and the artist’s simulacrum.

“Anyone who knows me knows that I do impressions of everyone I know. I’m a mimic. Any friend I have, I can do an impression of. I’ve always had a weird way of relating to the world, more as an imitator than as an actual normal person.

“It’s all about observation, really, and seeing life as a story. I think it has to do with the conditioning of watching the world through television in the first place, having that distorted perspective ingrained in me. Not really making the separation between cartoon and reality, seeing people as characters instead of real people. That’s been a problem of mine—girlfriends have gotten mad at me, friends have said, ‘Everyone’s a character in your world, Jack, and it’s not always nice.’”