Feb 1st - Feb 22nd 2007:
John M Flaxman Library, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA
9th March - 13th May 2007
Washington University Libraries, St. Louis, USA
1 June - 31 July 2007
Rhode Island School of Art and Design, Providence, USA
20 August - 2 October 2007
Noosa Regional Gallery, Australia
Menthol Daze is being shown as part of Arcadia Id Est - A travelling exhibition organised by the Centre for Fine Print Research, The University of the West of England.
The booklet is 107mm X 150mm. The inside page once opened is 297mm x 420mm (A3)
The cover is printed on white card, the inside page is black and white on 130g cartridge paper. There is space for 14 collectors' cards. Each edition has 9 cards pasted in. The collectors' cards are printed in colour on glossy paper. Menthol Daze is produced in editions of 7, it is now on its third edition.
Menthol Daze is a fold-out page containing spaces for collected cigarette cards. The booklet is produced under my own invented brand Elysian's Cigarettes.
The images are manipulated collages from Salem cigarette advertisements and images from the Sierra Club publications from the 'fifties. The cards are numbered and when pasted into the booklet, text accompanies each picture. The images are intended to represent the clichéd images of delightful countryside, so often used in selling products - by attempting to make them appear natural. The text that accompanies each image however details reasons to be uncertain of the countryside. Threats in the natural environment range from nuclear testing contamination, dangerous infections carried in rivers and annual lawn mower injuries, to the link between temperature change and heart attacks. The intention of Menthol Daze was to juxtapose threat and relaxation found in the Great Outdoors in order to satirize the inflated claims made for nature in advertisements - cereals, shampoo, cars, sweets and snacks, insurance and mobile phones.
This booklet was originally created as part of my PhD submission, for the University of Brighton.
