FLEFF 25th Anniversary: Artist and Designer Patti Capaldi
By Patricia Zimmermann, March 13, 2022
Kudzu propelled artist and graphic designer Patti Capaldi to consider the ecological manifestation of Entanglements, the theme of the 25th Anniversary of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF)
Often referred to by its nickname "mile-a-minute," kudzu is a creeping, climbing, and invasive perennial vine.
In the heart of the pandemic in May 2021, Capaldi, assistant professor of Art and Design at Ithaca College, offered to create the artwork and design for FLEFF 2022., the 25th Anniversary of the festival.
A few months later, she was participating in an artist’s residency in Virginia.
She began documenting the entangled vines of kudzu in the landscape.
For Capaldi, kudzu materialized the idea of entanglements in nature. As she thought through the graphic design for the FLEFF, she began taking photos of kudzu.
The poster translates the kudzu image with a half tone dot screen to provide variations. This process transforms a continuous tone image into pointillist dots, referencing the printing process and making the background layer more graphic for the overall design.
Another design element emerged: a gradient with an enmeshment of colors that move from warmer to cooler with red, orange and green, a set of complimentary colors contrasted on the color wheel.
She decided that the typography for the festival theme would itself be entangled. Fracturing the large type into outlines that break, overlap, and weave with each other, she explored the idea of “type as image,”
She designed two posters to function either alone or as a pair.
“The design is conceptual rather than denotative. It keeps the elements simple, clean, and clear so that the viewer does not have to work, “ she explains.
Capaldi is also the coordinator of the Graphic Design Minor.
She has been the recipient of many awards and artists residencies including a New York Foundation for the Arts and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation Award, the Gottlieb Foundation Award, and an AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) Nomination Award, as well as Fellowships at the MacDowell Foundation, the Millay Foundation, the Banff Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, among others. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group and solo shows.
Most recently, her art and design work has been published in Message Journal, Issue 5: COVID-19 SPECIAL ISSUE Capturing visual insights, thoughts and reflections on 2020/21 and beyond in the UK, and can be accessed here: https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/18929
Capaldi has worked as a freelance graphic designer for over twenty-five years in some of the country’s leading editorial art departments such as Random House, Harper Collins, FSG, WW Norton, Scholastic, Martha Stewart, The Metropolitan Museum, and MIT Press as well as many brand agencies and design boutiques such as Wolf Olins and Segal Savad. Capaldi’s art and design practice is based in a shared interest in digital visual culture and how meaning is constructed and communicated through visual images.
Capaldi will discuss her fine art practice in conversation with Jennifer Jolly, professor of Art History, at a special FLEFF event on April 7 at Zoom. Details and registration HERE
FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT