A Year of Conscious Practice

A Year of Conscious Practice is an

online publication committed to supporting criticality among emergent curators of contemporary art in Aotearoa. Dedicated to the practitioners in our field who are at the beginning of their careers, A Year of Conscious Practice represents twelve opportunities; twelve spaces for dialogue or reflection—borrowing the basic format of the twelve-month calendar year. We propose this second alternative ‘calendar’ as a space for reflective, alert and purposeful dialogue that responds to the experiences and challenges of the outcomes-driven, time-poor curator.

The website was designed by Dexter Edwards and Son La Pham and is typeset in Seb McLauchlan’s Gestalt typeface. This chameleonesque Grotesk comes with a number of alternate glyphs for key letters like a k G K R Q & 2 3 7 etc., several of which were used here, side by side. The point of this is not quite clear to me. It’s reminiscent of interspersed letters from a different typeface, as it sometimes accidentally happened with metal type, and as it was done as makeshift in dry transfer lettering — but here with perfectly matching weight and proportions. Is it simply the desire for playful variation? A subtle, almost subconscious stumbling block for the reader? An in-joke for typophiles? Or a subversive comment on the uniformity and repetitiousness of the typographic pattern?