Untitled (Living Things)

Landland is a very small graphic design & illustration studio in Minneapolis that was started by Dan Black, Jessica Seamans & Matt Zaun in the spring of 2007. We had all been making things for quite a while before that, but 2007 was when we actually moved into a real studio and built the loft and the walls and a massive printing table, and learned how to install sinks and lights and all of that. Now it's just Dan & Jes. The Landland studio doubles as a fully-functional screenprinting shop, mainly focusing on record sleeves, posters and art prints. We make these things with computers and scanners and photocopiers and drawings and fun printing techniques and whatever we need to use to get the job done. We are also about to start publishing some short-run books and a handful of very limited-edition records. Where we live tends to get very cold, so a lot of times the only thing that makes sense is to stay inside and draw tessellation patterns or the names of bands or messed-up billboards or things that you remember from back when it was fun to go outside. Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.