"Soft Targets: The artwork of Landland"
February 27 - March 23
First Amendment Arts
(1101 Stinson Blvd at Broadway, NE MPLS)

Grand opening Saturday February 27, 7-10pm
Live music from Best Friends Forever &
BRLSQOTHEQUE DJs
all ages, free admission

SOFT TARGETS
First Amendment Arts is pleased to be displaying a collection of posters, CD packages, and other pieces of art designed and screenprinted by Minneapolis thing-makers Landland (Dan Black & Jes Seamans). With their studio conveniently located just two doors down the hall from First Amendment, Landland has been cranking out tons of gorgeous work and they will be lugging over every single piece they've created since their move into the 1101 Stinson Blvd warehouse in 2007. Performing live will be local pop rock outfit Best Friends Forever, featuring Landland's own Jes Seamans on bass and vocals.

LANDLAND
Completely disregarding the standard template of what a rock poster should look like, Landland's aesthetic comes from a different world—unusually sized prints, muted color schemes and obsessive drawing mark the steady stream of posters they produce for First Avenue, the Triple Rock Social Club, The Varsity Theatre and assorted basements and hole-in-the-wall spaces in the Twin Cities and across the country.

There is rarely anything simple about their work from the five layers of ink they routinely pull across their prints or the days at a time Dan Black will spend drawing a spyrograph pattern from memory. And they never take the easy way out—there are no puns based on band names or half-hearted attempts to interpret the music abstractly. Instead they create micro-worlds of fantastical domestic structures, scaffolding, decaying rollercoasters, train wrecks and swarms of ghosts. In pursuit of designing advertising for rock shows Landland end up creating works of art—each a singular finished statement that looks like the work of no one else.

AND!!!

LOOK INTO THE LIGHT
New Work by Danimal and Jes Seamans
On view Feb 13th - March 7th, 2010
Opening Reception Saturday Feb. 13th, 6-9pm
at No Coast Exhibitions and Editions
1500 West 17th Street Chicago, IL 60608

We're getting a ton of emails about this, so I thought I'd post a quick and tiny update: Our posters for The Swell Season's Seattle & St. Louis shows are available for purchase now*...they're just not up on the website. Sorry for the wait on that...I'll have them both up (as well as the new Mount Eerie poster and a few others) sometime today.

In the meantime, if you want to see what the two posters for The Swell Season look like (as well as the rest of the amazing posters for this tour), they have them up on their website, so check them out.

*For right now, the best (and I guess only) way to order them from us would be to send me an email at danblack at landland dot net and we'll hook it up. We have a decent number of both of them to sell, but I'm not really sure how long they'll be around.

Also, in other news, there was a weird and unfortunate hold-up at the record mastering stage of the Nate Denver's Neck / Best Friends Forever record-making process, but I've been assured that a test press is on it's way as we speak. I'll get more information up about that before too long, I swear.

• We went to four more Flatstocks. All of them totally ruled.

• There are a ton of new posters on here now. Almost all of them are available for you to buy. We have pretty limited quantities of some of them, so move fast.

• We made two weekly planners for the amazing Little Otsu in Portland. The first one we made is pretty close to being completely sold out. They're in the menu to the left, and available to order directly from Little Otsu's website, as well as at BuyOlympia.com and a bunch of apparently really awesome brick & mortar stores.

• We made some t-shirts for Graniph in Japan. They make a ton of awesome shirts (sort of like Threadless over here), and have an arsenal of really great artists at their disposal, so we were pretty flattered to work with them. I just found out that those are sold out too, which is kind of crazy. Hopefully we get to make some more at some point.

• We are about to start making record albums. There will be a lot more information about this soon, but the first one will be coming out in November. It's a split 12" with the totally incredible Nate Denver's Neck on one side, and the latest batch of songs from Jes' band Best Friends Forever on the other side. We're really excited about it, even if it's kinda stressing us out at the moment.

• We're starting a mailing list. We obviously aren't that great at updating anything, so you can rest assured that we probably won't be filling your inbox every time we eat a bowl of cereal or whatever...so if you want to get some kinda sparse (but TOTALLY CRUCIAL) updates as to what we're up to, and when new posters go on sale and all of that, send us an email and we'll add you.

Mostly, this tiny little update is to say thanks to all the people that stopped by and hung out at our Flatstock booth down in Austin last month. It was our first time being a part of anything like that, and constantly having a ton of really nice people around was a really great way to shake off any weird nervousness we had going into it.

Also, I meant to post a thing about this a while ago, but it kinda happened before we had a real website, and then all this other stuff happened, so I never did. We've had some work show up in a couple really great places over the last year or so:

The first of which was a two-page spread in Mike Perry's amazing book of hand-drawn typography, "Hand Job." This thing came out last year, is seriously amazing, and is completely packed with work from tons of friends and people we really look up to. Copies of it are available pretty much everywhere.

Also, we had some work picked to be in Print's 2007 Regional Design Annual. They showed both the decembers architects ",apiary..." cd and the Signal to Trust "Golden Armour" cd, as well as Matt Zaun's mailer for the "You Were Never Here" show at the Soap Factory. It was really fun to see that stuff mixed in with all of the heavy hitters.

I think that's it for now...we're working on getting the rest of the site up to date, but it might be a little longer yet. Sending us emails to make us feel bad about [whatever thing] not being up here yet would probably be a good motivator, so do that if you have some time.