Edition Announcement #151 - Christine Berrie

Industrious Tuesday greetings, collector friends! I write to you from sunny San Francisco, where I'm happily ensconced in a very hip apartment that's situated in the ground floor of a former milk-bottling factory. It's all post-industrial chic with poured concrete and raw steel beams juxtaposed with vast slabs of marble serving as counter tops and a wall of ribbed glass that lets the light shine in. It's stylish and cozy, but would be that much more so if it had a bit more art on its walls. Today's editions by the talented illustrator Christine Berrie would be just the thing.

Industrial Part 1 and Industrial Part 2 are what I imagine the pages of a thick Global Industrial catalog might look like were it handed off to J. Peterman's people. What a catalog that would be!

Christine has a lot in common with the architects who designed the loft I'm typing from — a reverence for the simple beauty of nuts & bolts, wires, junction boxes, cinderblocks and steel beams. I share their enthusiasm for the unexpected aesthetic pleasures to be discovered under the hood or behind the drywall. The aforementioned architects decided to forego the drywall entirely; instead the walls are clad in bare plywood, and the pipes that convey heat and water to the floors above are in full view, providing an oddly soothing soundtrack to my days.

There's something kind of stirring and mysterious about this stuff, and also sentimental. My dad worked at ConEd for his entire career, and some of my most thrilling childhood memories come from visits to the control room where the engineers monitored the grid and kept the lights on. It was like something from Star Trek: a wall of interconnected lights with a bank of control panels, riddled with complicated buttons and nobs, that my dad and the other engineers sat in front of and studied during their shifts. As with Christine's drawings and my current digs, the complexity of the grid before them arose from the interconnectedness of all these simple parts which, when considered apart from one and other, are easily understood.

Christine's drawings diagram and document the humble appeal of designs that were conceived with clear (and often critical) communication as their goal. I love the way the parts flow into each other within the frame and beyond. The points of connection between Industrial Part 1 and Industrial Part 2 are clear, giving us a legend with which we might be able to imagine the paths of their other circuits as they travel off the page towards connections with other unknown systems.

Speaking of connections, unknowns and the unraveling of complex systems... I'm very pleased to call your attention to our new jobs page. We're currently in search of a half-time Staff Accountant and an Office Intern to work with us at 20x200's World Headquarters on Chrystie St. We'll be adding additional listings soon, which we'll be posting there and telling you about here.

I'm back tomorrow with another duo of images that honor industriousness, plus more details on our upcoming 20x200 Collectors Confab, hosted by our generous friends at Chronicle Books. Look for me then.

Previous Newsletter : Edition Announcement #150 - Carol Padberg