It all started with Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau's troubles promoting their band.
What does an Aids Wolf look like? What colors and images would represent the musical realm in which such a creature prowls? What graphic representation would do it justice?
These are questions that Chloe and Yannick, both members of the noise-rock band Aids Wolf who go by first names only on their business card, addressed as they designed and produced their own T-shirts and promotional posters. As these two art school dropouts from Montreal created more art for their band, other area rockers took notice. Soon, Chloe and Yannick had become the leaders of their field, artists who used advertisements as their medium.
\We were printing our own T-shirts and posters, and more and more, other bands we met were interested in our work and decided to hire us, and that's how Seripop started,"" Yannick explained.
Seripop, short for Serigraphie Populaire, was Chloe and Yannick's response to the ""pure crap"" others printed for their clients. Believing they could do a better job, the two created a screenprinting shop called Seripop in their Montreal loft in 2000. After two years of honing their screenprinting skills, the duo established a full-service design and printing outfit, realizing their goal of ""painting"" in bulk, creating mass-produced, handmade prints and posters for bands they admired.
Asked which bands Seripop likes at the moment, the number of obscure bands Yannick ticked off was overwhelming. Near the top of their list is the Philadelphia band An Albatross, which Yannik describes as a ""political- leftist, hardcore band with keyboards."" Other underground favorites include: Sickbay, Air Police, US Maple, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Wolf Eyes, the Chinese Stars and, of course, Sonic Youth. Yannick said he's particularly proud of a 16-poster series Seripop printed for a recent Chinese Stars tour-a different poster for each stop on the tour.
Not all of Seripop's artwork is for obscure, underground noise rock. Some of the better-known acts they have worked with include Hot Hot Heat, Slayer, Yo La Tengo, The Unicorns, Xiu Xiu and Deerhoof. They sell most of their art through their Web site at and through gallery tours. Seripop's recent one-night stop through Madison with the Little Friends of Printmaking was well attended. Whether you want to puzzle your friends with eccentric art or simply want to be the only person on your floor not to have the typical Dave Matthews poster, Seripop's obscure art might do the trick.
Not content to only promote tours with their visually rambunctious art, the duo is currently crossing the nation on an art-rock tour of their own. Indeed, it seems that the exuberant nature of Seripop's art, far from belonging in stuffy galleries, lends itself well to a corresponding art-rock tour. Yannick said they decided ""adopting the band way of traveling around to show our work was the best way to promote ourselves.""
""We're hitting Western cities with our heart, day after day,"" said Yannick of the tour. He might have meant to say ""art;"" with his pronounced French-Canadian accent, ""art"" easily becomes ""heart."" But if you've seen Seripop's work, ""heart"" works just as well in this context-the pieces are clearly designed with a tireless dedication to detail and composition that signify devotion. As difficult and inpenetrable as many of Seripop's favorite bands may be, their art is immediately accessible and often as provocative and edgy as the underground scene Seripop chronicles. While the vast majority of their eye-popping work demands attention, many of the tour posters require close scrutiny to unravel and de-code exactly which bands are on the bill. It seems the trend in rock screenprinting is to contort and disguise the band names, meshing the text into the artwork so that after minutes of squinting and head-scratching the viewer comes away triumphantly announcing: ""That poster is for a Yeah Yeah Yeahs show. I think.""
Yannick-with his slight frame and huge, square glasses that look so nerdy they might almost be cool in a few years-presided over the show, which included not only art but also vegetables and blueberry pie for customers and indie rock playing from dusty speakers on the floor. Yannick taped a strip of yellow legal paper with ""Seripop"" written across it to his chest, presumably to avoid confusion. Chloe, Yannik's partner in crime, was conspicuously not present. A flyer on the wall announced that she was stopped at the Canadian border and turned back because ""she likes to fight too much.""
Aside from battling border patrols, the future looks busy for Seripop. Aids Wolf is on hiatus during the Seripop art tour, but Yannik hopes to keep the band going, noting that there is a possibility for a small release on Switch Records. He said that Seripop is working on an installation with fellow Montreal artist Matt Moroz. Yannick says that they have been researching ""biographies and books about crazy people and serial killers, actually, to try to picture people's insanity and over-productivity, and to picture that through building a single room where someone like that would live."" This room would be made up of hundreds of objects and drawings, each with multiples, so that they could take the installation on the road and recreate it in different cities.
Seripop is also a charter member of Black Rainbow, an ""art gang"" made up of poster artists with the goal of stretching across the continent to unite and support like-minded artists. The Black Rainbow project is currently working on publishing a quarterly magazine that will feature drawings by their members as well as artists they admire. Yannik said the magazine should be out around late November or early December. If you can't wait that long, you can check out Seripop's work in the book ""Swag: Art Posters of the 90's"" by Spencer Drate and Art Chantry.
