David Rudnick

David Rudnick makes art for a time where modern life increasingly feels like a surreal nightmare.  As society marches towards a path of controlled globalization, the mechanisms with which society reproduces itself are both increasingly alien and secretive. David Rudnick’s work forces the individual to think outside of the repressive apparatus of ideological control that characterizes the modern industrial age, producing thought-provoking works that celebrate and acknowledge the context they are created in. 

Rudnick was born in the UK, and after being turned down at the Ruskin school at Oxford, he studied art history at Yale University.   He is the art director of Making Club Time in Philadelphia and has collaborated with artists like Evian Christ and Nicolas Jaar.  Rudnick studiously applies a broad-based mix of research to his work, and his references often have a deep sophistication.

Rudnick began by experimenting with purely visual work, but he realized that he simultaneously wanted to ground his work with the specificity of language and historical context.  He began to experiment with new ideas, typefaces, colors and various original ways of structuring information within his work.  His approach mimics the approach Making Time took to presenting the stylistic evolution of new music to their audience.

One of Rudnick’s most essential locations for not only creative inspiration but for life in the modern world, is the nightclub.  Nightclubs are spatially confusing, without a clear structure or hierarchy.  When a group of people experiences a new track for the first time together, a beautiful moment of ego dissolution and possibility is created - a rarity in modern life.

Perhaps the most notable and striking aspect of Rudnick’s work – the typeface, is often completely original.  Rudnick often designs a typeface that is similar in many regards to an existing one, but he gives it a voice that naturally emerges in his creative process.  The creation of the typeface is the most time-consuming facet of Rudnick’s work, as each detail is rigorously perfected.  Rudnick sees the idea of typography as a means to create an alternative to the past that already exists, interacting with notions of collective memory and reconstruction.  The weight, verse, and structure of the typefaces he creates allow Rudnick to take on their voice.

In response to the modern condition, Schopenhauer wrote that artistic production and aesthetic experience was one of the only ways to escape the drudgery of the human condition. Rudnick’s work, in a world over-saturated with images and the white noise of advertising, offers us a compelling window of escape from our modern lives.