Raeann Van Zee

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6,465
MDes Thesis Exhibition
2024My thesis work was a meditation on labor, its value, the exchange that occurs between maker and reciever, and considering alternative curriencies for labor. I explored those themes by producing a large quantity of books (14 books each in editions of 100), recording the time spent in production (6,465 minutes), and offering the books as free for the taking during my exhibition. Takers were offered the chance to leave items in exchange for my labor. After the exhibition was over, roughly 1100 copies were taken, and I received around 50 things in return, ranging from food items, giftcards, notes, knick knacks, and other books. 

Select Publications
2022-2024 Names Carved into a Rock: 2024
Pictures of the Sky: 2024
Collections: 2024
Undesigned Structures, William Morris: 2024
Found Objects: 2023
Designing with Care, a Need for Craft: 2023
Mother Goose’s Words of Wit and Wisdom: 2023
Shared Space, Blue Line: 2022
Intake/Output: 2022

link to small press website
In Response to Scrapbooks
2023This project responds to Ellen Garvey’s essay “Scissoring and Scrapbooks: 19th Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating.” The essay retells the practice of scrapbooking that some 19th century women engaged in lines cutting out words or sentences from books to paste into their own scrapbooked stories, knowledges, or poems. This alternate and independent form of publishing became a practice of knowledge building, using repurposed information to form something new. I made scrapbooked texts of my own by printing out PDFs of the texts that underpin a lot of my own design practice, and physically collaging lines of text from them to create new compositions - thus forming new ideas and knowledge by integrating separate documents. This study currently lives in a book, as well as a screenprinted newsprint broadside. 

Experimental Materials
2022This project considers the substrates that we typically use to print, and the alternative everyday items that could potentially be printed on.

Image Making Posters
2024A series of posters that consider the compositional qualities and communication abilities of images. They do this by relating disparate photos to one another in a single composition, and using images as the sole design component. 

Experimental Type Design
2023This experimental font design was made in tandem with my design friend and collaborator, and explores the infinite possible combination of letters within language, and the randomness of those letter pairings. We each designed half of the alphabet in our own expressive style, without seeing what the other was working on. After surprising one another with our work and combining the letters into one font, we played with the infinite combinations of our distinctly different letter styles. 

Sub-Created
2022An exhibition that documents 7 different process-driven ways to co-create with my environment in an interative fashion. It’s a meditation on the human instinct to create, and combines design with a variety of making methods and materials. 

Quilted
2023Poster design that represents personal images through the motif of the quilt, a form that I have a personal tie to. Thread interacts with the poster, breaking the 2-D plane of the design and reinforcing textile as a theme of the work.

2D Compositional Form Exercises
 A series of iterative form-making exercises meant to introduce students to the fundamentals of graphic composition with an emphasis on observations, process, hierarchy, and abstration. The class concluded with a collaborative book and series of posters that documented their work, which we exhibited at the UIC School of Design Winter Show. 
Student Work
2D Form Studio - 100 level

Typographic Exercises
Various typographic exercises meant to explore both the expressive and legible potential of type. 

Student Work
Typography - 200 level

raeannvanzee@gmail.com             (641) 629-1842                 www.bovinepress.com