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Since graduating from Cranbrook in 1987 at age forty-eight, Fella has taught at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). In his work, damaged and defective forms--from third-generation photocopies to broken pieces of transfer type--are assembled by means of Fella's formidable yet technologically out-of-date manual skills, including hand lettering and meticulous paste-up production. In Fella's work, the unfettered mind of a Dada/ Fluxus hippie confronts the dexterous hand of a traditional commercial artist. Fella designed over sixty posters for the Detroit Focus Gallery between 1987 and 1990. The gallery, by giving Fella total freedom in designing these low-budget posters, provided a public outlet for experimental design.
Fella has rarely worked with computers, relying instead on a battery of hand skills that have become nearly obsolete. Yet his work has a structural affinity with digitally produced typography. In Fella's words, "I actually feel that I started thinking like a computer a while back, almost inadvertently or instinctively. Some of my work preceded the computer, in that I was doing all these things that were difficult to do manually, but are so obvious and easy to do on the computer, like the mixes of typefaces, the slight differences in size, the distortions, the irregularities....I just avoided the first phase of the computer, the bitmap phase." While Fella has sidestepped the computer, his students--including Barry Deck, who began designing typefaces while attending Cal Arts--are avid users. Deck's Template Gothic, which debuted in the pages of Emigre in 1990, was a response to one of Fella's handmade posters. Generated in the digital environment, the bruised characters of Template Gothic are soft and organic yet linked to the industrial realm of mass-produced stencils.
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Robert Bielat/Lincoln Eddy
Sculpture |
