You may not have realised it, but if you've visited Melbourne's Federation Square you will have seen Sean Hogan's work. The hip and award winning LED matrix typeface used in the signage throughout the National Gallery of Victoria, ACMI, and the numerous bars and restaurants in the Square is
Hogan's design, as is the Federation Square logo the "F" in the square. Hogan produced these while working with Tomato, the famous international design company, for the Fed Square architecture team Lab.
Hogan's graphic work is in the functional weave of Fed Square, but perhaps
its most spectacular appearance has been on the façade of the Squareıs newly opened and immensely popular and stylish bar, Transport. One hundred and seventy panels printed onto the glass louvres that make up the faceted street frontage facing onto the cityıs major tram and train exchange.
Hogan's translucent mural is an like an immense wall of intricately layered and energetic graffiti sweeping the eye through a panorama of architectural fragments, birds, clouds and forest.
"I think of what I did with Transport as a kind of public visual art," he points out, "but it's also the corporate identity and part of the architecture, and so itıs fused with the urban space of the
everyday."
But Hogan can also work fluently on a more intimate scale, whether using digital printing technology or hands-on processes like print-release. Deft collisions of details from urban fabric and geometry with chaotic swarms of silhouetted foliage and birds, his smaller canvases are exhilarating visual
remixes more like an intoxicated and vivid dance than an abstract art. Hogan's youthful and very contemporary talent, like his enthusiasm, seems as
boundless as it is restlessly original. Catch it while you can. |
