Movement & Connections

JF: Yeah, [when I was in high school,] it was the early days of the internet, and I did websites for the school newspaper, the ecology club, etc. … in the world of Netscape navigator in the mid ‘90s. There was only a handful of us then, so I was doing a lot of web design work before college.

JF: Laughs – [Before the UN], I ran my own studio for about seven or eight years, focused on helping nonprofits bring progressive ideas to life with graphic design. I helped new organizations develop their logos and branding systems – their visual identities.

Also [as an art major], I’ve done a lot of op-art, poster campaigns, and websites… 

JF: “Respect” is something that comes up a lot, and “love.”

I’ve done some things that are political … But also [I do things around] joyfulness, along with respect and love. I think those are the main themes, even though they take very different forms.

One campaign I did was called “Corporations Can’t”, for which I did a bunch of posters calling out the absurdity of corporate personhood. And that, to me, is about respect, because a corporation isn’t a person, and [considering them as such] is not respectful to people.

[Each one is a] very different type of campaign – each one looks different – but to me they all go back to that concept of respect and love.

JF: I don’t remember exactly how that got started… In college, I took a political science class, and then I studied in London for a year. And it was right around the time “No Logo” came out, so I was reading a lot about how the corporate world works. I was also getting to the more advanced years in art school, so I was able to do more print-making and stuff that was more directed on my own. 

So I think that is both my knowledge of that world and my ability to create something around it [that] came around the last two years of college. My thesis in college was a little magazine that never really got produced then, but it [eventually turned into my firm], “Yield Media”. 

JF: That was where the name [Yield Media] came from, yeah. I wasn’t quite as articulate [as I am now, with the tagline] “bringing progressive ideas to life”. But that was always the idea. It started [with the idea that] the mainstream media isn’t always covering ideas from [certain perspectives], and it was a way to communicate some of those ideas. Through design. 

JF: For sure. I think the stuff there was much more – not necessarily political, but it was much more reactionary to policy and politics. And now it’s much more focused on the values of respect and the values of love.

I think a lot of my work was about highlighting unfairness and highlighting disrespect. And now it’s more about highlighting respect and highlighting love. So it’s more focused on the positive side. I definitely think there’s more joy in it than before. 

JF: I think so, and it sounds so cheesy – laughs.

JF: But I think I want to leave room for some of the more political stuff. I think, for this show, the ideas I’m going to have are probably a bit more focused on a concept around equity. 

To me, the “movement and connections” theme – especially around refugees – is really an issue about respect. 

That idea of – what do we call home? And who is allowed at your home? Is it an ownership over space? To me, that boils down to “respect” … [I think] what I’m going to do here is call out the idea that there’s this planet, and it’s a shared home. It’s all ours.