Foundations

Foundations

In art school, you begin with Foundations. Before you specialize in a creative field or a particular medium, you spend time (a year or several semesters) learning a broad curriculum of tools and techniques for a life of making and creative exploration. An aspiring sculptor might spend a semester charting color values and learning color theory. A young graphic designer might take a life-drawing course to internalize the proportions of the human body. Foundations is a communal experience – where emerging artists come together to learn, and where experienced artists reexamine what they thought they knew. In either case, Foundations provides the “building blocks” of art education. 

In this spirit, Apply presents Foundations: a sticky crash-course in our favorite medium; a celebration and remix of our favorite touchstones of art history. It is our invitation to begin to play with an array of art historical icons and concepts in your daily life. As a company on a mission to build & empower a creative community, Foundations is our starting point – our beginning – from which we hope to build upon in the years to come.  

  • Sticky Pictures: first and foremost, we’re in love with pictures.The foundation of any Apply sticker is a great picture. A sticker is a kind of picture – a sticky picture – you get to live with and play with. Every sticker we make should be memorable, meaningful, and filled with creative potential. 
  • Peel & Reveal: Any good artist exploits the potential of their medium. As a company, we aim to tap into the full range of creative possibilities of our favorite medium. A sticker is constructed of two layers of adhered vinyl: a top layer (the sticker) and a bottom layer (the liner). Usually, when a sticker is peeled, you see a whole bunch of nothing – a laminated piece of white paper that ends up in the trash. At Apply, we’re obsessed with the creative possibilities of both layers. We print on both, and each time you peel, something extraordinary should be revealed or come into greater focus. 
  • Sticky – but not too sticky: One of the most important parts of a sticker is its adhesive. Too often, stickers are made with bad adhesives: ones that aren’t sticky enough, causing the sticker to quickly peel; others are too strong and leave a nasty residue; both are unpleasant, and we’ve solved by using a wonderful adhesive called “Magic Stick.” Magic Stick preserves the surface of your possessions, and allows you to remove, reposition, and re-Apply your stickers. Try our stickers here, there or over there - there’s no wrong way to Apply!
  • Remix Everything: Remix is neither a specific technique, nor does it involve a particular medium. Instead, it’s an artistic point of view – a hunger for novel combinations of disparate objects, ideas, and mediums. When you embrace this mindset, the creative possibilities are limitless. Our stickers are designed to be combined, layered, and collaged. Each sticker incorporates and juxtaposes source material from across the globe – photographs, text, illustrations, paintings, and more.

Each sticker in Foundations plays with these concepts: endlessly remixable; visually sticky – but not too sticky; layered and delightfully peel-able; and all rooted in beautiful, iconic imagery from art history. In Queens, a bust of Nefertiti is layered atop a photograph of another feminine icon, Georgia O'Keeffe. In Frame in a Frame, a baroque frame is set within a late 19th century watercolor of the night sky after the eruption of Krakatoa, Indonesia. In Color Wheel, a scientific diagram rests atop an Alfred Steiglitz photograph of New York City; and in Detour, the shape of a butterfly is masked with the image of a DayGlo road sign.

These are our Foundations – a beginning, a starting point, an entry, an invitation to creative play. We can’t wait to see what you do with them. 

Image Credits: 

  • Genevieve Naylor, Black Mountain College, Josef Albers Folding Paper
  • Otto Umbehr, Josef Albers Preliminary Class Group Critique, Bauhaus Dessau, 1928-29. Sourced via Art & Critique

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