Third Realm Art Catalog

The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) wanted to produce a low-cost, short-run publication to accompany an exhibition on contemporary art from across East and Southeast Asia. The project was conceptualized as a zine, but JNL proposed elevating it by producing a set of unbound broadsides housed in a vellum envelope.

The project size was dictated — and inspired — by the sheet size of the J Press at Classic Color: 19” x 23”. The project’s finished flat size of 18” x 22” maxes out the parent sheet, leaving little waste. Each sheet was folded twice to a finished size of 9” x 11” and then nested together into a 10” x 12” vellum envelope. Silver mirror stickers were hand-applied to the envelopes for a bit of flash.

The finished piece is a high-quality publication that the museum can sell at a modest price and recoup its production costs — a real bonus for a museum shop, where books tend to be loss leaders. It was so successful that the museum is already planning another publication for its next exhibition.