Third Atlantic is a Toronto-based independent art and music brand curated by Andrew Gavin Hicks aka “Andycapp”. We offer custom designed posters and clothing inspired by a love for collage and music subcultures. Influenced heavily by the advertising work of Tadanori Yokoo and the golden age album covers of Mati Klarwein and Pedro Bell, we wanted to make pieces to own but could never find. They represent the legends of music and culture that have shaped our tastes, sounds, and attitudes. Through the use of collage we hope to elevate these historical icon/artists in a very contemporary manner. By controlling the use of images, we are able to retain their ideas and meanings that are most important to us.
Our designs are created using a mixture of screen printing, photocopying and digital scans from photo, magazines, rare catalogues, video cassettes, and album cover archives ( and in some instances we may pull stills from videos).We spend hours and hours going through what we have already collected over the years, before finding new ways to incorporate them into the work. The images are then digitally manipulated trying out inspiring combinations of colours, textures, and patterns. Each project is then stamped with a new language; a completely original logotype that adds its own unique personality to the visuals.
Every object in the designs tells a story and nothing is there by accident. They may appear to be busy, but the final product carefully reflects the source material. It is an expression how we see the artists and the world or space they have created. We attempt to embrace the idea of time and history through the layering of various images, that are at once immediate, chaotic, multilayered and surreal. Our most important issue is how to keep each project cost efficient, while making the art available to all. We do our best to employ the most environment friendly methods while retaining the highest quality possible.
POSTERS
Most of our posters are 24” x 36” (71 x 92 cm) and 27” x 40” (68.58 x 101.6 cm) and are printed on 8mil Photo Gloss Text Paper. This paper is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified which means that the paper materials used are from responsibly managed forests, ensuring environmental, social, and economic benefits which also help protect forests, biodiversity, and workers while promoting responsible forestry practices.
We have chosen these dimensions so that customers can easily find frames that match the sizes from local art supply stores at a low cost but we also encourage customers to simply pin them on their walls, studios or bedrooms.
T-SHIRTS
We use the direct -to-garment method of printing which uses special printers to spray biodegradable water-based inks directly on the t-shirts. The advantage to using this method allows us to handle multiple colours, reproduce high resolution images, shorten set -up time, process orders quickly, and produce shirts in smaller quantities while promoting sustainability.
We offer two sizes for our T-shirts: X-Large and 2X-Large. We encourage the oversized look because they are comfortable, stylish, and versatile offering the roomiest possible fit. Embracing oversize silhouettes helps to naturalize people’s bodies and convey a sense of power and comfort at once. They fit larger than regular shirts, allowing them to fall loosely and are designed to hang lower than your waist.
DJ MIXES
Music is, first and foremost, our main focal point. Our reputation is built on championing forward thinking and ever-evolving new music and rarities. We have made upwards of a hundred mixes or more in our lifetime. The ones featured here represent the best of the past 5 - 7 years and are a hotchpotch of what we call Scheming Funk, Boogie 3000, Caribbean New Wave, Plastic Soul, & Cyber Jazz. For the uninitiated we strive for something that sounds at once familiar and totally new.
RADIO SHOW
Our new radio show called the “Third Broadcast” is hosted by Andycapp. It is a chance to highlight new music not necessarily focused on dance floor hits but rather in an intimate fashion to connect with our listeners and fans. Join us once a month for journey across multiple genres and releases from across the globe.
THE NAME
Third Atlantic came about as a fusion of two similar ideas. The first, a basic understanding of third culture kids, like us, whose relationships with many cultures is a valid place of belonging, a multi-perspectival outlook in which seeing the entire world as a foreign land, makes possible an originality of vision. We are also inspired by author Paul Gilroy’s book “The Black Atlantic” where he describes a modern, cultural –political space for black cultural production that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but rather a hybrid mix of all of these at once.
Although Gilroy’s book focuses on the fluid nature of Black identities, our own histories involve a transatlantic journey by our parents and grandparents who resided in the UK and later migrated to North America. Taking these ideas and expanding within our creative expressions, the focus is on making art defined by a “third space” that at the present, is undefined, intangible, and is constantly shifting and morphing.
We are very aware and deeply respectful of the way black culture has dramatically influenced our music tastes, style of dress, art direction, and ways we move on the dance floor. Over time, not only have the cultures of Latin America, The Middle East, Balkans, and South Asia slowly migrated into our music sets but also into our visual design. We believe that our identities are not fixed or static. They are constantly constructed and reconstructed as we move across borders and mix with new cultures. People by nature want to move forward on an endless journey of self-discovery, which has no tangible place or time.
