Winter sports are all about the feels: rushing down a mountain with the wind on your face; sweating from exertion in the cold; defying, and then succumbing to, gravity. Many of us long for bodily, tactile experiences as we push pixels around on our screens all day long, though we might forget that physicality can also be terrifying.
Seth Neary, 53, is no stranger to the dangers of throwing himself down a mountain. A pro snowboarder in the 1990s, he grew up in Warren and now lives in Burlington, where he cofounded Driven Studio, a graphic design firm that does creative work for such brands as Ben & Jerry’s and Vermont Creamery. Though Vermonters likely have seen his commercial designs without knowing it, they can glimpse more personal artwork in his first solo show, “Fall Down, Get Up,” on view through November 22 at Safe and Sound Gallery in Burlington.
Typography plays a strong role in Neary’s artworks, more than 50 of which are collected in the show. Most are small, snugly composed collages made from shipping labels, bits of paperbacks, barcodes, old pay stubs, masking tape, patterned envelope linings and borders of Polaroid photos. Ink and white correction fluid occasionally enter a composition. Many of the works are presented clustered together salon-style, in thrift-store frames. That might sound distracting, but ample white space gives each design its due while ensuring that none seems precious.
The works are not individually titled, and lots of them are primarily abstract. In one, a Polaroid border acts as a window framing a blocky cluster of letters; small strips of manila-envelope yellow and blue tracing paper play against patterns from a security envelope and text from an old paperback. The bold, black letters are cracked and weathered — an aesthetic that’s present throughout, since the Letraset type used to make it is decades-old.
Neary started making this work after confronting the limits of his own physicality in 2019 — not on the mountain but through a health crisis that took many months of recovery. His mother had died of cancer in 2002, at only 59 years old, and mortality was on his mind on her birthday, when he received a copy of Monster Children, an artsy magazine on surf and skate culture.
“The cover really struck me, because it was obviously done by a designer, but there was no computer,” Neary said. “It was collage and found materials, but the typography on it was as perfect as it could be, if it was done by hand.” After learning that designer Chris Ashworth had used Letraset type to create the image, Neary began a deep dive into analog graphic design techniques and skater aesthetics.
Following his career as a professional snowboarder, Neary attended Champlain College for design starting in 1999 — after the industry’s transition to digital publishing. Earlier practitioners of the trade often made layouts using Letraset type, which comes as sets of characters in different fonts, backed with translucent sheets. Rubbing the back side of each letter with a stylus transfers it onto a page; dotted lines and other guides help designers create correct kerning and leading between letters. Neary ordered a case of Letraset sheets on eBay and quickly fell in love with the medium.
As well as using the type for its formal qualities, Neary has made works that carry political and personal meanings. Lest you forget the world of 2020, a few proclaim “Black Lives Matter”; one exhorts us to “protect our nurses.” Another is a tender remembrance of local skater and DJ Andy “A_Dog” Williams, a friend of Neary’s who died in 2013. Others’ meanings are inscrutable without added context, as in “East” or “Nancy” or “hi.”
The largest piece, at some 90 inches wide, is like a forest of scraps: Barcodes, text, numbers, handwritten receipts — all become visual textures. Oranges and reds pop from kraft-paper brown and pale blue. It’s abstract but suggests narrative, as though it has traveled the world and come back with stories to tell.
“Art and skateboarding, snowboarding … It goes together.”
Seth Neary
Though Neary hadn’t necessarily planned to show the works, sharing them with friends led to a couple of charitable collaborations represented in the show. One is a suite of pieces for a skate deck he designed to benefit the Harold Hunter Foundation, which supports youths via skateboarding clinics and outreach in New York City. The other is a set of designs for special-edition Burton snowboards created in collaboration with photographer Gary Land on the release of East Street Archives, Land’s photo book about East Coast snowboarding. The book was designed by Marin Horikawa, the gallerist at Safe and Sound; a portion of proceeds from the sale of the snowboards went to the Chill Foundation, which supports youth snowboarding.
The sport has always been very visual, Neary said; snowboarders started making videos of themselves as far back as the 1980s, and boards have always needed graphics.
“Art and skateboarding, snowboarding … It goes together,” he said.
Neary’s work draws on an aesthetic from magazines such as Ray Gun and Transworld Snowboarding, but his visual tricks are more mellow.
While corporate commissions require close attention to a client’s directive or brand identity, Neary loves the freedom and immediacy of working in the studio, completely analog. Doing something direct and physical, he said, is a way of letting go.
“When I was making this … I wasn’t thinking about snowboarding, really,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about skating. It was really just putting stuff down.”
“Fall Down, Get Up,” by Seth Neary, on view through November 22 at Safe and Sound Gallery in Burlington. safeandsound.gallery
The original print version of this article was headlined “White(out) Space | Designer and snowboarder Seth Neary goes analog at Safe and Sound Gallery in Burlington”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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