The Where, the Why, and the How by Jenny Volvovski

Volvovski, 37, came here from Moscow in 1991, grew up in Buffalo Grove and attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where she met Lamothe and Julia Rothman, the other member of ALSO.

She was home, in the Logan Square studio that she shares with her boyfriend and business partner, Matt Lamothe. It was blackened and soiled and stiff, like the corpse of a small animal revealed after a spring thaw. For 'The Secret History,' Donna Tartt's thriller about murder at a Vermont college, Volvovski made a stencil of the title, laid it in her snowy backyard and sprayed ink on it - creating an eerie shape, reminiscent of the dead body in the book. I think it's more satisfying when you create a physical thing.'Īfter reading 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,' from former Chicagoan Rebecca Skloot, 'I designed a cover, then printed it very tiny, because the book is about cells, then put a magnifying glass over the cover and took a photo through the magnifying glass.' The result looks like microscopic bacteria.

I could have stabbed it with a knife but we were in Maine - I shot it a bunch of times with a BB gun. The lettering on her 'Americanah' cover is itself a clever commentary: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's best-seller tells the story of a Nigerian woman navigating culture shock and casual racism in the United States, and Volvovski's interpretation has red squiggly lines under the title and author name, the sort that word-processing software inserts beneath mistakes.īut many more of her covers reveal a sort of obsessive, method approach to graphic design: ' After I read 'The Cartel' (by Don Winslow, about the Mexican drug wars), I made a straightforward cover (just title and author), then stuck it to a tree. Her take on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels is a set of covers that show the progress of two plants, rising upward, twining, separating, not unlike the trajectory of the women in the popular series. Writing Life No.Some of her covers are created digitally.On the Power and Nourishment of Multidisciplinary Inquiry: Remembering Adele H.Making embryos lively: The politics of embryo personhood when fertilization happens under a microscope.The emergence of multimorbidity as a matter of concern.

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The Where, the Why, and the How by Jenny Volvovski