If a significant portion of your time is spent cruising pop culture websites, you’ve seen roughly a million different pieces of Star Wars art. You’ve seen all the real posters, fan posters, artistic interpretations, parodies, and on and on. Star Wars art is everywhere. And yet, with this new piece, artist Daniel Danger has actually come up with something different, and Gizmodo has your exclusive debut.
Danger has teamed with the Bottleneck Gallery to release a piece called “…will he finish what he begins?” an interpretation of Luke Skywalker arriving on Dagobah that’s available as a 14 colour screenprint, or as one of three custom framed, multi-layered shadowboxes. You can check out one of the shadowboxes, provided to Gizmodo by Danger and Bottleneck Gallery, here in our exclusive unboxing video:
As you can see, this is completely different from the usual posters and prints that are released, and a real stand out piece even in the realm of Star Wars poster art. A piece like this is only possible if you’ve been making screenprints for a long time, and Danger has — over 20 years. And in that time, he has figured out what kind of art he likes to make, and how to take a franchise as saturated as Star Wars and do something new with it by pushing the medium.
“My illustration style is very much about the open space, the environment, the location and trying to be as immersive as possible,” Danger told Gizmodo over email. “I’m never gonna be the guy who can cram every character, ship, scene, and moment every fan loves into a single image that sums up the whole film. I’m just not good at that. But I felt like I could make these small ‘Iconic Scenes in a Box’ style releases, in the vein of the concept art books I poured over endlessly as a kid, fully screenprinted and handcrafted and with real depth and all that delicious parallax movement; and they could be something special and fresh in a very, very crowded and already extremely well covered franchise.”
io9 is exclusively debuting this piece, and they’re on sale right now if you click over to the Bottleneck Gallery site. There are three shadowbox editions — Blue, Green, and Lavender — all of which are 12 x 18 inch, 18 colour screenprints, covering the background art and three laser-cut layers. Each will be framed in a custom wood shadowbox with spacers, with optional upgrades for collectors who want some extra protection. The green and lavender editions are limited to 125 and 175 pieces, respectively, while the blue edition will be a timed release available until Sunday January 30 at 11:50 p.m. EST — meaning they won’t go out of stock, and Bottleneck will produce as many as are sold in that timeframe. Regardless of colour chouce, all editions are $US300 ($416) before the optional $US15 ($21) museum glass upgrade. You can also see more process shots on Danger’s site about creating the shadowbox, and check out a behind the scenes video as well.
If the shadowbox is a little too much for you, you can also get Danger’s art as a standard 12 x 18 inch, 14 colour screenprint for $US65 ($90), in an edition of 150 pieces:
So where did this idea come from? Considering the way of the world, it’s probably not surprisingly that covid-19 played a role.
“When covid shut down so many means of production and printing for artists, I started brainstorming and looking at what machinery I could afford to bring into my studio to have SOME ability to do short-run things in-house,” Danger said. “I initially bought my first laser cutter for an etching idea that simply didn’t pan out for efficiency reasons, but after a crash course in vector artwork, I saw the potential in bringing actual physical depth into my work by cutting and stacking screenprints.”
“I did a few personal work shadowbox pieces for a show at Rotofugi Gallery in Chicago, and absolutely loved the result and had so many idea about how to improve it,” he continues. “I had already had a sketch of a Star Wars Dagobah piece worked out with [Bottleneck] before any of this, but was having a lot of false starts. Once I took that sketch and reconstructed it for this shadowbox format, it all clicked.”
Speaking of clicking, head to Bottleneck to snag one of these unique, lovely pieces.