In today’s installment of Art Center Stories, Graphic Design alumna Anya Farquhar talks about her time at Art Center and conquering typography. Take a look:
Yearly Archives: 2011
IDB hosts Safe Agua Exhibit in Washington, D.C.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is hosting an exhibit on innovative and affordable designs to provide safe water, Internet solutions and entrepreneurship opportunities for people living in poverty.
The Design Innovation with the Base of the Pyramid exhibit will showcase solutions developed by the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais, a non-governmental organization based in Santiago, Chile. Six different safe water solutions developed by Designmatters students in partnership with the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais will be on display. These safe water solutions were developed by connecting design students with families living in poverty with limited access to running water and other basic services. In 2010, these solutions were used to help hundreds of Chileans affected by the earthquake.
Read more: IDB hosts exhibit on innovative design solutions to improve the lives of the poor
HYPERBOLIC Opens Today
The highly anticipated exhibit, HYPERBOLIC: Reefs, Rubbish and Reason, opens today at Art Center’s Williamson Gallery.
HYPERBOLIC uses crochet to create sculptural form and mathematical complexity, forming a crochet coral reef. The extraordinary structures are tantalizingly beautiful, yet provocatively challenging in their commentary about the current health of Earth’s oceans. The exhibition is the creation of twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim, directors of the Institute for Figuring, a nonprofit organization pioneering new methods for educating the public about scientific and environmental issues.
An opening reception will be held Wednesday, June 22. A panel discussion will be held featuring Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific and Margaret Wertheim, HYPERBOLIC co-curator, science writer and author. The panel and reception are free and open to the public. RSVP to events@artcenter.edu.
Check out this great article on the exhibit in today’s Pasadena Star-News: The artful science of crochet
HYPERBOLIC: Reefs, Rubbish and Reason Opening Reception
Wednesday, June 22, 7 p.m. (panel), 8 p.m. (reception)
Williamson Gallery
Art Center College of Design Hillside Campus
Another Day in the Life: Saturday High Instructors David Sotelo and Evah Hart
Sotelo
Last month we introduced you to Olivia Crawford, an alumna of Saturday High, Art Center’s program for high school students (grades 9 through 12), who shot images for Nike Sportswear’s Look of Sport: Los Angeles campaign. Olivia spoke very highly of the “Day in the Life” projects she completed in Saturday High’s Photography 2 class, saying they were important in shaping her experience with photography.
We wanted to learn more about “Day in the Life,” so we chatted with David Sotelo and Evah Hart, who co-teach Photography 2, to learn more about the project, the process of discovery, and teaching at Saturday High.
Dotted Line: Tell me a bit about the “Day in the Life” project.
Evah Hart: We start almost all of our classes with “Day in the Life.” It’s important because it establishes the recognition that our student’s lives are important and a valid place to be pulling from to create work. In the project, we have them shoot three disposable cameras in one day. And we ask them to include the time stamp on the prints. The fact that they’re shooting a lot of pictures really forces them to recognize things in their life that they wouldn’t otherwise see.
Dotted Line: These disposable cameras aren’t the digital kind, right?
Hart: Yes, and that’s important because we’re not editing. We actually have them cover up the viewfinder, too. We want them to react to their life rather than trying to make beautiful pictures. The project diminishes the expectations of beauty and the ideals we’re confronted with on an everyday basis.
Art Center at Night Instructor on New Book, Film
Art Center at Night instructor Robert Mehnert recently completed the cinematography of Jinn, a supernatural thriller written and directed by Art Center Film alum Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad.
Jinn is based on the Middle/Far East myth of the Jinn, a race of beings that occupied the earth long before mankind evolved. The problem is that some of them want the world back for themselves. The story follows Shawn, the one man who can save humankind, on his quest to save mankind from a terrible fate.
The planned release date is this Halloween. Mehnert and Ahmad have worked together on three other films.
In a departure from the world of motion pictures, Mehnert has written a series of books, the first of which, Looking Down at the Sky, is now available on Kindle from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. An adventure in time and alternate reality, the story tells the story of a brilliant mathematician lost in a mysterious earthquake—only to wake in her own bed, discovering that seven years have passed.
Visit Mehnert’s website at bobmehnert.com.
MDP Grads Help Define Future of Mobile
Alex Braidwood's Synthetic Din
The L.A. Times Hero Complex blog has a great piece on the evolution of mobile apps, and even better—it features the thesis projects from recent Graduate Media Design grads Alex Braidwood and Scott Liao!
From the article:
Media artists such as Alex Braidwood, 32, are in fact harnessing smart devices as the means to a more aesthetically nuanced end. The Art Center College of Design graduate programmed the iPhone’s built-in camera to function as a sensor that detects blue, red and yellow tones. The Synesthetic Din program then translates the colors into an ever-shifting electronic composition that plays into a user’s ear buds as he or she walks down the street.
“To me the most interesting things about smart phones and iPads is that they have all these capabilities that are just waiting to be glued together in new ways,” says Braidwood. “I like turning these devices into little performance machines.”
Braidwood, who last month earned his master of fine arts in Media Design, notes, “Most apps are commodities that people get either because it helps them do something or it’s some kind of novelty game. But there’s this space in the middle where it’s not about guiding you to the best sushi restaurant in town but more about helping you wander around and discover something new that you did not see or hear before.”
Art Center graduate Scott Liao has similarly toyed with the innards of iPad tablets to create what he calls “enriched narrative.” His Anonymous Triangle piece allows viewers to aim a sensor-rigged iPad at projected short films to trigger back-story texts about the various characters. “With current tablet technologies,” says Liao, 27, “we have the chance to change our viewing behavior from passive to active.”
Read more: Apps evolution: A new wave of digital artists is adding whimsy to mobile gaming
Student Film Wins Art Directors Club Gold and Cannes Award
The following post about Voices From the Field, which we’ve featured here earlier this year, is from the Designmatters blog.
Guest Blogger John X. Carey (Film Department, 8th term) is the recipient of the 2011 Young Director’s Award from the Cannes Film Festival as well as the recipient of the Art Director’s Gold Cube Award for his film, Voices From the Field.
Designmatters put me and two of my fellow classmates at Art Center College of Design into a real world re-branding situation as part of a TDS studio last spring with an international aid organization called Project Concern International (PCI). Kyle Murphy (Film), Jeremy Jackson (Photography & Imaging) and I pitched the idea of shooting a film in Africa about the humanity that PCI was working with everyday and the client decided to go with the idea.
Flying to Africa for a week and shooting the film and subsequently editing the 40 hours of footage down into a digestible five minute commercial pushed me way outside of my comfort zone but I couldn’t help but come away with a fresh perspective on my career, the world, and my place in both.
Our resulting film, Voices From the Field, went on to win an Art Directors Club GOLD Cube, which was a really gratifying way to cap off the entire experience.
Jeremy and Kyle were such amazing students to work with on the film. The job called for them to be both particle technicians and highly creative artists, and they were able hold both in the palm of their hand flawlessly.
The fact that I had such a good crew is just a testament to Art Center and how amazing the students are here.
I highly encourage people to investigate Designmatters and meet the program Director Elisa Ruffino and Vice President Mariana Amatullo, who are two of nicest people I know.
They spend their days helping Art Center students use their smarts, social status and personal voices to better mankind.
Art Center Stories: Keith Longino
In today’s installment of Art Center Stories, Art Center Advertising alumnus Keith Longino talks about getting work after his graduation in 1967, and how the skills he learned here helped him make a radical career change years later.
Ad Students Take Home the Gold
At the recent One Club student competition award ceremony in New York, three Art Center Advertising students brought home a most prestigious souvenir—a One Club gold pencil.
From left to right: Brandon Grande, Advertising Department Interim Chair James Wojtowicz, Dawn Kim, Josephine Yatar
The award is the ad student equivalent of winning an Oscar. Students Brandon Grande, Dawn Kim and Josephine Yatar worked as a team to develop an integrated branding campaign, NY Feeds NY, for City Harvest, a food donation service that helps feed the homeless in New York.
Art Center also picked up three merit awards for entries by three other teams.
Congrats to all, and be sure to check out all the Art Center winners at the One Club site!
Cannes Palm d’Or Winner Edited by Art Center Faculty
Terence Malick’s new film Tree of Life has won the 2011 Cannes Film Festival Palm d’Or Award, the festival’s top prize. The film was co-edited by Art Center Film Department instructor and mentor Billy Weber.
Tree of Life is the story of a Midwestern family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son (played as an adult by Sean Penn) through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (played by Brad Pitt).
Weber earned an Academy Award nomination for editing Malick’s Thin Red Line as well as one for editing Top Gun. His many editing credits include Nacho Libre, Miss Congeniality, Bulworth, Days of Thunder, Midnight Run, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, 48 Hrs and Beverly Hills Cop.
He directed Josh and S.A.M. and served an associate producer on The New World. He is currently editing Madagascar 3 for DreamWorks Animation. Congrats!