Author Archives: Christine Spines

Creative Footnotes: Kristy Lovich traces the inspiration for her new gallery show to her childhood bedroom

This creative manifesto is part of a series of first-person pieces by Fine Art students reflecting on the ideas informing their work. Each post will feature the artist whose work is currently rotating through the Undergraduate Fine Art Student Gallery, at the Hillside Campus. This week, student Kristy Lovich explores the sources of inspiration behind her intimate and evocative installation entitled, “Don’t go runnin off, there’s lots of shit to carry!”

We are building a house that remembers.
Don’t go runnin’ off, there’s lots of shit to carry!

This Place: and we have so much to do; so many things to look at.

When I was a kid, my mom would ask me to clean my room, the room I shared with my sisters. And because we were always making things, because I was always building something and taking something apart, the room was always a mess. Always in each corner was the evidence of the simultaneous destruction and construction of the small worlds I occupied: the theater, the miniature, the fantastic, the hidden, the movie, the book, the magic. Collections piled onto collections. And alongside these precious worlds were also the objects of this world: the dirty laundry, the trash, the long abandoned can of soda, lollipop stuck to its own paper, a forgotten homework assignment. On that dreaded Saturday morning, when she had finally tired of negotiating the path carved into the sea of things in our room, my mother would tell us that we were not to emerge until it was clean. Until everything was in its place.

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Creative footnotes: Student artist, Joanna Bassi on her current show, ‘Hallowed Degeneration’

This is the first in a new series of first-person pieces by Fine Art students reflecting on the ideas informing their work. Each post will feature the artist whose work is currently rotating through the Undergraduate Fine Art Student Gallery, at the Hillside Campus. This week, student Joanna Bassi unveils the sources of inspiration behind her striking collection of sculptures made from charcoal, beeswax and ash, entitled, “Hallowed Degeneration.”

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Nike designer D’Wayne Edwards dares students to supersize their dreams

D’Wayne Edwards at Pensole demonstrating a few of the kicks he’s designed

“Are you awake?”

With these words, more of a challenge than a question, D’Wayne Edwards begins to make inroads into rowdy scrum of inner city high school students seated before him in Art Center’s Ahmanson Auditorium. The response: a cacophony of groans.

It’s 8:30 a.m. on a late October Monday morning and Edwards, founder of Pensole Design Academy and former design director for Nike’s Jordan brand, has come to Art Center to inspire and illuminate the opportunities available to creative students in various areas of design. He has spent enough time with teenagers to know that engaging them at this time of day can be a losing battle. And he’ll need to act quickly to establish that he understands where they’re coming from and, more importantly, he knows what they need to do to get to someplace worth going in the future.

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How embracing failure has helped John Ryan design solutions to life’s most puzzling questions

John Ryan (second from left) works with UNICEF and frog design staff on mHealth solutions

What was your background prior to Art Center?
I was born in Dublin, Ireland and studied multimedia as an undergraduate. I began my career working as a digital and web designer, and early on I knew that I really wanted to start my own studio. After working for a couple of in-house design teams, I couldn’t quite find the right fit: designers weren’t supposed to have the desire to move so broadly throughout the design process. So I started my own business and worked directly with clients throughout Ireland and UK. It was a fun couple of years and I learned a lot from the experience.

But I had always had a desire to go to grad school, and with my weird mix of interests across disciplines — design and art, technology and code, politics and culture — I became hungry for a new challenge that would integrate more of my own passions and curiosities into my design practice.

Art Center’s Media Design Practices program was exactly the kind of interdisciplinary environment I was looking for—innovative, experimental design work that would give me a platform to engage with the bigger ideas, concepts and questions that lay beyond the previous client work I had been doing.

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‘Insights’ highlights: 108 high-intensity doses of creative inspiration in 130 characters or less

Alum Lynne Aldrich leads a tour of her sculpture exhibit in the Williamson Gallery

While Car Classic dominated last weekend’s headlines, with its lineup of head-turning, high-revving art-imitates-life works of automotive aesthetics and ingenuity. Sunday’s auto design showcase wasn’t even the only audacious display of Art Center’s creative assets on view last weekend. On Saturday, the College hosted a curated selection of seminars and workshops known as Art Center Insights. The invitation-only event offers donors and trustees an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be Art Center student for an afternoon (minus the mountain of pressure to complete competing creative projects).

After a lunch in the student dining room with President Lorne M. Buchman, participants chose from the following Session 1 presentations: 3D Printing: A Revolution in 3D, Environmental Design: The Safe Aqua Project and Interaction Design: Evolving User Experience. Then came the second and final round of workshops: Transportation Design/Sustainability: Nature, The Mobility Innovator, Photography: Portraiture Unplugged and Fine Art: Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects.

Because Insights reaches only a small slice of the population who might benefit from it; we embedded reporters in each of the workshops and live-tweeted the entire event. Taken together, these concise dispatches offer a cohesive (if not comprehensive) narrative of what it was like to experience Insights and the inspiring ideas and tools exchanged over the course of all six workshops.

Some people dream of being king for a day. But Insights makes a good case for the rewards that go along with being a student, for a day or a lifetime. Hopefully the chronicle below will conjure some of that mind-expanding thrill vicariously.

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Entertainment design students restore Halloween’s fading fear-factor

Let’s face it: Halloween has become scarier than ever before. Unfortunately, that’s happened for reasons that have little to do with the ghosts, goblins and the great gobs of candy that began as Celtic custom marking the death and rebirth signifying the of the harvest season. Over the past decade or so, Halloween has been co-opted by profit-hungry pop-up superstores hawking disposable “Scream” masks and spooktacular inflatable lawn decorations to consumers hoping to purchase a more sanitized version of the collective cultural experience.

But as Halloween has become more homogenized and commodified, there are fewer surprises that await revelers, leaving a major deficit of the kind of adrenaline-spiking thrills that have defined the mythic tales that have defined the holiday, like Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Edgar Allen Poe’s the “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In other words, all treats and no tricks makes Halloween a very dull holiday.

It’s time fright back into Halloween night. With that in mind, we’ve resisted the temptation to celebrate the proliferation of clever (but defiantly un-scary) costumes referencing politics (the debt ceiling) or pop culture (“Breaking Bad”). Instead, we’ve plumbed the deepest recesses of the creative firepower on hand at Art Center for the kind of mythically unsettling visual storytelling that evokes a low-grade version of the terror that follows a night of spooky campfire stories. The above slideshow is a curated selection of images by current and former Entertainment Design students, whose work often involves conjuring the reference points for otherworldy cinematic sci-fi fantasias. You’ll also find the artist’s explanation for the ideas informing the dark and twisted images which capable of sending the fragile among us sprinting to safety. Care to join us in our effort to re-haunt All Hallow’s Eve?

George Widodo doesn’t believe in designing for now, ’cause now don’t last.

George Widodo’s witty campaign for Joe’s Pizza.

The best way to understand the essence of Art Center is to pay a visit to Pasadena and get to know some students. The quickest (and cheapest) route, however, is to travel to our recently refreshed “Students” page where you’ll find a mosaic of Polaroid-style snapshots of unfamiliar faces, containing inspiring Q&As about each student’s creative journey.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of deeper dives into the creative lives of those profile subjects, with highlights from the body of work they’ve produced at Art Center. Today’s installment looks at the winding path that lead George Widodo to study Advertising at Art Center.

How/Why did you choose Art Center?
Art Center has a reputation on its own among art schools in California and greater parts of the world for having graduates who simply don’t work at Starbucks. From what I had heard and perceived, this school is a military base camp for the creative minds. Art Center allows me to relentlessly train all the muscles in my right brain.

What was your background prior to Art Center?
Science School + Otis College of Art and Design + Life full of curiosity.

Biggest creative challenge/breakthrough you’ve faced while at Art Center?
Getting ideas, great ones. Ideas are free, anyone can grab them, yet they cannot be controlled, confined, or formulated. It has, is, and will be the challenge of every creative who makes a living with conceptual thinking.

In what ways has Art Center helped you grow as an artist/designer?
Work ethic, lifetime opportunities and the realization of how much power an artist has to influence the world.

Describe your most gratifying collaboration with a faculty member or another student?
Working on a real brief, representing the school to collaborate with Wieden + Kennedy.

How has Art Center changed your worldview and/or creative sensibility?
Everything created and invented is interesting. In visual arts, nothing is new under the umbrella. There are only new ways of seeing things.

How do you hope to change the world through your work?
I commit to make advertising that is intelligent and memorable, which compels you to think and act.

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Myspace takeover 2.0: New videos track students’ creative progress and problems

Art Center invades Myspace homepage

Update: Our quartet of students leading our Myspace occupation has produced a new batch of posts — three videos and one written narrative. Visit our Myspace profile for the latest news on how these artists and designers are devising solutions to the roadblocks and detours they encounter en route to their destination: creating something of lasting value that didn’t exist before.

Space. Whether it comes in the form of a blank canvas, an empty sound stage, a blinking cursor on a computer screen or a room of one’s own — space itself has always been fundamental to the act of creation. Art Center has long provided that space for its community of compulsively creative forward-thinking doers and makers, united by a desire to disrupt the status quo with explosive feats of imagination and artistry.

At its most basic level, it’s an invitation to create, explore and invent. And put simply, artists need their space. This was the operative principle behind the supernova success of Myspace, the 1.0 generation social network that became a hub where music lovers connected to their favorite bands. Ten years later, Myspace has reinvented itself, beginning with its June 2013 relaunch, as a social network “purpose-built to empower an infinitely expanding creative community.” The new Myspace has been designed around 21st Century creators’ needs to “connect, make, discover, collaborate, promote and expand.”

And what better place to seed that artistic ecosystem than the hothouse of creativity that is Art Center? So, for the next week, Art Center’s unique approach to bringing audacious ideas to fruition will receive unprecedented exposure as it stages an occupation of the MySpace homepage, which has a massive global reach of 35 million users.

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Inside the extended-play version of the Microsoft Surface DesignStorm video

Earlier this month, we posted a teaser trailer capturing highlights from a DesignStorm in which students conceived innovative uses for click-on attachments (code name: Blades) to Microsoft’s Surface tablet. The three-day session consisted of a group of students from the College’s various design departments facilitated by Graphic Design faculty member Gerardo Herrera along with Product Design instructor, Todd Masilko and Jeff Higashi, who teaches both Graphic and Product Design.

DesignStorms are Art Center’s trademarked immersive workshops which pair expert faculty with select upper-term design students with sponsors to form multidisciplinary teams. Over the course of the collaboration, the teams apply an intensive design methodology to identify opportunities for deeper exploration and innovation.

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Innovations in lunch: The ultimate South Campus dining guide

lucky-boys-sign-2

It’s hard to overstate the excitement that greeted the announcement that a fleet of food trucks would be adding Art Center’s South Campus complex to its rotation of regular stops. Clusters of giddy staffers congregated around 8×10 flyers, speculating over which roach coaches– Holy Aioli? Kogi? – would become the go-to lunch option within walking distance of 950 Raymond Avenue. Unfortunately, this culinary convoy was soon diverted away from South Campus, when turnout wasn’t big enough to justify a stop on the trucks’ lunch route.

On paper, this might have seemed a devastating blow to staffers as well as students tired of foraging for tasty eats in an industrial wasteland. South Campus sits at the heart of Pasadena’s Innovation Corridor, a name that may be more aspirational than descriptive of a neighborhood that houses a semi-functional power plant and a row of hulking industrial monuments to the last century’s love affair with molded concrete and steel. In other words, this is not exactly the kind of neighborhood where one might expect to find an operating vending machine, let alone a reasonably priced handcrafted meal.

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