Author Archives: Christine Spines

LA Shorts Fest to screen alumni and current student films

Official Selection LA Shorts Fest

Art Center’s graduate Film department will be well represented in the program of this year’s LA Shorts Fest, which runs from September 5-12 at Laemmle Noho 7 theaters. Current student, Ellen Houlihan and recent grad, Carlo Olivares Paganoni, learned this week that each of their MFA thesis projects — “Joan’s Day Out” and “Cardboard Camera” respectively — has been accepted into the prestigious festival, which also serves to qualify all its selections for Oscar and BAFTA contention. In other words, LA Shorts provides a uniquely powerful showcase for exposing up-and-coming filmmakers to industry power players.

Houlihan and Paganoni’s films represent the broad spectrum of work produced by Art Center Film students. “Joan’s Day Out,” which screens Monday, September 9, follows a grandmother (played by Sally Kellerman) who becomes a fugitive from her assisted living facility. While “Cardboard Camera,” which unspools on Sunday, September 8, features a 10-year-old boy who makes his cinematic dreams come true with few resources beyond his imagination and ingenuity. What follows are the filmmakers’ reflections on the ideas and inspiration animating their films and the challenges involved in bringing them to the screen.

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Inside the making of a new teaser for J.J. Abrams’ mystery project

When J.J. Abrams‘ production company, Bad Robot, tossed out a teaser trailer for a tantalizingly mysterious new project, it didn’t take long for pop culture vultures to peck away as if it were a juicy porterhouse left by the side of the highway. Since Hollywood feels the same way about secrets as nature does about vacuums, speculation about what exactly this spot is teasing has turned into a digital cage match in comments sections across the web. And while we can’t confirm or deny any of the out-there theories circulating about the nature of the project. Is it a “Lost” spin-off? Or a tease for NBC’s “Believe“?

As the teaser says, Soon we will know. In the meantime, we have gotten ahold of one meaty tidbit worth sharing: The teaser’s cinematographer is Chris Saul, a 2010 alum of Art Center’s Graduate Film department. Below, Saul re-traces the path that lead him to find this creepy stiched-mouth character on an abandoned beach at night. 

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Blazing a trail from Art Center to Burning Man


Burning Man, the annual creative bacchanal drawing some 50,000 hedonistic seekers, makers and disrupters, kicks off next Monday in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. This year’s week-long confab celebrating self-expression, community and the ephemerality of art and life itself draws its theme from John Frum, the messianic figurehead of the cargo cults of the 1930’s and ‘40’s, which sprung up on South Pacific islands after American troops landed there and dazzled the natives with their exotic first worldly possessions. After the servicemen departed, the islanders built altars and monuments intended to lure these otherworldly Americans (John Frum was derived from the endless series of G.I.’s introducing themselves as “I’m John from…” ) back to bestow them with another bounty of MRE’s and walkie-talkies.

It’s a legend tailor-made for Burning Man, which culminates with the incineration of a giant effigy of the eponymous wooden figure, constructed on site by an army of artists. And though Art Center has never embodied the anarchic temporality of the Burning Man ethos. There’s an argument to be made that Burning Man’s cultivation of a cult of makers, sustainability evangelists and big-dreaming visionaries is more closely aligned with Art Center’s forward-thinking values than it may seem to the naked eye.

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2013 Great Teacher Award-winner, Richard Keyes, delivers graduation address. Student-drawn allegory included.

 

Illustration by Katia Grifols

Illustration by Katia Grifols

Richard Keyes didn’t stay long the first time he took the stage at Art Center’s 2013 Summer commencement ceremony to accept the Great Teacher Award. That’s likely because he knew he’d return shortly in his other capacity, as the event’s keynote speaker. Keyes, who is both an alum (Graphic Design ’87) and beloved faculty member has made a habit of multitasking throughout his career at Art Center, where he straddles five departments — Graduate Industrial Design, Entertainment Design, Photography, Integrated Studies and Art Center at Night. For insight into why he received the highest honor awarded by Art Center students, look no further than the speech itself (posted in its entirety below), which culminates in a moving fable, accompanied by a slideshow of images hand-drawn by student, Katia Grifols, who has been Keyes’ T.A. for three terms.   

You have reason to expect a celebrity sending you off into the world today, but you are getting a teacher. Conversely, when I came to Art Center 30 years ago I occasionally expected teachers and got celebrities, so I hope I can redress the balance somewhat. But not before I state how much I have learned from you, quite probably the most impressive student body in the creative world.

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Highlights from Art Center’s 2013 Grad Show Preview

This has been a summer of record-breaking heat waves and dramatic conclusions to ongoing narratives in the news (Nelson Mandela’s miraculous recovery from a life-threatening illness coinciding with his 95th birthday) and culture (Superman will face off against Batman on the big screen). Last night’s Grad Show Preview played right into this season’s “go big or don’t go at all” ethos, with its spectacularly well-attended (upwards of 500 guests) display of graduating Art Center students’ creative heat.

Each term at Art Center culminates with Graduation Show Preview, an invitation-only event, where students unveil final projects as well as highlights from their time at the College. While the show eventually opens up to the public following Saturday’s graduation ceremony; there is a particular electricity and excitement coursing through Hillside campus on the preceding Thursday night when students debut the feats of ingenuity and imagination they’ve spent the past four years cultivating and refining.

“It’s such a special night with incredible energy and great opportunities for our graduates to share their work with industry and celebrate the completion of a tremendous amount of hard work,” says Alumni Relations executive director, Kristine Bowne. “It’s the only time during the whole year when the work of our graduating students is on display and the only time you can visit and get a sense of the breadth of creativity and innovation of our students and the impact they will have on our world.”

For those of you who weren’t on the list last night, here’s a glimpse at what you missed.

Watch: ‘Trick or Drink,’ a riveting video memoir by new Fine Art chair, Vanalyne Green

 

With today’s announcement of Vanalyne Green‘s appointment as chair of Art Center’s Undergraduate Fine Art program, the College unveiled a pivotal panel in a larger canvas depicting the program’s evolution. Green is an internationally-recognized pioneer in the feminist art movement, whose work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, where the above video is currently housed as part of the museum’s video collection.

“Trick or Drink,” which debuted in 1984, a decade after Green graduated from CalArts’ Feminist Art Program (spearheaded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro), offers an intimate and provocative look at the different forms addiction takes on as it’s passed among generations of family members. Green adapted the video from a live performance she’d developed from autobiographical material incorporating her experiences growing up in an alcoholic household and her own battles with bulimia. “Truth or Drink” is the rare video work to be as heralded for its artistic achievement as it is for its therapeutic value to patients in hospitals and treatment centers.

This particular work illuminates more than a lifelong social justice bent to Green’s creative sensibility. It also offers a glimpse at how the Fine Art Department’s new Artmatters concentration — an interdisciplinary curriculum launching this fall emphasizing collectivism and collaborative projects in the public sphere — might manifest itself in the real world.

Green, a founding member of the pro-choice, pro-sex agitprop group, No More Nice Girls, expressed her kinship to Art Center’s trans-disciplinary approach to social impact creativity as follows: “This is an especially optimistic moment for education programs such as Art Center because of the unusual flexibility it offers to students to cross disciplines,” Green stated in her application for the position. “My goal is to support young artists to recognize their inherent interests and to strengthen their commitment to work through a program of experimentation and exposure to an international art world.”

Regarding the role she will play at Art Center, Green stated, “For some, making art and administrative leadership within an educational institution are inimical. To the contrary, I find pedagogy and program development to be intrinsic to the project of being an artist: they involve narrative, composition, architecture and art as a form of social energy. This idea of a porous boundary between practices originates in the unorthodox programs I was privileged to experience.”

 

Culmination celebration: Summer 2013 graduation events

Graduation at Art Center

With the all-nighter intensity of finals safely in the rear-view mirror, excitement mounts as Summer Term 2013 graduation week gets underway. Here’s an overview of the campus agenda, which teems with an array of culminating events showcasing the handiwork of the creative talent pool about to flow into the marketplace.

Thursday, August 15

Industry leaders and professionals, employers, corporate partners, donors and alumni will get the first look at the Summer Term’s graduating artists and designers at this year’s invitation-only Graduation Show Preview. The show will feature student projects from major fields of study at Art Center, including Advertising, Entertainment Design, Environmental Design, Film, Graphic Design, Illustration, Photography and Imaging, Product Design, Transportation Design, Graduate Industrial Design and Graduate Media Design Practices.

Graduation Show Preview will be held at Hillside Campus from 6:00 to 9:30 p.m., with a private reception hosted by Alumni Relations immediately following.

From 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., Graduate Media Design Practices will host a lab research discussion followed by an exhibition and reception, from 5 to10 pm, in honor of this term’s cohort of graduates, which includes the program’s first Field Track students. These events take place on South Campus (950 Raymond) and are open to the public.

Saturday, August 17

Join us in the Sculpture Garden at Hillside Campus from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. for our graduation ceremony. Cross-disciplinary faculty member and alum, Richard Keyes — who teaches popular classes in color theory, design principles and narrative structure — will deliver the commencement address. We will also hear from valedictorian and Environmental Design student, Rosa Tsaihua Lee and present the Art Center Student Leadership Award to Photography and Imaging student, Kate Marie Buntsma.

After the ceremony, Graduation Show opens to the public from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., where work by the newest Art Center graduates will be on display. In addition to Hillside Campus activities, Graduate Art and Graduate Media Design Practices will host  a Graduation Show at South Campus from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m.

Free valet parking will be provided at the Hillside Campus from 6 – 10 p.m.  Self-parking will be available at South Campus throughout the evening.

Congratulations to our Summer Term 2013 graduates!

Dyson Foundation Grant: Less Time Paying Bills, More Time in the Studio

The Dyson Foundation was particularly impressed by this prosthetic socket, designed for BETH by Industrial Design alum, Jason Hill,

When James Dyson Foundation was looking for ways to inspire the next generation of design engineers, Art Center Industrial Design students kept appearing on the Foundation’s radar.

“We’ve consistently received strong entries to the James Dyson Award from Art Center,” says Erin Webb, Foundation manager, referring to the Foundation’s annual international design competition. “It was clear to us that the College has a very iterative approach to the design process and that Art Center students are challenged not just to come up with ideas but also to create prototypes.”

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Conscious Commuter mobilizes an e-bike revolution at The Design Accelerator

Gabriel Wartofsky with his electric bike at the Environmental Media Awards

Gabriel Wartofsky with his electric bike at the Environmental Media Awards.

When entrepreneurial inspiration strikes, it’s often described as the convergence of creative and commercial instincts. An innovator perceives a void in the marketplace and conceives a product or experience to fill that space and drive demand for more. But for Gabriel Wartofsky and Bob Vander Woude, that well-worn path into the startup trenches has been less clear-cut.

The partners have spent the past two years developing Conscious Commuter, a company built around an electric bicycle with a sleek design and long-range battery. However the whole enterprise is driven by nothing short of a mission to revolutionize transportation.“We’re solution providers,” declares Vander Woude, an entrepreneur and CEO of a seed-stage investment fund, who was looking to fund an electric bike company when he happened upon a web demo of Wartofsky’s senior thesis project, now the basis for their partnership, which aims to implement e-bike sharing systems in cities around the world. “We’re multi-modal. That’s the secret sauce. Other electric bike companies are not coming from the background of solving a social problem. They’re just motivated to get to a retailer and make money.”

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Puppy Love: Play Day lifts spirits during the dog days of week ten

Communing with canines at Play Day

Communing with canines at Play Day

The announcements for the Center for the Student Experience-sponsored “Play Day” touted an enticing array of activities designed to promote maximum stress release and lighthearted fun.  The calendar of events read like a childhood fantasy birthday party come to life: ceramic painting, chair yoga, pizza, goodie bags, ice cream sundaes and, perhaps most intriguing of all, therapy dogs. To this reader, that last element conjured visions of frankfurters spiked with ginko biloba. It was hard not to wonder whether this was some trendy new food experiment engineered to fuse childhood nostalgia with natural healing properties.

As it turns out, the above type of therapy dog is a culinary idea whose time has yet to come. Play Day’s dogs, of course, were of the canine variety. And their therapeutic benefits were immediately apparent to anyone who stepped foot into Room 201, the Play Day hub, where clusters of students huddled around the three furry pets laying on the floor basking in all the attention.

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