Laura Solomon
Pretty Hurts (Art 257) started out as a class that stirred debate and outright defiance both within Art Center’s student community and online publications. As the instructors of Pretty Hurts we would like to highlight the outcomes of the course as well as the projects that originated as a result of the class and how the ideas discussed fractured away from the class to influence Art Center College of Design’s student and faculty community. Continue reading
This Friday, April 10th, from 7pm – 9pm, an opening reception will be held for Andrea Santizo’s senior show, Pulling the Strand.
The work ranges in scale and media, from large wooden and wool wall pieces that encompass the viewer, to small copper and salt sculptures that could fit in a child’s hand. Her hybrid objects blend artistic and craft traditions with personal and art historical references. The result is a generous and inviting array of objects that want to shift when you grasp at them but linger in your mind long after the encounter.
In her own words:
As far back as I can remember, there has been a clash between my cultural background and the transplanted American culture in which I was raised. I find myself pushing together what is considered valuable art histories of: frames, prescribed minimalist shapes, drawing and painting, up to traditional textile, fiber, and domestic objects that lack validity within the same art worlds structure in which the formerly mentioned genres reside. In order to form a dynamic exhibition that allows for a critical viewing of such histories, traditions, and acceptable forms of high art, and in doing so directly confronting the polarized art histories and blatant appropriation of traditionally “female” shapes and practices, and questioning the exclusion of craft into the realm of “fine art.”
The Dotted Line caught up with Alumna Antrese Wood (BFA 94 Illustration) at the opening of her show, “A Portrait of Argentina” at the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona.
Perito Moreno glacier. Antrese Wood.
Dotted Line: What have you been doing personally since you left Art Center?
Antrese Wood: I’ve had a windy path.
I left Art Center and worked for Disney for about 12 years. I got that job by being extraordinarily persistent, possibly stalker-ish. Sometimes, I wondered if they hired me so I’d finally leave them alone.
Working at Disney allowed me to mature and continue to develop skills I learned at Art Center. The real lesson in all the class critiques is not so much about the details of the work itself; it’s about being able to objectively talk about the work. To listen to other people’s opinions about your ‘baby’ without taking it personally or getting defensive. Part of my job at Disney was providing art direction for video games. I can tell you the people who did not pick up that skill were not happy and did not make it very far.
In the Grad Art Seminar series, Jeff Wall spoke candidly about his work and its influences. (Art Center photo by Juan Posada)
Vancouver-born and -based artist Jeff Wall is now living and working part-time in Los Angeles, which is good news for students at Art Center. A capacity crowd filled the L.A. Times Media Center at Hillside Campus last Tuesday night, eager to hear what he had to say.
Jack Bankowsky, who co-curates the popular Grad Art Seminar series with fellow faculty member Walead Beshty, introduced Wall, and reminded the audience of three of his works—opaque black and white prints—that are set in Los Angeles: Citizen (1996), a man lying on the lawn in a public park; 8056 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles (1996), a cinema-turned-synagogue, framed in a circular black vignette; and Office Hallway, Spring Street, Los Angeles (1997), a man in a dimly lit, nondescript hallway.
Installation view, With Hidden Noise
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design
Photo: Chuck Spangler
Sound is a fugitive object. We live in a muted cosmic universe – the big silence – where aural comprehension is confined to only certain molecule-rich atmospheres of planets supporting species of living things with an evolved ability to hear. We’re just damned lucky to be one of them—and even luckier to know of our own good fortune.
Without volume or mass (at least not the kind that succumbs to gravity) sound on Earth is weightless, fleeting and ephemeral—certainly not the solid we think of when contemplating the form of a physical thing. And yet sound is described in just those tangible terms, as having color, weight, body or texture. It isn’t that the material world just happens to offer us a robust set of analogies; it’s also because sound is, to our comprehension, very much like an object—a transient form of object, one that moves through time. Its shape, it might be said, is something we sense fourth-dimensionally.
The following Pasadena Now article adds a concise bit of context to Art Center’s new show of work by illustrator Carol Johnson. The exhibit opens today in the College’s newest gallery space, the Hutto-Patterson Exhibition Hall, located within South Campus’ Illustration and Fine Art hub at 870 South Raymond Avenue. This show offers a rare glimpse at both Johnson’s uniquely evocative illustrated narrative about WWII and, ultimately, our evolving relationship with war and how its atrocities and triumphs are conveyed and covered. And for those who have yet to visit Art Center’s newest building, this ongoing exhibition also represents the perfect opportunity to pay a visit to the meticulously renovated former US Post Office warehouse.
Art Center College of Design presents Drawing Fire, an exhibition curated by alumnus Brody Albert, bringing attention to the work of his grandfather, illustrator Carol Johnson. As a World War II correspondent, Johnson helped translate the immediate experience of war into raw observational sketches for nationally syndicated newspapers, conveying a first hand experience of the war into the households of thousands of Americans.
The West Coast’s most comprehensive art experience, LA Art Show, is commemorating its 20th Anniversary at the LA Convention Center from January 14-18, 2015 and a handful of recent alumni from Art Center’s Illustration Department will be there to help celebrate.
Building on the success of last year’s partnership, Red Truck Gallery owner Noah Antieau again invited Associate Chair Aaron Smith to assemble a collection of work by Art Center’s Illustration alumni to showcase in “Littletopia,” a curated selection of galleries that are “bucking convention” in the art world. Smith has tapped emerging artists Zander Bice, Ranee Henderson, Ariel Lee, Valerie Pobjoy, Chris Youssef, Cassie Zhang to display their work under the “New Eye” banner, a term borrowed from the diverse tracks of study available within Art Center’s Illustration program. To add to the spectacle, upper-term students Addison Eaton and Erica Buttenschen will be presenting large, site specific sculptural installations at the fair.
Eunoia II from Lisa Park on Vimeo.
The following post from Wired.com does a terrific job explaining the creative and technological impact of Lisa Park’s bold and brave performance installation, entitled Eunoia II, which uses neural feedback technology to physically manifest her emotions as ripples in pools of water. Park, who received her BFA in Fine Art at Art Center, uses her project to implicitly make the very compelling point that the spectrum of human emotion, from placid to roiling, is to be embraced and harnessed as the source of our creativity, vitality and individuality. Rather than building bridges over troubled water; Park’s work encourages us to splash around in those turbulent tides. In essence, Park’s evocative installation reveals the exquisite and fleeting beauty in a feeling, regardless of where it falls on the pleasure-pain scale.
Behold the cover of Esther Pearl Watson’s teen angst graphic novel
“This is going to be the best summer ever…I know my hot guy is sitting on a couch or mat and wondering if some fine lady is dreaming about him,” muses Tammy Pierce, the unlucky underdog of Unlovable, a graphic novel series by Illustration alumna Esther Pearl Watson.
Jesse Hazlip launches his first solo show, “Mark of Cain” at Known Gallery in Los Angeles.
Art Center alums wrapped up 2014 with a flurry of media attention and creative activity. Here’s a snapshot of their impressive undertakings.
