Category Archives: Photography and Imaging

Explore the art of border crossing with Morgan Fisher: scholar, sculptor, filmmaker and conceptual artist

Morgan Fisher's New Alien Pendant Pair Paintings

Morgan Fisher’s New Alien Pendant Pair Paintings

Conceptual artist and filmmaker, Morgan Fisher, will discuss his vast and eclectic body of work at Art Center College of Design on Tuesday, March 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Los Angeles Times Media Center.

At first glance, it’s hard to connect the dots comprising the details of Morgan Fisher’s early biography. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1942. He studied the history of 19th and 20th century art at Harvard University. Then he studied film production in Los Angeles, first at USC and then at UCLA.

His creative path started to coalesce, however, once he landed in L.A. and committed himself to filmmaking. He began making independent films in 1968 while complementing his own avant-garde filmmaking, working as a teacher at Art Center and in various capacities on Hollywood productions, including as Roger Corman’s editor. Fisher’s films have been shown at festivals such as Pesaro, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Berlin, and New York; and at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou.

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Peering into the future of 3D printing: Q&A with Graduate Industrial Design Chair, Andy Ogden

Printing_with_a_3D_printer_at_Makers_Party_Bangalore_2013_11

The Dotted Line: What can 3D printing technology do?

Andy Ogden: The technology can make a solid 3D ( material)  model (output) of anything one can imagine in a 3D modeling program—from cookies, to doorstops to rocket engine tooling.
These machines churn out working prototypes (not just models) made from solid usable parts. This technology is especially valuable for making models, mockups and prototypes that do not require the time or labor traditionally necessary to achieve a similar result.

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Of one minute wonders and sustainable paper planes: February’s Art Center alumni notes

Hiroshi Sugimoto's design for for his museum complex in Odawara, Japan

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s design for for his museum complex in Odawara, Japan

From art installations inspired by NASA’S space oddities to a self-styled museum in Japan: Art Center alums have been busy in February. Read on for more details about last month’s alumni accomplishments, including Designmatters’ new alumni engagement efforts.

News

Dan Goods GRPK 02 was featured in a story on Yahoo News about his work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).  Yahoo

Satyendra Pakhalé PROD 94 discussed his design process and curiosity in a One Minute Wonder video. One Minute Wonder

Hiroshi Sugimoto PHOT 74 has announced plans to design and build a new museum for his work, the Odawara Art Foundation, which will be located in Odawara Japan. Wall Street Journal Blog

Jennie Warren PHOT 05 collaborated with Welsh singer Cate Le Bon and illustrator Erin Althea and on a series of promotional images for Cate’s upcoming tour. Erin Althea’s Blog

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Check out the latest videos from Art Center’s Myspace occupants

Update: Shortly after the Spring 2014 term passed its half-way point, our participating students (Myspacers?) produced a new set of videos tracking their progress on the path toward creative completion.

Starting a project is never easy. And finishing it is, arguably, even harder. But let’s not underestimate the challenges involved in persisting through the obstacle course of road-blocks artists often face once they’re deep enough into a project that starting over isn’t an option and the finish line isn’t yet in sight.

This extraordinary set of videos (featured on our Myspace page) offers a snapshot of the breathtaking range of creative activity happening at Art Center on any given day.

Photography student Roman Alexander Vargas takes us deeper into his sources of inspiration (Nan Goldin, primarily) for the very personal photo essay he’s creating as he chronicles his initiation into drag queen culture.

Interaction Design student, Inae Song, delivers a dynamic illustration of the iterative process involved in redesigning an interactive digital destination for AIGA, the American professional association for design professionals. For a young designer proving her mettle, it’s hard to think of tougher crowd to please than the members of AIGA. But Song remained undaunted and produced some incredibly compelling work that plays like a tutorial in website design.

Graduate Transportation Design Student, Nish Kamath, bowed out of this step in the process and will rejoin us with a final video revealing the finished product he creates based on his research into traffic patterns in the developing world.

Each of these students defies and exceeds any and all expectations they set forth in their initial videos, leaving us rapt in anticipation of their final installations. Stay tuned.

Last October, Art Center formed an alliance with the newly relaunched Myspace platform, which had reinvented itself as a social network for creative types. Myspace’s elegant interface seemed custom designed for the Art Center community, with each user profile centered around a portfolio of images and videos that comprise the user’s identity by showcasing the evolution of imagination and innovation. In other words, if Mark Zuckerberg had been a student at Art Center, not Harvard, Facebook might have looked a lot like the current iteration of Myspace.

Because Art Center is known for its students’ enterprise and productivity, that creative rigor became the focal point for this partnership. To illustrate this dedication, we recruited four students from four different disciplines (Product Design, Graphic Design, Illustration and Film) and asked them to document their creative process over the course of the term as they complete a project. The results were as inspiring as they were fascinating, providing a panoramic view of the geyser of creativity that is Art Center.

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We shall not see his like again: Remembering Photography alum Wayne F. Miller

“We began as artist and dealer, but it developed into the most important personal relationship I made in my 16 years in the field,” says Chicago gallery director Paul Berlanga of his friend, Art Center alumnus Wayne Forest Miller (Photography ’41). They met in 2001, at an exhibition of Miller’s work at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. “After a momentary glance at his work on the walls [the Bronzeville series], I knew the Stephen Daiter Gallery needed to represent this man.” Miller, a Chicago native, was 82 years old at the time, with a long and legendary career behind him — World War II photographer in Edward Steichen’s elite U.S. Navy Combat Photo Unit, member of Magnum Photos, and recipient of two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships for his landmark project documenting the African American community on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1940s. Miller, who lived in the Bay Area with his wife of 70 years, passed away on May 22, 2013. Berlanga gave a eulogy at the California memorial service last fall, and now shares his memories of the photographer — “Wayne always preferred ‘working photographer’ to artist” — with Dotted Line.

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Tiffany Trenda at Salon Hysterique: If you attend one feminist new media art opening this year, this would be a good bet

Tiffany Trenda performing Urban Devotion, October 30, 2010. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © Tiffany Trenda 2011

Tiffany Trenda performing Urban Devotion, October 30, 2010. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © Tiffany Trenda 2011

New media performance artist and Art Center alum, Tiffany Trenda (Fine Art, ’02) will unveil her video installation, Le Grande Odalisque, at SALON HYSTERIQUE in London next Tuesday, from 6 to 10 p.m. For those of us stranded on this side of the pond, here’s an advance glimpse at the spirit animating Trenda’s work, the soiree and the larger show of like-minded creative provocateurs, which runs through April 19, 2014.

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Student designs the Air Jordans of high performance sailing shoes

Nina Viggi's high performance Dinghy shoe

IDEA gold medalist Nina Viggi’s One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe.

Since its inception in 1965, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) has recognized “positive impact” in design. In 22 years of competition, Art Center students have taken 70 medals in IDSA’s highly competitive International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA).

When IDSA announced the most recent IDEA winners, they included—among Art Center’s eight finalists in the 2013 competition—three medal winners. Graduate Industrial Design student Nina Viggi took home a gold medal for her One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe, designed for competitive sailing. Continue reading →

MLK Day: For Photo alum Van Evers—son of civil rights leader Medgar Evers—giving a photograph is as rewarding as taking one

civil-rights-sisters

Dr. Betty Shabazz (educator and widow of Malcolm X), Coretta Scott King (activist and widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) and Van Evers’ mother, Myrlie Evers-Williams.

Though he rarely grants interviews, this week Van Evers agreed to talk with Dotted Line about his education and career, and also about his family legacy—an important part of our nation’s history as well as his own.

Los Angeles is not merely the backdrop for an Art Center education. It’s a living laboratory for artistic experimentation and, as the capital of an Industry so pervasive it needs no other name, a source of gainful employment.

Photography alumnus James Van Dyke Evers (who goes by “Van”) has an especially coveted gig in entertainment as the official photographer for the L.A.-based Tavis Smiley show on PBS. Over the past six years he has photographed hundreds of A-list guests on the nightly talk show, a who’s who of contemporary culture and politics, from Prince to Anthony Hopkins, from James Taylor to President Barack Obama.

“My job is to capture that special energy between two people,” says Van, who may be unique in the fast-paced world of TV talk shows for making sure every guest leaves with a framed print commemorating their appearance on the show. It entails working with lightning speed and decisiveness, and often literally running to catch guests as they step into their waiting limos.

“Most shows deliver digital images to the publicist later, and we do that too,” he says. “But handing the guest a physical print, to hold in their hands—it means so much to that guest, and it puts a smile on their face.”

That grateful smile is what made Van choose a career in photography.

Van picked up his first camera as a nine-year-old at summer camp and made his first prints in an old shed. “Light leaked everywhere, it was a real mess, but when I saw that print come up in the developing tray, that was it.”

Art Center’s top-tier facilities and dedicated faculty helped Van hone his craft, teaching him professional skills and life lessons that continue to serve him. Looking back he singles out instructors like Charlie Potts and Peter Suszynski and fellow students like Everard Williams and Jeff Sedlick (who both now serve on the faculty), and Neal Brown and Sean Thonson. And he gladly shares his own “must do”s for aspiring photographers: “Be on time. Listen to the client’s needs. And prep, prep, prep! Have a backup plan. Because things can and will go wrong. If you don’t get the shot right away, it’s over. You don’t get a second chance.”

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Fall 2013 Grad Show: A master class in next-level design thinking and doing

Top companies leading the innovation economy swarmed the Hillside campus scouting new talent during Fall 2013 Grad Show. Facebook, BMW, Snapchat and Square, creator of the revolutionary cube device that instantly transforms cell phones in to credit card machines, were all seeking the next wave of their creative workforce.

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