monash clayton graphic design honors exhibition

The exhibition at monash was a great example of the 'competition' as such in our industry. Their portfolios of work were outstanding, but the work on display was not necessarily industry standard, but still very creative in nature. There was a lot of bogan themed artwork, it was interesting to see people's different views on the culture of australia and the immigrant situation.

One piece in particular caught my attention, it was the Ivan Milat poster and book set, the stock it was printed on felt like sandpaper, which drew more attention to it. The two pieces used strong typography as a strong focal point and created a lot of interest.

The exhibit featured a lot of visually interesting work to look at. It was definitely something worth going to see.

In the campus there was also an architecture and fine arts exhibition. The fine art display was very odd and challenged you to think differently.

Leah Buechley: How to “sketch” with electronics (TED talk)

 Leah Buechley
Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
AT&T Career Development Professor
Director, High-Low Tech Group
MIT Media Lab

High-Low Tech Group
Publications
Previous Research
MIT Media Lab
     

Leah Buechley is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the High-Low Tech research group. The High-Low Tech group explores the integration of high and low technology from cultural, material, and practical perspectives, with the goal of engaging diverse groups of people in developing their own technologies. She is a well-known expert in the field of electronic textiles
(e-textiles), and her work in this area includes developing the LilyPad Arduino toolkit. Her research was the recipient of a 2011 NSF CAREER award and has been featured in numerous articles in publications including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Popular Science, and the Taipei Times. She received PhD and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA in physics from Skidmore College.

Before her two projects she thought of designing electronics as "cumbersome" and expensive.

She has created a number of different things using conductive paint, pens and different materials. She calls some of them paper computing, this is a really innovative way to extend the use of computers and technology in general, even incorporating them into design and other projects such as fashion. In the ted video she creates switches, a piano and a couple of different things all using a conductive pen, magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper.

I think that using this method of combining art and electronics could create some fantastic interactive design pieces that could benefit the design industry immensely. 

Walker street diploma graduate sculpture exhibition

This exhibition was interesting to see, a lot of the artwork was very different and strikes up interesting conversation.

Three pieces that stood out the most to me for various reasons where;

This piece featured on the wall, it was about metal illness such as dementia and was made after the artist has watched her mothers mental condition rapidly decline. The piece features small black ad white pots some with textures, some broken and some with text in the base of them. As the work goes on the gaps in between the pots grow larger and the black and textured pots become more frequent. The text on the base of the pots also starts to fade out. It was a very emotional work, you could feel what the artist had put into it at the time.


The next piece was really interesting, the idea of everything having containers and being contained made it quite cut off from the rest. It felt very Asian inspired with the glaze, and the look of the pots and rest of the work. This particular piece could be taken a number of different ways, to me they look like stalagmites or a cluster of mushrooms.


The third piece that caught my attention was what I'm assuming to be seeds or pits of stone fruit. Aside from them looking like genitals to me, they are a point of interest to the entire show, because of the different nature of the work. There is nothing them in the rest of the gallery. Their paint and glaze work were quite different compared to the rest of the artists work and style.

Photographic abstractions

The exhibition had a strong use of Design running through the work. Making reference to the catalogue, identify three pieces of work that displayed a strong use of 'inventive' design.
Chantal Faust – Creates amazing pieces of art without even touching a camera. Layering different objects onto a flat bed scanner and scanning them, it’s really creative and really makes you think about her art, it’s hard to perceive at first.

Anne MacDonald – Her works at the gallery where photographs of velvet. One black, one red. The red you could see all sorts of textures and it looked a little like curtains, the black however was just a plain black square. It made you stop and think about what it really could be.

Scott Redford – His photographs at the gallery where not what they seem, originially I thought they were fountains, or a forest. But they are actually urinals. It shows these things which are considered dirty and gross in quite a different light.

How else did the exhibition develop the theme of creativity and challenged our concepts of photography?

This exhibition showcased artworks that look at light, pattern most artists had very creative ways of capturing images and used repetition or scaling to create the look or effect they were going for. It was really interesting to see how people can make something so popular, so different.

Why was the work by Scott Redford (Urinals), the large aerial lanscape by John Gollings and the work of Rick Wood discussed? What does the work have in common?

All of the work by these artists focused on scale. The urinals where really quite enlarged that you couldn’t make out what they were on the first look. The Large aerial landscape by Jogn Gollings was extremely zoomed out, which made it almost look like a painting because of all the different colours.

Have a look at the artist Chantal Faust on the web. Find out what you can about her work and write a short biography. Besides the two pieces in the gallery what other work has she done? Find two examples and write what you think of the work.

Chantal Faust was born in Melbourne in 1980. Working with mainly flat bed scanners she creates images that seem to be from a kaleidoscope. She has a doctorate in philosophy as well as masters in fine art and also two bachelors in the same subject. Faust has had 9 solo exhibitions ranging from 2003-2009 and included in many group exhibitions from 2000-2012.

She has won 12 awards and been published 27 times. Very rarely does her work actually depict something that the viewer can make out. One of these works is called “Hula-Hula Horse” it features a horse with abstract lines crossing it. This piece of work actually looks like a painting and is quite popular.

We looked at John Nixon work and his reference to Malevich (Suprematism) . Following Suprematism in 1915 the movement Constructivism dominated in Russia with the work of Rodchenko. Why is Rodchenko an important influence on Graphic Design?

Rodchenko was very ahead of the times. He used his photography to provoke emotion in those that viewed it. His graphic design work featured bold colour blocks and a lot of abstract lines. Because of this style is work is very iconic.