Photographers, filmmakers, fashion insiders and enthusiasts will be gathering at the SVA Theatre (333 West 23 Street) on Thursday, February 2, for the New York Fashion Film Festival. Celebrating the rise of the moving image in fashion, the festival begins with a reception at 7pm, followed by a screening at 8pm of the most influential fashion films to emerge in the past year, as chosen by 35 of NYC’s top fashion tastemakers. The evening’s program features original short films for brands like Balmain, Bottega Veneta, Chanel and Lanvin and includes films by a roster of leading fashion photographers including Quentin Jones, Nick Knight, Craig McDean, Steven Meisel and Tim Walker, among others.
GQ’s “The Style Guy” Glenn O’Brien will lead a panel discussion on the fashion industry’s embrace of film, featuring Poppy de Villeneuve, photographer and film director; Alix Brown, deputy design editor, T: The New York Times Style Magazine; and John Jay, global executive creative director, Wieden + Kennedy. The panelists will discuss the evolving genre of fashion film and its impact on the industry.
The event, now in its second year, is hosted by MPS Fashion Photography Department Co-chairs Stephen Frailey, also chair of the BFA Photography Department and editor of Dear Dave, magazine, and Jimmy Moffat, co-founder of Art + Commerce, along with alumnus Bon Duke (BFA 2009 Photography). Festival sponsors include StyleCaster, (capsule), Le Book, Purple Fashion Magazine and Dear Dave, magazine. The festival is free and open to the public. For more information, visit nyfff.com.
Filmmaker, alumnus and MFA Fine Arts Department faculty member Johan Grimonprez’s (MFA 1992 Fine Arts) most recent project, The Shadow World, has been selected for a development grant from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. Based on a book of the same name by Andrew Feinstein, a former African National Congress member of parliament in South Africa, the documentary focuses on corruption in the international arms trade, those who profit financially from it, and the costs in human lives.
In addition to the grant, Grimonprez will also receive support from the Sundance Institute that includes work-in-progress screenings, access to creative labs, and special events and activities at the Sundance Creative Producing Summit and Sundance Film Festival. For updates about The Shadow World, which is scheduled for release in 2014, visit Louverture Films.
“Every Once Sometimes Now,” the first of two thesis exhibitions by students in the MFA Fine Arts Department, is on view until January 28 at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26 Street, 15th floor, New York City. Curated by Ron Segev, gallerist at Thierry Goldberg Gallery in New York, and assistant curator Richard Goldstein, the exhibition includes work in various media by Eleni Beristianou, Chie, Eun Jung Kim, Sharon Kirby, Jonas Lara, Amelia Midori Miller, Augustus Nazzaro, Jenny Santos, Heewon Seo, Kim Smith, Paul Hunter Speagle, Miryana Todorova, Aken Wahl and James Brendan Williams. The second exhibition, “Just The Tip,” will be on view February 24 – March 10 at the Visual Arts Gallery.
The exhibition documents the merging, mixing and cross-referencing of mediums and materials that drives some of today’s most ambitious artists. In addition to exploring pluralism, the works in “Every Once Sometimes Now” embrace and react “against a world that is saturated with visual clutter, where images are tagged, tweeted about and uploaded to Tumblr in an instant,” says Segev.
For more about the exhibition and a slideshow of images, visit SVA.edu.
Illustrator, author and SVA alumnus Joanna Neborsky (MFA 2009 Illustration as Visual Essay) was interviewed by Yuri Chong for The New York Times Style Magazine recently. In her introduction, Chong described Neborsky as an artist “who likes to pair her lush, vividly colored imagery with plenty of dry wit. Her kooky aesthetic—part yellowing newspaper cutouts, part inky freehand brushstrokes—and clever way with words feels reminiscent of that special strain of illustrators like Leanne Shapton, Maira Kalman and Lauren Redniss, artists who write as well as they draw.”
The reference to MFA Design Department faculty member Maira Kalman was fitting, as Neborsky refers to her as “my mentor.” In fact, Kalman was her adviser at SVA and helped her get her senior thesis, Illustrated Three-Line Novels, published in 2010.
Neborsky also discussed the children’s book she illustrated last year, Tumbling Old Women, by the 20th-century Russian author Daniil Kharms, as well as her upcoming project with Joe Berkowitz, who writes for The Awl. As for her influences: “I love Antonio Frasconi, a great Italian dude. Jean Cocteau. The best children’s book I have ever read is The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine by Donald Barthelme. It’s the most ridiculous story. I love Sister Corita Kent. I can’t make anything even close to what she made because she was a genius,” Neborsky said.
As if regularly contributing illustration work to The New York Times and designing books for Malcolm Gladwell weren’t enough, BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department faculty member Paul Sahre can now add the following to his wide-ranging resumé: Monster Truck Hearse Creator/Constructor. Legendary quirk-rock band They Might Be Giants recently asked Sahre to design and build the hilariously disarming vehicle—out of cardboard, no less—for a music video for the single “When Will You Die” from the band’s new album Join Us. The Briefs tracked down Sahre at his O.O.P.S. (Office of Paul Sahre) headquarters to discuss the project via email.
How did this project come about?
I got an e-mail from band. They had seen some of my illustration work for The New York Times and asked if I would be interested in working with them on developing a cover image for their new release Join Us. The project mushroomed to all of the conventional collateral including the design of a CD, digital art for iTunes, digital booklets, posters, t-shirts, ads and over a dozen illustrations, as well as a downloadable PDF with instructions for building a tabletop paper version of the pink monster truck hearse featured on the cover.
The project culminated with the construction and documentation of a life-sized version of the monster truck hearse (made entirely of paper and cardboard) for the music video for “When Will You Die.”
What part of the project was the most challenging? The most fun?
The building of the life-size model and the video documentation. I’m not sure I would call it fun, though. The video is a bit deceiving as it takes four months of work and condenses into 2 1/2 minutes. The design of the table top model and the PDF instructions alone took forever. The bulk of those hours were logged by my intern at the time, Santiago Carrasquilla (current student, BFA Advertising and Graphic Design). I’m sure he still has nightmares about it.
Were there any other SVA people involved?
It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this an SVA project. Faculty member Adam Wahler not only printed it and contributed advice, but we also built it in his A to A Studio driveway in Stamford CT. Joe Hollier (current student, BFA Advertising and Graphic Design) co-directed and shot it (and helped build). Former O.O.P.S. intern and SVA legend Alex Stikeleather (current student, BFA Advertising and Graphic Design) along with Santiago, did everything from designing to building for the project and were there from start to finish. And last but not least David Cooke (current student, BFA Photography) was there at the end to film and shoot large format pictures.
What was it like to see your work destroyed at the end?
Are you kidding? It was great! That thing had to die. It was built, we test drove it and then it was in pieces, sitting in a storage space (it completely filled a 30′ x 10′ x 10′ unit that was running us $560 per month). There was always a plan to recycle it, but the idea to film the flattening of it didn’t come until the end. A designer one floor above my office on Sixth Avenue, Frank DeRose, hooked me up with a friend of his that operates a scrap yard. Next thing I know, we’re having a moment of silence for a pile of cardboard.
More than 500 photographs from the personal collection of curator and BFA Photography Department faculty member W.M. Hunt are on display through February 19 at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, New York. As the name of the exhibition suggests, “The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection” is focused on not looking—the eyes of the subjects in each image are never directly fixed upon the viewer, whether due to an averted gaze, positioning of the head or blurring.
“The collection and exhibition represent a very personal journey for me,” says Hunt. “It is my conscious made manifest. These are all photos of me. But they’re all of you, too. They are evocative, whimsical, representational, many things. I love the mystery of it. You have to react, to come to the image, to make up your own story.”
Since its introduction in 1932, the Whitney Biennial—the museum’s signature exhibition and one of the art world’s most highly anticipated events—has kept a firm finger on the pulse of contemporary art across genres from painting, sculpture and installation to film, choreography and music. Of the fifty-one emerging and established artists chosen to participate in the 2012 Biennial, which opens March 1 and will be on view through May 27 (with additional programming continuing through June 10), four SVA faculty and alumni will be featured. Artists create works specifically for the Biennial; the Whitney will release details about the 2012 Biennial projects and a schedule of events in the coming weeks. But here is an overview of the types of work these four artists have built their reputations on.
Photographer and sculptor Sam Lewitt’s (BFA 2004 Fine Arts) preoccupation with text and imaging apparatus compel him to scrutinize the two with juxtapositions resulting in tableaus of its cast-offs. Through images of the innards of letterpress machinery to compositions consisting of reflective surfaces, Lewitt’s work tries to determine the ways in which “…language points up…materiality beyond the vagaries of self-representation.”
Matt Hoyt’s (BFA 2000 Fine Arts) unassuming sculptures that resemble found objects are usually displayed in groupings on shelves. Although the figures look like rocks or broken pottery he might have scavenged on a trail walk, these forms are carefully and meticulously made. Hoyt’s patina-covered materials—melted tape, plastic, resin—suggest a mutability that is reflected in their intimate scale.
Since the early 1990s, Liz Deschenes (faculty member in the MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Department) has been making work that examines the variable nature of photography. For Deschenes, abstraction seems most interesting when it is revealed through explorations of more antiquated imaging processes like photograms. Her tongue-in-cheek union of the classic and the modern give her images a depth that belies their seeming minimalism.
Performance artist Andrea Fraser (1983 Fine Arts) is most known for risqué and controversial works that turn a critical eye on the business of art and cultural production. “All of my work is about what we want from art, what collectors want, what artists want from collectors, what museum audiences want,” Fraser explained in a 2004 New York Timesarticle about her video Untitled (2003), in which she filmed herself having sex with an unidentified American collector.
For more information and updates about the Whitney Biennial 2012, visit the Whitney’s Web site.
Unconventional Advertising instructor Frank Anselmo (BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department) has come up with a fitting tribute to one of the greatest innovators off all time. Through his company KNARF®, Anselmo has created The Steve Jobs Moment of Silence, a music track that offers eight seconds of silence in memory of the late co-founder and CEO of Apple. The track is available through iTunes for $0.99, and all proceeds go toward the research of pancreatic cancer, the disease that took Jobs’ life a few months ago.
Anselmo created the The Steve Jobs Moment of Silence with current BFA Advertising and Graphic Design student Hyui Yong Kim and former SVA exchange student Bryan Wolff Schoemaker. “It’s rare to produce an idea you love—dedicated to someone you admire—designed to help people,” said Anselmo. “This idea is more rewarding than anything I’ve ever produced since it was produced entirely by my company KNARF® by just a few pair of hands doing everything.”
For more information about the track and a demonstration of how it works, watch the video below. To download it to your iTunes library, click here.
In front of a standing room-only audience, MFA Design Department Co-chairs Steven Heller and Lita Talarico led a lively discussion about their new book Typography Sketchbooks (Princeton Architectural Press) at The New York Public Library’s Berger Forum on Wednesday, January 11. They were joined by several contributors to the book (which features 118 designers in all), including alumni Travis Cain (MFA 2004 Design) and Matt Luckhurst (MFA 2010 Design), MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Department faculty member Viktor Koen, and Purgatory Pie Press duo Esther K. Smith and Dikko Faust.
Heller started the evening with a slideshow and enthusiastically praised the work featured in the book—“It transcends what’s on the screen.” He applauded both the refined and the very rough starts of the field of typography and demonstrated that “(typefaces) can represent things in the street that have nothing to do with typefaces.” Koen talked about his early distaste for sketches during his student years (one of his teachers required seven additional sketches in addition to final assignments), but said he soon began to appreciate sketching as an important part of the design process. Cain, currently the Art Director for Kiehl’s, said that because he focuses on easily readable type for Kiehl’s health and beauty products, in his spare time, he gravitates to “typography that doesn’t concern itself (with) whether the viewer can read it.”
Wearing a t-shirt displaying his students’ proofs, BFA Fine Arts Department faculty member and “Letterpress” instructor Faust presented with his professional and personal partner Smith. While showing the audience some of the process behind the duo’s Purgatory Pie Press, Smith emphatically stated that Faust hated Helvetica. The evening’s last presentation was from Luckhurst, who got into design via graffiti work. “Sketches don’t need to have an intent, other than to be sketches. Not to say they can’t, but it is novel to have a place to let the mind and hand wander,” he says in Typography Sketchbooks.
In an effort to support suicide prevention, the Office of Student Health and Counseling Services has a new project underway called “Messages of Hope.” All SVA students, faculty and staff members are invited to create an original, postcard-sized (5-by-7-inch) artwork with the theme of “hope” in mind. The pieces will be exhibited anonymously and then sold from February 10 – 17 at the Westside Gallery, 133/141 West 21 Street. All proceeds will go to Samaritans of New York, a non-profit organization that operates a 24-hour suicide prevention hot line and provides other resources and support for those at risk.
To submit artwork, download a form online at the Samaritans of New York Web site. Pieces can be hand-delivered or sent via messenger to the George Washington Residence, 23 Lexington Avenue, Room 302 up until Friday, January 20 at 4p. For more information, visit the Samaritans of New York.
Image: Gift, submission for “Messages of Hope.” Provided by the Office of Student Health and Counseling Services.
