Visual Arts Briefs

The retail chain Gap is expanding its (Product) Red clothing line to include limited edition T-shirts created by artists. Fernanda Cohen (BFA 2004 Illustration), alumnus and faculty member in the BFA Illustration and Cartooning Department, is one of the artists commissioned by Gap to create designs for the T-shirts, which will be sold in Gap stores in the U.S. and abroad beginning in fall 2009. Half of the profits from (Product) Red sales benefit The Global Fund, an organization committed to fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis worldwide.

Image: Fernanda Cohen, Gap (Red) Campaign T-shirt design.

One in a series of occasional dispatches from Aimée van Drimmelen, an emerging artist and illustrator from Montréal, Canada, who is taking part in SVA’s Summer Residency Program in illustration.

On Friday night we walked over to artist Michael Alan’s Draw-a-Thon, a bi-weekly drawing event he’s been putting on at the Gershwin Hotel that took place for one night only at the Chelsea Art Museum. The main room was filled with 20 or so live models in master/slave-themed macabre psychedelic costumes that Alan had designed and built. Participants were invited to draw/paint/create to their heart’s content, inspired by the theatre/modeling taking place before us. I was lucky enough to have my ink and sketchbook with me, and made use of the free iced tea in lieu of water. It was a very energizing event, and Alan’s personal work is definitely worth checking out, too.

In addition to that event, there is so much going on this last week of the Residency Program. I realized I was forgetting how to use colour, and to break out of this a bit I did these abstract circular ink pieces. I’m still not sure if I’ll incorporate them into an illustration or let them stand alone. Each original is on a piece of 11×17” paper and I hope to do a few more.

Alongside our illustration assignments, I’m working on an ink portrait series—something I was just getting into before leaving Montreal. I’m working from the excellent photographs of my good friend Caroline Desilets, who has been shooting portraits of local artists (including Jack Dylan, below) for a few years now. While this series is just “practice” for me, I really like the way they are turning out. I’ll be building a series of six posters incorporating portraits, hand lettering and decorative elements to show at our open studios event on Wednesday, July 1, 6 – 9 pm.

Images: Drawings by Aimée van Drimmelen, 2009.

This summer, two alumni are taking their work to the streets of New York City as part of two different public art installations. A Clearing in the Streets, co-created by Sarah Wayland-Smith (MFA 1999 Fine Arts), is a 10-sided panoramic mural surrounding an enclosed landscape of native plants and grasses. Over a four-month period, viewers will be able to see the plants within the structure grow from seedlings into a lush meadow. The installation was commissioned by the Public Art Fund and will be on display through October 2009 at Collect Pond Park, located on Leonard Street between Centre and Lafayette Streets.

Malin Abrahamsson’s (BFA 1998 Fine Arts) work, On the Trail of the Rising Sun, similarly deals with the interplay between nature and the man-made. Abrahamsson created glass and ceramic mosaics portraying assorted local vistas for a permanent installation at the Valley Stream Station on the Long Island Rail Road. One of the mosaics will also be on display in the exhibition “The Route of the Dashing Commuter: The Long Island Rail Road at 175,” runs through Sunday, September 13, at the New York Transit Museum, located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights

Images: (top) Julie Farris and Sarah Wayland-Smith, A Clearing in the Streets, 2009, photo by Seong Kwon, courtesy of Public Art Fund; (bottom) Malin Abrahamsson, On the Trail of the Rising Sun, 2008, glass and ceramic, photo by Rob Wilson, commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit.

Photographer and alumnus Ofer Wolberger (MFA 2001 Photography and Related Media) was recently selected to participate in C/O Berlin’s “Talents” exhibition series. The annual series is an experimental forum for emerging photographers, and four artists are selected for solo exhibitions and accompanying publications. The “Talents” exhibition will display Wolberger’s collaborative project (Life with) Maggie, which follows the fictional character Maggie as she travels and collects snapshots from her journeys. With an appearance that is both masked and anachronistic, Maggie, in essence, constructs her identity through these snapshots.

While the exhibition at C/O Berlin does not open until the fall, currently “(Life with) Maggie” is at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London and runs through Saturday, July 25.

Wolberger spoke with the Briefs about (Life with) Maggie:

Tell me about the character of Maggie.
The character of Maggie was conceived quite accidentally as my wife had a mask sitting around. When I saw it I immediately became intrigued. We made one picture together and that led to the next one. Eventually I realized that Maggie could travel and that I could basically put Maggie into any situation and make a photograph. She is, in essence, a license to document and record things that I normally wouldn’t be able to bring myself to photograph. In that sense, it grew into a dream project.

Your wife is the model portraying Maggie in these photographs. Did your relationship inspire the series?
In one sense, the project is a reflection of both of our interests and charts the course our relationship has taken. We sort of used Maggie as an excuse to learn about each other and learn about each others’ cultures, because I’m American and she is French. That’s why we focused the project on America and France.

Images: (top) Ofer Wolberger, James Dean and Me, Lost Hills, CA 2008 © Ofer Wolberger courtesy Michael Hoppen Contemporary; (bottom) Ofer Wolberger, Mont Saint Michel, France, 2007 © Ofer Wolberger courtesy Michael Hoppen Contemporary

We asked SVA students and faculty to send in work they were creating over the summer. Below is the first in an occasional series of Summer Session posts.

BFA Film, Video and Animation Department student Ross Bollinger is creating a series of short animations called Pencilmation, aiming to post a new one every two weeks to his pencilmation.com Web site. Below are two of Bollinger’s latest cartoons:

One in a series of occasional dispatches from Tyler Vipond, a Toronto artist who is taking part in SVA’s Summer Residency Program in painting/mixed media.

This has been the most interesting piece to work on thus far, both because of the challenges it presented and the result yielded. This especially challenged me in its physical creation, as the wooden panel that the piece is mounted on is a trapezoid shape that also moves diagonally from the wall. I don’t have a wood shop at home, so I’ve been taking advantage of the one here at SVA to work on projects that would otherwise never be realized. Getting access to a wood shop is one problem to overcome; having a distinct lack of skill in geometry is another.

When the piece was finally put together and the photo was mounted, I had a number of critiques before I started to work at it. There was a real split of opinion amongst the instructors and students. There were some who didn’t want to see me cut into the work to bring the color out, but in the end I had to follow [faculty member] Tobi Kahn’s rule and go with my instincts.

Images: Tyler Vipond, untitled (full view and detail), 2009.

Opening a new graduate program means opening a new space on SVA campus. The MFA Interaction Design Department is set to begin classes this coming fall, and this month they moved into their newly renovated location at 132 West 21st Street. True to the nature of the program, Department Chair Liz Danzico has been using digital technologies to open an interactive window into the department’s progress. Click here to view the MFA Interaction Design Department Flickr feed of images documenting the renovations; and check out a time-lapse video that condenses two days of moving in to 93 seconds.

Move-in Day from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.

A lighthouse is an enduring symbol of an old way of life, a solitary beam of light keeping storm-tossed ships from danger and guiding boats home through the fog. This summer, Iceland’s Reykjavik Arts Festival is re-claiming the lighthouse as a marker of contemporary creativity with “Stray Beacons,” in which four artists each create a site-specific installation for a quartet of lighthouses around the island nation.

Recent graduate Curver Thoroddsen (MFA 2009 Fine Arts) is one of the artists involved in the festival project. He is exhibiting an installation entitled Sliceland in the Bjargtangar lighthouse in Iceland’s West Fjords region. The piece is a conceptual pizza parlor with the “westest” pies in Europe, including the original regional concoction “puffin pizzas.” Speaking to Iceland Review about the project, Thoroddsen says that the project was inspired by his time at SVA and his two-year stint in New York City: “There are loads of pizza places [in NYC], so when I was asked to host an exhibition at Bjargtangar, the westernmost part of Europe—you can’t get any closer to America than right here—I thought it was ideal to open a pizza place.”

Thoroddsen will be running Sliceland out of the lighthouse through Monday, August 3; click here for a video of Curver in action at the pizzeria. For more information on the Reykjavik Arts Festival and “Stray Beacons,” visit listahatid.is/en/artfest-2009.

Image: The Bjargtangar lighthouse; photo by Curver Thoroddsen.

• Former MFA Computer Art Department faculty member Satre Stuelke was recently profiled by abcnews.com. Stuelke, now a medical student, discusses his use of a CT scanner to create images of everyday objects. The project was also featured on WAtoday.
• Wired highlighted alumnus Chris Hastings (BFA 2005 Cartooning) and his popular webcomic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. Hastings created the character of Dr. McNinja while he was a student at SVA, and the comic won the 2007 Web Cartoonists’ Choice Award for Outstanding Superhero/Action Comic. Read the full interview with Hastings here.
• PDN just interviewed photographer and alumnus Darren Modricker (BFA 1990 Photography). Modricker was originally comissioned to photograph the Gosselin family, of TLC’s John and Kate Plus 8, when their sextuplets were born and continued to photograph the family over the years. One of his images became part of the season opener for the TV show and was on the cover for the Gosselin’s book Multiple Blessings (Zondervan, 2008).

Longtime BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department faculty member James Victore is rarely apt to be found standing still. Whether he’s teaching students to apply graphic design to the New York City landscape in his Urban Design course, creating award-winning posters for the College, designing furniture, or making original artwork for clients ranging from The New York Times to Amnesty international, Victore is always moving forward. (Click here to watch a short film about Victore, by Hillman Curtis)

His latest undertakings include a unique photo shoot for Esquire and a new monograph he’s penning for Abrams Books in 2010. Victore spoke to the Briefs recently about the many projects on his plate.

What is the new book for Abrams?
I just signed the contract a month ago. [Fellow faculty member] Paul Sahre is designing it, and Michael Beirut is writing a foreword for it. I’ve started sitting down every morning and going through the horribly brutal process of trying to write. I have found that with most of my work, there are stories behind them. For example, I just fished writing about a project I did for Mother Jones a number of years ago. They gave me a full page to make any kind of protest poster I wanted to. I chose the issue of gun control. The poster was an old-style shooting range target in the shape of a turkey, and another set of targets that were little girls. It was the March/April issue from 1999 I think. The month the magazine came out was the Columbine shooting, a couple of months after I finished it. So I’m writing these stories, more anecdotal than descriptions. Hopefully it’ll be a good read instead of just a picture book.

Tell me about the Esquire project.
They called a couple of months ago and said what all clients say: we have a perfect project for you. It involved me writing out the 1st few lines of Stephen King’s new story for the cover of their magazine. I’m going to draw this typography on the body of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, Bar Rafaeli. She wore a white bikini, and by the end she was completely covered with my typography. We did a shot for the cover with relatively clean typography on her body, then more images of her and me smearing the typography. It was really marvelous. I think everybody in the room felt like there was something going on. It felt like I was in a Peter Sellars movie from the 70s.

How do you get new commissions like this, and how do they fit into your practice?
I wish I could tell you how. I work real hard at finding clients, smart intelligent people who have the money to work with me. And then things come like a brick at the back of my head. I just did a lecture for the AIGA and I titled it as a ‘How To.’ But we don’t know how to. I don’t know how to, you’re never totally in control, and that’s the good news.

Image: Esquire, July 2009 cover.