Visual Arts Briefs

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.

Watch the video for “When Will You Die” below.

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.

Among the photographers featured in the exhibit are SVA faculty members Bill Armstrong, Elinor Carucci and Carrie Levy (BFA 2000 Photography); Stephen Frailey (chair, BFA Photography and MPS Fashion Photography departments); and alumni Maya Barkai (BFA 2005 Photography), Anthony Fuller (BFA 2003 Photography, MAT 2011 Art Education), Simen Johan (BFA 1996 Photography) and Joseph Sywenkyj (BFA 2002 Photography).

“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.”

For more information, visit the George Eastman House Web site.

Image: Carrie Levy, Untitled from the series “Domestic Stages.”

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 Times article 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.

Thomas Woodruff, Chair of the BFA Illustration and Cartooning Department, presents a series of new paintings called “The Four Temperament Variations,” inspired by the ancient belief that the body and mind are controlled by four mysterious, colored fluids. In addition to exploring the humors, Woodruff’s work also investigates genre painting such as still-life, portrait, and landscape. On view at P.P.O.W., 535 West 22 Street, 3rd Fl, through February 4.

Sarah Sze (MFA 2007 Fine Arts) explores the potential and possibilities of drawing as a medium in her current exhibition “Infinite Line.” Through a series of lithographs, silkscreens, graphite, ink, and collaged drawings that focus on memory and personal experience, and new drawings that highlight the complexity, intricacy, and painstakingly detailed character of her sculptural practice, Sze creates rich compositions that blossom, morph, and bloom again and again through a single line. On view at Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, through March 25.

Inspired by Classical European portraiture, the paintings in Stan Narten’s (MFA 2008 Fine Arts) “Three Pound Universe” are at once abstract and literal. The exhibition takes its name from a concept in philosophy and neuroscience that imagines the known universe existing as a sole construct of the brain and culminating in all feeling, perception, distortion and illusion. On view at Kravets Wehbly, 512 West 21 Street, through February 18.

SVA’s “Art in the First Person” lecture series hits the ground running again in 2012 with a talk by photographer Steve Winter on January 16 at 7pm at 136 West 21 Street, room 418F. On assignments for National Geographic, Winter has traveled all over the world, including Brazil, where he was stalked by jaguars; Myanmar, where he was trapped in quicksand in the world’s largest tiger reserve; and the Himalayas, where he was camped for six weeks at 30 degrees below photographing snow leopards. For AIFP, he will discuss the strategies, skills and technology required to photograph the most elusive subjects in the toughest environments.

On February 16 at 7pm at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, curator Christopher Phillips, art historian and attorney Virginia Rutledge, critic and curator Robert Storr, and artist Oliver Wasow will gather for “The Case for Appropriation: A Panel Moderated by Joy Garnett.” Artist and NEWSgrist blogger Garnett will lead a conversation about the creative methods and ideas associated with appropriation art today, why appropriation and other forms of visual referencing are important elements in art making, and how to defend these practices in and beyond the courtroom.

Photographer, educator, blogger and SVA faculty member Amy Stein turns the focus on her work on February 27 at 7pm at 136 West 21 Street, room 418F. She will present an overview of her critically acclaimed monograph, Domesticated (Photolucida, 2008), and discuss her most recent work in progress, Stranded.

Coinciding with the exhibition “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde” on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, historian and SVA faculty member Michele C. Cone presents “The Gertrude Stein Paradox” on April 2 at 7pm at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street. For this roundtable discussion on the sometimes problematic and mercurial figure of Gertrude Stein as a writer, thinker and patron of the arts, Dr. Cone will be joined by Mary Ann Caws, distinguished professor of English, French and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Catharine Stimpson, university professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University; and Barbara Will, professor of English at Dartmouth College.

On April 3 at 7pm at 209 East 23 Street, 3rd-floor Ampitheater, painter and writer Carrie Moyer offers insight into her life as both an artist and activist. With photographer Sue Schaffner, she co-founded one of the first queer interventionist projects, Dyke Action Machine!, a public art project which ran from 1991-2008. In addition, Moyer’s paintings have been exhibited extensively both in the US and Europe in such venues as MoMA PS1; the Tang Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum and the American University Museum, and her first solo museum show, “Carrie Moyer: Interstellar,” opens at the Worcester Museum in February.

Most “Art in the First Person” events are free and open to the public. For more information on all 23 events, visit sva.edu/artinthefirstperson.

Images: (from top) Susan Bee, Recalculating, 2010, oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches, from the collection of Richard Deming and Nancy Ku; Amy Stein, Peri, Route 64, Kentucky, 2005, digital C-print, courtesy of ClampArt, New York City.

The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius (David R. Godine, Inc. 2011), story by M.D. Usher and illustrations by BFA Illustration and Cartooning faculty member Tom Motley: Adapted for children by Usher, this classic tale centers on the misadventures of a young man obsessed with magic who mistakenly turns himself into a donkey. According to the publisher, “Motley’s lively, thoroughly contemporary drawings capture the boisterous, see-sawing plot, while wittily quoting any number of graphic predecessors.”

Orcs: Forged for War (First Second 2011), story by Stan Nicholls and illustrations by Joe Flood (BFA 2002 Illustration and Cartooning): Through highly detailed drawings, Flood brings to life the brutal warrior orcs that inhabit the fantasy landscape of Nicholls’ graphic novel, which has drawn comparisons to Frank Miller’s 300.

Life Dressing: The Idiosyncratic Fashionistas (self published, 2011) by current MFA Illustration as Visual Essay student Joana Avillez: As part of a semester-long project at SVA, Avillez focused her attention and cartooning skills on style icons The Idiosyncratic Fashionistas, whose motto is “Growing Old with Verve.” The result is Life Dressing, an illustrated book that chronicles the adventures of the art-loving duo.

SVA employee and alumnus Levent Cetiner (MFA 2005 Computer Art) recently used his creative skills to catch a burglar who was breaking into his Chelsea apartment—and the young artist did it remotely, via smartphone while seated at his desk six blocks away. Cetiner had set up a $50 motion detector in his apartment that, when triggered, sends real-time photos of the activity. He had originally purchased the device to use for an interactive art project, but then set it up to monitor his home when police issued a warning about recent burglaries in the neighborhood. “I hoped I wouldn’t actually have to use it, but I thought it was a good idea to have,” he told the New York Post.

When Centiner was alerted via e-mail that there was an intruder in his apartment, he called 911 and ran home. “I couldn’t get in because he locked the deadbolt from the inside,” he said. Centiner then shouted, “You’re being recorded, and the police are on the way!” When the police arrived moments later, Centiner used his smartphone to show them a photo of the man entering his top-floor apartment through a window off the fire escape. The law officers ended up finding the man hiding in the courtyard outside of the building and made the arrest.

To read more, visit the New York Post, CBS New York, and Gothamist.