Faculty presentations

Kim Gaza / Graphic Designer

She has 14 years of experience as a graphic designer, and has had many different jobs and titles, from studio to agencies, and governmental related. She says that design is new learning all the time, it is a “liberal arts life”.

She presented about one of her works called Eventurist. It is an app -now available in the App Store- which helps people plan travels. It started as a work for the company Handsome, and her work was to interview people around the US, ask about their traveling experiences, put that info into ideas for apps. 15 ideas were presented, 4 chosen for prototypes, 8 users tried them, and Eventineer was born. After that, they changed the name and released it. I think it was a very good idea for an app.

She also presented about one of her own works. It was a film-music project with her husband. They created this project of modifying a film (Till the Clouds Roll By) from its original version with its music and images, to a version with new music over original images (made by her husband), another version with  a new music arrangement (original lyrics though) and a modified version of different clips of the movie, and finally another version that they arestill working in. They have been working for almost 6 years in this project, and it is awesome so far! Can’t wait until official release.

James Sherin / Photographer

He was first an art student, and them he shifted into photography. He likes thinking of photos in terms of index: pointing something, showing Wahabis there with a certain intention. He also likes thinking his production in terms of spandrels, like architectonical spaces. He also like using photos to record the subconscious accidents, things that look “pretty” but without a aesthetical intention.

Then he shifted towards something more personal. But he still continued doing the aesthetics of the subconscious accidents. Like constellations of the day a day life. That’s why he likes seeing and taking pictures more than planning and taking them.

Tammie Rubin / Artist. Sculptural Ceramics

She like thinking of her production in terms of a chimera: a wish or hope which is illusionary. She likes taking day a day objects, slip cast them in clay and creat cameras. This come from her relation to nature as an urban person, from her childhood in Chicago’s urban grid to Seattle’s wild nature. She think she’s a part of nature as a fallacy.

She takes the objects that are not longer in use, slip cast them, putting them together, mad then creating ensemble that represent something else. She said she likes this process because it is a different way of approaching to an “alive medium”, as ceramics is. Ceramics is the materiality and the work itself simultaneously. It is deconstruction, reconstruction and deconstruction again.

In her work “He is Gone, Imagined Contraptions For Communication”, she started working with the figure of the cone. She started experimenting with ideas of voice pipes, voice tubes, megaphones, etc. She realized we normally have objects that have other uses and powers/values, and that we have “communication cones” everywhere: antennas, phones, tubes, etc. She realized she likes the viewer to feel the use of her new objects, but the pieces are not actually going to work. That’s one of the reasons she thinks of her artwork as a 3D colleges.

Final Thoughts of the Class

I think this class was useful for me as a sophomore because I could rethink the way I already handled school last year. I also think it was very useful for freshmen since they need to figure life out. They have to adapt to a new dynamic of studying, and specially with visual arts related studies.

What I would have liked to do in the class, and maybe it can be incorporated to it for other occasions, is to have assignments where we have to create/produce something out of what we have been talking in class in our own areas (photo, design, art). I also missed presenting and talking about the posts in our blogs… that would have been interesting.

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