OTIS College Of Art & Design DesignWeek 2015 brought together their own MFA students and alumni with those from as near as CalArts to as far as Sint Lucas Antwerp. VCFA’s own Mike Scaringe and Aaron Winters were also in attendance, rounding out the collective ‘student body’ of over 40.
Aaron and Mike introduced the collaborative model at VCFA, discussing their work with Jason Alejandro and Laura Rossi Garcia.
The event had a decidedly international flavor, with even many of the ‘local’ students originally calling Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and China home. The roster of workshop facilitators also ranged from all over―from California to The Netherlands and Switzerland.
OTIS BFA alumni Martina Lund and Jaime Nichols present their Los Magazine project Sunday morning.
Following the theme of I Am The City, OTIS professor Chava Danielson began the week with a presentation on the historical patterns of urban development and social communities. Thursday night hosted a public lecture by renowned Los Angeles’ architect Takashi Yanai.
A series of collaborative woodtype prints were made in the spirit of the I Am The City theme
For the bulk of DesignWeek, students were paired into working groups to begin a series of multi-day workshops. The groups were also treated to teaching demos in each of OTIS’ working labs, which granted them access to their screenprint and letterpress facilities, as well as the wood shop.
Extra! Extra! (Unread), the author’s ‘monument’ to Los Angeles.
In the first, 4-day workshop, attendees worked under the guidance of either Cedric Van Parys and Lu Liang, Field Experiments, or Tania Prill. In the first, titled The Monument, designers reconstructed personal artifacts from found objects in the local landscape, ranging from Tina Miyakawa’s comparison of the organic nature of social media with random growth between sidewalk cracks to a full-on audio-driven experiment by Lori Wollens.
OTIS MFA 2 Carl Guo’s monument to learning to drive in LA.
Field Experiments’s group created a souvenir shop of found and repurposed objects in the area, while Brill’s team recreated their own modern equivalent of cave drawings based on the graffiti in nearby Venice Beach.
Penghui (Farrah) Li captures the ultra-blue skies of southern California so that she can take it back to China with her!
After a group critique Wednesday, and a well-needed break followed by a public reception on Thursday, three new groups began another 2-day project, this time led by either Cameron Ewing, Agency Collective, or the team of April Greiman and Laurie Haycock Makela. These groups produced “apps for empathy,” speculative fiction and documentary narrative, respectively.
VCFA MFA candidate Mike Scaringe deconstructed vintage signage, then output the pieces through the CNC machine and collaged them to create this series of letterpressed postcards.
Field Experiments’ team produced souvenirs. In this case, a hand-sewn mash up of rasta and cholo aesthetics sold by many beachside vendors.
Jeroen Vermeesch, here from Sint Lucas Antwerp, took the ulta-modern route in displaying the random ephemera a newcomer to LA may encounter. The framed piece is his actual application, headshot and fingerprints from a day-labor office!
Tanya Brill’s group explored the “cave paintings” of Venice Beach and returned with a cave and paintings of their own.
As part of April Greiman and Laurie Haycock Makela’s documentation project, teams explored a two-mile radius from the school. Some went south towards LAX, the rest went north to the nature preserve. Henrique Eira (CalArts) teamed with Congxiao Liu (OTIS) to record the contrast of nature in the midst of so much city.
Agency Collective’s speculative design fiction had students modify stories through alternative lenses.
MJ Balvanera, a new OTIS student from Mexico City, reimagined the story of Peter Pan as a horror tale, and expanded the thought by proposing sinister alter egos for other childhood characters.
