2019 ArtCenter Grad show (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
Entering the 2019 ArtCenter Grad Show, one faces a rectangular corridor with partitions providing straight lines and squared edges, sealed off from the world outside.
By Garrett Rowlan
And yet the exhibitions, marked off by sans-serif lettering, showed a remarkable tendency to engage with the real world, and real-world problems.
Of course, in transportation design there were gleaming, futuristic models of vehicles shaped from pod-like to sleek, and there were plenty of exhibits in illustration, entertainment design, and graduate environmental design to make one stare slack-jawed at imaginary landscapes, as in Ruben Avoian’s Guardians of the Galaxy-like panels, and I was drawn to Loretta Christian’s mockup of a salon with the Cartesian title Cogito Ego Sum, with the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or, as in the Jefferson Airplane song, “you’re only pretty as you feel.”
But more than beauty was the thrust in Ash Akdemir’s BushBomb line of products, designed to empower women by addressing the issue of body hair. Ash reported one woman telling her, “When my body produces hair, I feel it is betraying me.” To make a woman’s body more of a partner than an enemy, Ash’s oils and serums are designed to facilitate the removal of hair or else smooth it with the lotions she envisions. In any event, comfort is the desired outcome.
Comfort of a different kind is proposed in Anna Meddaugh’s Night Loo, a box for the disposal of a woman’s necessities in refugee camps, where a night-time trip to a communal restroom is fraught with the possibility of rape or assault. The Night Loo box, a trimmed-down redesign from last year’s proposal (mentioned in these pages), is intended to allow relief without the perilous trek across a place of potential danger.
Even the issue of homelessness was addressed in Vincente Magana’s proposed conversion of cars to an all-purpose living quarter. Since rents in California are escalating, Magana’s solution is to turn one’s car into an ersatz home with a bed, solar panel, and other amenities. When I asked him about going to the restroom (here the Night Loo might be useful!) he replied that many homeless people have gym memberships, which is something I’ve sensed while using my Silver Sneakers pass.
Still, with the sense of the real world’s encroachment, I was able to find refuge of a sort in Rachel Wilson’s illustrations for Robert Service’s old poem, “The Cremation of Dan McGee,” and Marty Robbin’s hit ballad, “El Paso,” which, Wilson reports, “my father used to sing to me.” Remembering this song playing on the radio, I think of the passing of time, for which memory is both a comfort and a plague.
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