Lin Sun with Art Roberts in background of AI-Pocalypse (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
Lacking last year’s real-world active-shooter intrusion in a nearby hotel, this year’s Art Center College of Design Grad Show had plenty of firepower of a different kind: a bang-bang approach from the interior, with a new spacing of presentations into squared-off and slanting galleries at times creating a visual effect bordering on the labyrinthine.
By Garrett Rowlan
This year’s Grad Show seemed more slanted toward the visual arts rather environmental or automobile design, although those areas did feature an impressive collection of modular spaces and futuristic automobiles, some perhaps to be features in a future Car Classic.
The purely visual displays suggested a graduation class ready to hit the creative ground running. These budding designers and directors seemed to be influenced by a visual vocabulary cobbled from movies like Alien, Blade Runner, and 2001. In the case of Lin Sun, the creator of the short, award-winning, futuristic Science Fiction film Al–Pocalypse featuring acting veteran Art Roberts, film awards have already been accumulating.
Other artists, while technically adroit, looked to the past or to mythology for their inspiration. For the polyglot artist Anya Radzevych, hers is an Art-Nouveau take on an alternative past. Lilit Beglarian’s The Exalts of Life and Death is a homebrewed mythology, the spiritual story of a child brought back to life by prayer.
It was not all seriousness. Definitely, worth a hoot is ex-serviceman SungHyen Chung’s “recreational” book designs of Whistler’s Mother or some such iconic image, updated to reflect today’s cannabis culture.
All in all, a delightful feast for the eyes, as usual.
The scene inside the show (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
Chung’s humorous take of an iconic image (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
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