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Email PageMy World: The New Subjectivity in Design
January 5, 2008- February 23, 2008
Danny Brown, Committee, Doshi Levien, Neutral, Peter Traag, Alison Willougby, Wokmedia
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 W 14th StThe emergence of a new subjectivity in contemporary design as designers use sophisticated new technologies to create objects with qualities traditionally associated with handcraftsmanship will be the focus of “My World: The New Subjectivity in Design,” an exhibition presented at Pratt Manhattan Gallery from January 5 – February 23, 2008. Participating designers include Danny Brown, Committee, Doshi Levien, Neutral, Peter Traag, Alison Willougby, and Wokmedia.
“My World” was organized by the British Council and curated by Emily Campbell, Head of Architecture and Design, with freelance British curator Andree Cooke. The exhibition was originally launched at Experimenta 2005, the Lisbon Design Biennale; and has been touring internationally with New York being the only U.S. stop on the tour. The exhibition explores how, after decades of globalization, people crave a stronger sense of identity in the objects that fill their lives. The work illustrates how advances in technology are enabling today’s designers to replicate the individual creativity and closeness to materials and making that has long defined craft, and to develop industrially produced objects that are as idiosyncratic and emotionally expressive as artisanal ones.
“Craft, traditionally interpreted as a combination of individual creativity and closeness to materials of making, has recently become more acutely attached to design,” said curator Emily Campbell. “After a century and a half in pursuit of standardization, of making millions of perfect and identical things, we seem to want these things — buildings, products, brands — to have palpable character.”
The participating designers have worked in diverse disciplines of furniture, fashion, and multimedia; each has defined a distinctive visual language, intellectual position, or way of working with design, according to Nick Battis, director of exhibitions at Pratt Institute.
Danny Brown is a digital artist/designer who specializes in generative animation — that in which patterns continually grow, develop, and mutate within a set of programmed rules. For “My World” Brown created Software as Furniture, two generative pieces that use bed linen and tableware as canvas.
—MORE— Committee is a partnership between husband and wife Harry Richardson and Clare Page. Committee, whose focus is on the ordinary and quotidian, has contributed Fly Tip, a patterned wallpaper designed with images of discarded objects.
Doshi Levien is a partnership between designers Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien, whose aim is to create objects that represent their own cultural hybridization. Their installation for “My World” probes cultural identity through a prototype shop inspired by the workshops of Indian markets, whose products rely heavily on traditional craftwork.
Neutral is the brainchild of Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman — two artists who use film and animation as their best means of expressing the experience of architecture and urban space. Neutral’s Rescape is a video installation in three projections that provide a narrative journey across a partially familiar landscape.
Peter Tragg is a furniture designer fascinated by mass-production and how it can be altered to make products more individualized. Tragg explores this concept in the vacuum-formed LTD chairs and sofa he designed for “My World.”
Alison Willougby works almost entirely with the circle skirt, drawing on its flat surface as canvas and compelled by its geometry. Her installation, One, is a stack of raw fabric material that expresses the tension between two and three dimensions, between the precision of geometry and the irregular dynamics of the human body.
Wokmedia is a design partnership between Michael Cross and Julia Mathias. Their installation, Lanuganga, reproduces a distorted miniature swamp for a domestic interior by creating shelves in the twisting forms of twigs and roots.
An audio podcast is available for download at www.pratt.edu/exhibitions or at iTunes keyword Pratt Exhibitions.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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Pratt Manhattan Gallery was last updated: 2008-11-22
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