vizualz

Please consider this your official invitation to what promises to be the most *Curious* and *Chummy* event of Portland’s holiday design itinerary. Come down and chat-up some of our 37 Curiosity Club Alumni – that eclectic mix of local makers, thinkers and designers who shared their projects and insights at our bi-weekly speaker series over the past year. Intellectual stimulation and creative inspiration will be served! (As well as Beer, Soda and Lemon Bars!)

RSVP on Facebook here

Curiosity Club “Meet the Alumni Party” at Hand-Eye Supply
Tuesday, Dec. 13 2011
6:00 to 9:00 pm
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, Ore.
503-575-9769

A note from the CC hosts:

Over the last year and some odd months we have had no less than 37 Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club speakers at – and each and every one has been insightful, entertaining and of course incredibly curious.

One thing that we have always lamented is the fact that after each meeting we rarely get more than a few minutes to chat as people make their way out. So we have taken it upon ourselves to invite all of our members – everyone who has spoken or will speak to the Curiosity Club and anyone who has attended or will attend – to come down and exchange ideas over beverages and snacks.

The Curiosity Club is an incredible group of people – Our group boasts Designers, Tinkerers, Makers, Writers, Theorists, Open Source Manufacturing advocates, Teachers, a Cyborg Anthropologist, a Historian, a Luthier, a Pinhole Camera maker, a Knife maker, a One-Wheeled Motorcycle designer and developer, a Chef, an Upholsterer, an amateur Rocket Scientist, an Improv Comedian, Cargo Bike Builders …And the list continues, each area of expertise and persona being equally fascinating.

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Often we get caught up in talk of design thinking, sensemaking and synthesis. While moving post-it notes to sort things out is sometimes a necessary means to an end, it always warms my heart to see some real design DOING. There is something so authentic about a designer just getting in and making something; because making is thinking. As Mark Rolston, the Chief Creative officer at frog once said to me, working with your hands is the highest form of thinking. I found another wonderful example of this in the handcrafted footwear of Nick Maloy.

I’ve been in touch with Nick since he was a student at SCAD, when his older brother Tony Shamenkov, a designer at Renault, sent Nick’s work to a mutual friend. Back in 2007 Nick started a discussion topic on core77 called “Sketch Fu” which has turned into a 202 page discussion with people posting their sketches in over 3,000 replies! After graduating, Nick accepted a position at Kenneth Cole as a footwear designer where he learned the ins and outs of designing and developing footwear for mass production in China, but something was missing:

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From residences to offices to furniture to Burning Man art projects, Oakland-based design-build firm Because We Can is capable of designing and making a lot of crazy stuff. “CNC machines don’t care how complex things are,” founder Jeff McGrew pointed out during his Autodesk University 2011 Mainstage event.

By now you’ve probably read our transcript of that talk, and now we’re ready to post our video chat with both McGrew and co-founder Jillian Northrup, whom we caught up with in the AU 2011 Creative Studio. Here in Part 1, the duo tell us about their fortuitous discovery of ShopBot and how digital fabrication helped launch their firm.

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Household lighting is a singular challenge for industrial and interior designers alike, insofar as it (selectively) illuminates and ultimately defines a space. Lamps are typically subject to everyday use, yet they also present an opportunity for an individual to express him or herself through design.

Meanwhile, the challenge of minimalism as a design principle is that there is only so much that a designer can take away in the interest of paring an object down to its essence; at a certain point, he or she ends up reapplying signature touches.

However, it seems that designers may eventually exhaust the possibilities of expressive flourishes within the minimalist approach, as several of these Flotspotted designs might be considered to be variations on themes within a broader aesthetic. As always, some are more successful than others, though each is worth a closer look.

Chiara di Vincenza’s “Plì” is quite charming, something like a bioluminescent solid-glass mushroom when presented in haphazard clusters as in her product photography. Anyone care to translate the copy from Italian?

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3 years, 148 posts, 904 comments and over 2.5m visits later, Design Assembly (as we know it) is no more. ‘3’ archives over 100 published articles, comments included, as well as showcasing new and exclusive words and images from some incredible people.

£40.00 Free P+P

December, 14, 2011 – February 4, 2012
Opening reception: Wednesday, December 14, 7-10pm

www.castillocorrales.fr

“NOTORIOUS (CHRISTIAN LEIGH)” is a Christmas Mystery in the form of an exhibition, a jigsaw puzzle which is not that simple to put together. The central character in the story is Christian Leigh, once a teenage American fashion designer prodigy in the early eighties, then a maverick exhibition curator who mesmerized the art world during a handful of years at the turn of the nineties, and today a self-proclaimed prolific (but extremely elusive) filmmaker, performance artist and book editor operating somewhere, somehow, in Europe.

Leigh has made a habit of burning bridges, of vanishing overnight, and of reinventing himself anew in a different milieu under a slightly modified name each time: the 13-year old designer who was profiled in People magazine in 1983 was known as Kristian; the curator who, in 1989, authored the bombastic exhibition “The Silent Baroque” that put Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac on the map, signed as Christian; whereas the filmmaker who managed to band together Béatrice Dalle, Guillaume Depardieu, Leos Carax, John Cale, Dinosaur Jr., Guillaume Dustan, and Dominique Reymond in “Process”, his first feature film released in 2003, goes by CS.

For each new life, for each new career, Leigh set no ceiling to his ambitions. But every time, it ended badly. Trails of unpaid bills, angry creditors, ripped-off artists, bamboozled collaborators, and perplexed actors are woven throughout Leigh’s biographies. And yet, this is not enough to explain why he disappears time and again. There’s clearly more to it than just being uncovered at some point as a con man, a pathological liar, a huckster, and having to be constantly on the run.

Something else is being articulated and enacted in this regular pattern of hard work leading to a disappearing act, although no one can say for sure what it is exactly. Most people who have been in touch with Leigh over all these years, and eventually been duped by him (btw, this includes us when, a couple of years ago, he came knocking at our door to shoot a scene for one of his films in our exhibition space), always remember Leigh also for his brilliant, erudite, untiring, infectious and entertaining personality, and finally don’t hold his broken promises against him that much. It is proof enough that, in spite of everything, there is something genuinely compelling in what it is he does, and how he does it.

The exhibition NOTORIOUS (CHRISTIAN LEIGH) at castillo/corrales assembles a documentation of Leigh’s years as one of the most inventive and original exhibition-makers of his time, the definitive curator-as-author. It also brings to light what happened next: a decade of extensive filming, writing, editing books and magazines, where film, art, fashion and politics collide in a highly idiosyncratic, far-reaching and opinionated way. Well… maybe, as in most cases, such films, books and projects only exist as announcements of things that are either to come, or are already past, no longer available, unverifiable, missing. NOTORIOUS is a portrait of a genius inventor of his self as an oeuvre, or vice versa. It is also a portrait of the art world seen by one astute observer and exploiter of the weaknesses, rifts and self-complacencies which are some of the wheels that make the art world spin like it does.

Aperture is pleased to present The New York Times Magazine Photographs ($75), edited by Kathy Ryan, which reflects upon and interrogates the very nature of both photography and print magazines at this pivotal moment in their history and evolution. With a preface by former editorial director Gerald Marzorati, this volume presents some of the finest commissioned photographs worldwide in various sections, including reportage, portraiture, style, and conceptual photography, and photo illustration.

Diverse in content and sensibility, and consistent in virtuosity, the photographs are accompanied by reproduced tear sheets to allow for the examination of sequencing and the interplay between text and image, simultaneously presenting the work while illuminating its distillation to magazine form. This process is explored further through texts offering behind-the-scenes perspective and anecdotes by the many photographers, writers, editors, and other collaborators whose voices have been a part of the magazine over the years.

Colorful work by Alexandra Witjas.

The Most Expensive Picture
Upload your photo­graph for just one dollar more than the per­son before you. Buy into «TMEP». The amount paid per photo rises with the number of uploads. The first partic­ipant pays one dollar; each subsequent us­er af­ter that can claim the ti­tle of having the «The Most Expensive Pic­ture» and enjoy having his/her pic­ture posted in large-scale on our site. Once uploaded, the pic­ture will be blocked for at least one hour. The mon­ey transfer is done by PayPal. As soon as you’ve been out­bid, your pic­ture will be automat­ically trans­ferred to the «Archive» where you have the ability to nav­igate through all the pre­vi­ously uploaded pic­tures. So, why would anybody pay for uploading his own Pic­ture..?

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.