New Designers Exhibition at the Business Design Centre is currently showing student work including our own. There is some really amazing innovative work being displayed so come by for the last day on Saturday.
Monica Islas and I are showing our exhibition design work for London Jewellery Week. We were also published on the ARTS THREAD blog!
And see my portfolio on ARTS THREAD
Below are some images from the show of our exhibition in case you don’t reside in the UK.
never hurt anyone…
Well it is my blog, so what better forum to promote myself other than twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. Myself and a handful of students from the London Met are designing the interior for London Jewellery Week 2011, for the Essence pavilion (all fairtrade gold) at Victoria House. I am really excited to see our concepts come to life, and for me, as I am not an interior designer, this has been an amazing learning experience and collaboration with other students. Particularly my collaboration with my dear friend Monica Islas, with whom I have shared this experience and process with throughout the course to develop our concepts and ideas.
Cred is sponsoring the Essence pavilion and supplies Fairtrade/ Fairmined gold to the vendors. This is really the BEST part of designing for this exhibition, and became our main focus for our concept. We also made sure all our designs were sustainable to a certain degree.
I will post our process work from sketches to final exhibition soon enough, but as I said this is a shameless self plug for now. If you are in London please come to the show June 9th-12th at Victoria House.
See you there.
Sneak peek
Future horizons from Adam Kahan on Vimeo.
Pardon me while I reflect for a moment on studying at a Master’s degree course. I am aware many people believe that studying at this level is somewhat of a continuation of your undergrad degree. Perhaps it is to point, but I understand it as deepening your knowledge and perfecting or “mastering” your process. Because at this point in the game you should have the basic grasp of your subject matter. One integral part of a master’s course is teaching us how to think more critically and more meaningfully. In the end, we are all out for the same objective; to find a job we are happy with. And these days with computers and their humanoids doing most of the technical work, we are getting paid to think. Or we will be. So my point is, as many artists have already caught onto (Jeff Koons, Al Weiwei, Matthew Barney, Sherrie Levine, etc. -also see the book “The Art of Not Making“), the process and the creativity of the idea or concept is why clients will want to higher us. So maybe in this course we aren’t creating and producing very much at all, but we have been given a beautiful thing called time where we can reflect and research and develop our critical thinking skills. Which in return results in a better more convincing outcome in the long run.
End rant. More to the point, I feel I should talk through my own process on one of my projects that took about 3 months start to finish of just developing a concept and trying to communicate my ideas to others. Another important lesson I’ve learned through this course is you are less likely to be handed the knowledge you are seeking, so you better go find it yourself or go with your instincts. Which more or less is exactly what I had to do with this project since it was quite vague and very, very open.
Perhaps this project stood out for me because of my recent interest in film titles, or maybe because of my obsession with 3D paper art. But more likely because it combines the two in a very original and artistic presentation. Certainly paper art has been thoroughly explored and is an art form on it’s own right. But this film below of The Ice Book by Davy and Kristin McGuire is simply brilliant. It is a miniature theater, as they call it, with hand cut pop-up book stage and dancing and performance projection. The Ice Book is actually on tour at the moment but their website seems to be down from the high volume of traffic (not the worst problem to have).
Saving Photography
Photography has been on mind lately but it seems rare when I find new artistic images I am really interested in. Probably because there are now a lot more amateur photographers around with the coolest new digital gadgets. And, clearly, photos of friends and your pets photoshoped to look “distressed” or “vintage” is just getting really old and boring. However, in a positive way it has forced the more advanced photographers to get more creative with the process of making images. It is not just about film vs. digital anymore. Below are some of these techniques I have come across which are certainly clever and have lots of creative potential.
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