Strangely Familiar
dal 28/1/2005 al 24/4/2005
Segnalato da
28/1/2005
Strangely Familiar
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art SMoCA, Scottsdale
Design and Everyday Life. This exhibition highlights the role of design in everyday living and looks at the latest, and hottest, developments in international design. It features innovative and groundbreaking projects in architecture, product design, furniture, fashion and graphic design, including works commissioned just for this occasion.
Design and Everyday Life
Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life looks at the latest, and hottest, developments in international design. Artforum called this show one of the top 40 exhibitions worldwide. It features innovative and groundbreaking projects in architecture, product design, furniture, fashion and graphic design, including works commissioned just for this occasion.
We encounter hundreds of graphic messages, consumer objects and built environments in the course of our daily routine. Recent research claims that the average person living in the United States views several hundred objects and several thousand messages per day! Designers thus play a crucial (if covert) role in shaping our sensibilities. Today's new landscape of products reflects the larger social transformations at work in the 21st century-and gives us a glimpse of the consumer world of the future.
Strangely Familiar highlights the role of design in everyday living. The modernist dictate "form follows function" has given way to a generation of products that serve hybrid functions: a raincoat that becomes a tent, for example, or disaster-relief housing made of recycled cardboard tubes. New portable structures respond to the mobility of today's populations; experimental objects re-think our relationship to consumer products; and brilliant designs transform the most commonplace objects into extraordinary points of pleasure and humor. With increasing frequency, we call upon design to brand companies, sell lifestyles, solve social problems, promote technology, address an aging population and-as always-simply make our lives easier. Designers today think in terms of the audience's "constellations of experience."
Among the more amazing works in Strangely Familiar are Markku Hedman's Summer Container, 2001, a mobile summer cabin that unpacks itself like a match box; Nucleo's Terra: The Grass Arm Chair, 2000, which is seeded, watered and grown into shape; and MartÃn Ruiz de Azúa's Basic House, 2000, a metallic polyester cube that fits in a pocket yet inflates with the slightest breath of air. Product designer Michael Anatassiades's Social and Anti-Social Lights only work, respectively, with sound or silence. The firm www.fortunecookies.dk makes felt squares that can be assembled by the user and customized into garments for any occasion.
Curated by Andrew Blauvelt, design director at the Walker Art Center, Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life is accompanied by a 344-page illustrated catalogue with essays by Blauvelt; Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam; Jamer Hunter, director of the master's program in industrial design at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia; and Jonathan Bell, a frequent contributor to international design publications. It is one of the most significant design exhibitions of the decade. Before coming to Scottsdale, it toured to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the festival Lille 2004: Cultural Capital of Europe, Lille, France.
Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life is organized by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The North American tour is made possible by generous support from Target Stores. Additional funding for this exhibition is provided by the Mondriaan Foundation, with support from the Netherlands Culture Fund of the Dutch Ministries for Foreign Affairs and Education, Culture and Science; and the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation. In-kind assistance provided by Bouwbedrijf De Nijs, Kirin Brewery Company, Ltd. and Schroeder Company.
Local presentation has been made possible in part by APS; Cheryl and Robert Carr; CFG Business Solutions, LLC; Ferguson Bath and Kitchen Gallery, Scottsdale; Folk & Associates, P.C.; Sara and David Lieberman; My Florist Café and Bar; and the SMoCA Salon. Educational programs supported in part by David Michael Miller.
Gerard L. Cafesjian Founder's Gallery and Michael and Ellie Ziegler Gallery, SMoCA
Image: www.fortunecookies.dk, Felt 12 x 12, 2001, felt and velcro, dimensions variable. Courtesy www.fortunecookies.dk, Copenhagen. Photo: Gabriella Dahlmar
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art 7380 E. 2nd Street Scottsdale, AZ 85251