Born in Marseille, and trained at the public Art schools of Paris, Delphine Perrot is a Graphic Designer specializing in print and creative realisations. She has produced an array of artistic installations for the likes of Design Week, The Affluenza Exhibition, and The New Economics Foundation’s ‘Bigger Picture’ Festival of Interdependence. With her experience in producing work for arts, cultural and educational output, Delphine is currently working in London for the multi-award winning Studio Myerscough. Notes on Design caught up with Delphine to find out all about her practice and motivations.

Notes On Design: Can you give us an insight into your background?

Delphine: I successfully completed a BA and MA in Graphic Design in my native France. My studies were a very important phase for me, where I explored the freedom of self-initiated projects. I was taught by inspiring teachers, especially my MA tutor David Poullard who really gave me the confidence to push my personal work.

Since my MA final project, which took inspiration from the Parisian flea markets, I have researched and catalogued an extensive collection of advertising slogans, in French and English, that I feel encompass the 20th century. These form a strong thread that can be found, at least in part, in many of my installations and artwork.
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Emily Pilloton

I’ve seen some designs come out of the poorest villages in Africa that trump anything coming out of any design firm in the US. — Emily Pilloton

Recent Colbert Report guest and Bay Area native and designer Emily Pilloton was underwhelmed with the home product decision-making that made up much of her working life when she started Project H, an organization of volunteer designers who work to connect design with communities most in need. Her work encouraging local Project H chapters to bring better products to schools, hospitals and shelters led to the book “Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower
People.”

In February she’ll kick off the Design Revolution Road Show, a traveling exhibition and lecture series that will visit 25 high schools and university design programs nationwide across the nation via an Airstream trailer that highlights 40 humanitarian design solutions highlighted in the book. You can follow the cross-country tour, which will take Pilloton and partner Matthew Miller to schools from Austin to Baltimore, on the site’s itinerary and @DesRevRoadShow. Emily Pilliton is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

Notes On Design: What your initial motivation for starting Project H?

Emily Pilloton: I started Project H mostly out of frustration, but the kind of frustration that is laced with optimism: where you wake up one day and realize that you don’t like the way things are, but you think you know how to fix it.

I’m trained as an architect and a product designer, and grew up always taking things apart and putting things together, and came to design believing that it would be a great skill set for solving problems in a physical, creative, and critical manner.

A few years out of graduate school, when I found myself working as the store architect for a retail clothing company, where design was synonymous with choosing doorknobs and other such minutiae, I had had enough. Design had, in my own career (mostly because I had huge student loan bills), become so far removed from why I originally became a designer: to solve problems. I quit the doorknob job the next day, started writing and making up my own rules, and eventually started Project H as an avenue to apply design to the things that mattered.

The Design Revolution Roadshow Airstream

NoD: How did the idea for such a non-traditional book tour come about?

Emily Pilloton: As a natural contrarian, I tend to find the expected and the usual very boring. This was particularly true when I wrote “Design Revolution” and the time came to think about what kind of book tour I would embark on. The usual book signings and library talks seemed valuable, but not in keeping with the tone of the book, which is so much about a grassroots, bottom-up, “just do it” approach to design that really belongs at the doorsteps of designers who care, not in Barnes & Nobles. Read the rest of this entry »

BNE Was Here sticker -- Photo taken in Sukhumvit, Bangkok by Nat Wein

Thanks to Mother I recently interviewed, via email, a graffiti artist known as BNE.

Mother is big ad agency with big clients (like Coca-Cola and Stella Artois), that does interesting and creative work. They are opening a huge New York office (36,250 sq. ft.) at 11th avenue and 44th street in Hell’s Kitchen and across the street from Ogilvy. I was there last Thursday to attend a party they threw in celebration of their new office that was also promoted / co-sponsored by New York culture magazine ANIMAL. The guest of honor was BNE, but he/she/they was not present…as far as I know.

BNE has a secret identity and is prolific in the sense that the stickers and painted stencils that say “BNE” are in major cities all over the world. Enough to get print, tv, and web media coverage by major and minor outlets including a recent New York Times article. Coverage garnered, I suspect, thanks to a little help from trend / cool hunters representing agencies that tell the media what is cool and news worthy. There is no other logical explanation, because prolific tagging is not new.

BNE at Mother -- Photo courtesy of Mother, New York

The party was also billed as BNE’s first art show. The art at the opening included the big BNE initials/acronym that have provided the attention to date, and then some pieces where the BNE acronym were placed on top of brand icons like Bart Simpson and Spiderman obscuring the iconic characters as though the brand of BNE is so large, and aggressive, that it is stealing the exposure, the real estate, the consumers’ attention from the long established brands that play by the old rules of branding.
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Christine Nguyen

You’ve not seen work like that of Christine Nguyen. Much of her current body of work involves combining original photography, items from nature, and a salt crystalizing process that makes each piece organic and delivers unexpected and otherworldy results. She is a busy artist and solo exhibitions of her work have been featured at the Hammer Museum (Project), Michael Kohn Gallery, Andrewshire Gallery, and Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Laguna Beach Art Museum, Laguna Beach; 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles, PH Gallery, New York; San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Sprueth Magers Projekte, Munich, Germany; and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. Christine currently resides in Los Angeles, California. She received her B.F.A from California State University, Long Beach and M.F.A from University of California, Irvine.

Here, professional photographer and curator Laina Karavani interviews Christine in a series of emails, Internet chats, and phone calls.

NoD: Hi Christine. Where are you from?

Christine Nguyen: California. I grew up in Northern California and currently reside in Los Angeles.

Work by Christine Nguyen

“My work draws upon the imagery of science, but it is not limited to technologies of the present. It imagines that the depths of the ocean reach into outer space, that through an organic prism, vision can fluctuate between the micro- and macroscopic.” – Christine Nguyen

NoD: Oh. Where north?

Christine Nguyen: I was born in Mountain View and then grew up in San Jose. My dad was a commercial fisherman. He fished mostly in the bay area during my childhood and then in Southern California in my late teens. I realized about 3 years ago a lot of my work is partially inspired by the ocean due to the things my dad would bring home and spending a lot time on his boat as a kid. I’ve always been fascinated in nature, the sciences, geology, the macro/ micro, and outer space. Lately, I’ve been into growing salt crystals and collecting minerals and crystals.
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Indigo Painting with a Stencil

Shallom Johnson is an urban artist, dancer, and fashion/arts writer currently based in Vancouver who has been painting under the alias Indigo since 2008. She paints beautiful, layered, and emotional pieces using meticulously cut stencils, spray paint and house paint. She’s moving fast, literally and figuratively, making her mark in the art world in just 1.5 years of professional painting. Consider that she just left a live painting event in Brooklyn, is now painting with C215 in Paris, then is off to Brittany to paint with artist Liliwenn and then more events and collaborations in Berlin, Moscow, Dresden, London, New York City again (in late November), LA, and then home to Vancouver. And despite this frenetic schedule, when you speak with her you sense the patience and quiet that is required to create the works that you can view below. I met her in Brooklyn, and we have since had an interesting email exchange over the past three days:

NoD: Where are you from?

Indigo: I’m currently based in Vancouver (have been living there for 10 years now) but I grew up in a log house in the middle of a forest in Northern BC.

NoD:You just painted at Mark Batty Publishing’s Urban Arts Festival in Brooklyn. How did that come about? How did it go for you?

Indigo: My involvement with MBP came about via facebook. I was going to be in NYC anyways, because it is so much cheaper to fly to Europe from there than it is if you go straight from Vancouver. I saw the event listing online, noticed that they hadn’t announced all the artists yet, and messaged Adri (one of the festival’s directors) to ask if they had space for me to get involved.

Indigo painting after the rain stopped (Photo by Vincent Cornelli.)

It went really well, on all fronts – but during the days leading up to it, it seemed like everything that could go wrong, went wrong! First the paint shipment from MTN never showed up, then they got a little bit of paint but it was the wrong kind for me to use with stencils…finally got to the venue the day before to get my background done, and the space I was given was up on a narrow ledge with no available ladder to reach the top…then someone ran over two gallons of my housepaint with his car Read the rest of this entry »

If you like street art then the Wooster Collective is so deep in examples of outsider art that you are sure to find work that will make you want to go on a stickering or stenciling mission in your home town. I’ve been a fan ever since I found an original Adam Neate painting on the street in SOHO way back in 2002, and had no idea it was by Adam Neate (nor who Adam was) until Marc Schiller of the Wooster Collective agreed to have a look. Then I interviewed Marc, and interviewed Adam, and have not stopped looking at the Wooster Collective website since.

Adam Neate, self-portrait

Q: When I presented Marc Schiller of the Wooster Collective with your painting he immediately knew that it was your work. After visiting your Web site it became clear you’re a prolific and talented artist. What motivates you to create art and, even more intriguing, give it away by placing it on the street for people like me lucky enough to happen by?

Adam: I paint purely for the love and enjoyment I get from the feeling of creating something, be it a doodle on a piece of cardboard or a 6ft wall. After the process of creating something I lose interest in the final end product. I no longer want to see it. The egotist thrives on completing an acceptable painting. He will stand for hours looking at his own achievment. The egotist will call himself an “artist”… I just paint on stuff. The walls of my home are bare. For me art is not for hanging, but more for experiencing oneself. Read the rest of this entry »

MSLK’s Watershed project installed on Governor’s Island

As designers we feel compelled to use our talents towards helping the public visualize and comprehend complex information. Recently we, at MSLK have become keenly interested channeling those skills to help people understand the effects of society’s mass consumption of plastic. It seems that the things that are most transient such as disposable bags, silverware, applicators, packaging and bottles are made from plastic, a material that is very enduring.

However, whether out of complacency, lack of information, or confusion, the general public hasn’t taken to condemning these practices.
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Friend of NoD and New York Fine Artist Annika Connor (Instructor of Watercolor at Sessions Online) has invited all NoD readers and subscribers to attend the Company Launch Party for ACTIVE IDEAS PRODUCTIONS.

AI Productions, Inc. is an innovative corporation whose mission is to serve the artistic community by facilitating the presence of emerging artists and educating the public about their work.

This event is free and all interested parties are invited to attend, though RSVP is required. At the party, there will be 100 gift bags for VIP guests and donors to the Point Suite project.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008
8pm – Midnight
Mr. West
559 W. 22nd St. & 11th Ave., NYC
Sponsored Bar from 8pm – 10pm
Cocktail and festive attire

Please RSVP to: annika@aiproductions.org

For more information about AI Productions, please visit:
www.aiproductions.org

For information about AI Productions current project, please visit:
www.pointsuiteartbook.com

Currently AI Productions is creating a fine art book entitled Point Suite whose purpose is to enlighten the public about the ever-increasing artistic activities of our international contemporary art community.

The Point Suite art book is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions on behalf of Point Suite may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are
tax-deductible to the extent permitted by the law.

To donate directly to Point Suite, please visit
www.fracturedatlas.org/donate/883

Please feel free to share this information with your friends and colleagues.

“Don’t Worry – Be Curious!” is one of the most wonderful titles of an art exhibition I’ve ever come across. Art has many shapes and forms and purposes (or sometimes none) and at its best it has the ability to open our eyes and see to the world differently. Sometimes that means being made aware of pain and injustice that we have previously ignored, and sometimes it means seeing beauty and possibility in our daily grind. Read the rest of this entry »