DGS NEWS

M.A. Peers at the Pomona College Museum of Art

Greetings from the DGS offices! We hope your Halloween was as exciting and spooky as ours was.

We wanted to let you know about an upcoming panel discussion for the M.A. Peers exhibition “Project Series 42: M.A. Peers", hosted by writer and curator Doug Harvey, joined by artist Steve Roden.

Thursday, November 18, at 7 p.m.,
at the Pomona College Museum of Art
The panel will be followed by a public reception from 8-10 p.m.

The reason why is, (A) because these are all interesting folks with a lot to say, and (B) the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that we designed. We had a lot of fun working with M.A. Peers, and her broad array of paintings, including Soviet space dog portraits, made for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, purebred dogs painted on Op-y fabrics, and corporate figures slyly swallowed up in fields of brilliant color. The fact that Peers doubles as a competitive whippet trainer is also an extra-special bonus in our book. Check out the fluorescent spiral binding and the special hidden fold-out.

For more information on the exhibits and directions to the museum, see the Pomona College Museum of Art website.

Five Years of Fellowships for Visual Artists

California Community Foundation (CCF) with the support of the Getty Foundation will unveil their retrospective awards catalogue: Common Threads, Shared Spaces: Five Years of Fellowships for Visual Artists. Department of Graphic Sciences has been given the honor of creating the book's design and is collaborating with writer and project manager Irene Tsatsos. Others members of the project team include Namju Cho and Leslie Ito of CCF and Angie Kim of the Getty. This catalogue provides the unique opportunity of highlighting the diverse works of 61 Los Angeles artists. It will release in March, 2009.

A Field Guide: the Book

Keep an eye out for a comprehensive guide to The Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA, currently in the works and due out in September of this year. The explosive exhibition took place at LACMA on November 15, 2008, featuring performances, workshops, installations and events that introduced new ways of experiencing LACMAs expansive space and it's mazelike galleries. The book seeks to not only document these projects but further practices beyond the actual day by  featuring new works, essays and interviews.

Cowboys & Presidents

The exhibit Cowboys & Presidents opens this weekend at the Autry National Center. The exhibit explores the fascinating and ongoing intersection of cowboy culture and presidential politics from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush.
Check out items such as LBJ's mini branding iron and Bill Clinton's childhood drawing of the film 'High Noon'. Don't forget to take the two polls (designed by DGS) in the voting booths in the exhibit!

Cowboys & Presidents runs April 12 - September 7
Autry National Center
              4700 Western Heritage Way
              Los Angeles, CA
 

Happy New Year!

This week ushers in the Chinese New Year—the year of the rat. What better way to celebrate than to come on down to Chinatown for the annual New Year's Parade? Find out all the information about the parade and much, much more about Chinatown at the newly launched ChinatownLA.com. At the new site you can learn about the history of Los Angeles' Chinatown, where to eat and shop during your visit, or find out about upcoming special events.

The 109th Annual Golden Dragon Parade
Saturday, February 9 from 2pm- 5pm

taste: LACE Benefit Auction, May 19

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions will be hosting its 28th Annual Benefit Art Auction on Saturday, May 19, 2007. The event, entitled taste, features live and silent auctions of delicious artwork as well as mouthwatering food and drink tastings by Marvimon Productions (Secret Restaurant), Fallen Fruit and others.

DGS had the pleasure of designing the event invitations and auction checklist for the third year in a row (see the New Work photo album for images). LACE is a nearly 30-year-old nonprofit contemporary art center located in the heart of Hollywood. With a strong reputation as an experimental space for performance and experiential art projects, LACE produces art and events that inspire the public imagination and engage with issues that shape local and global life. In other words, they're a great organization to support.

So come on out! We'll be there, stuffing our faces and scribbling our names in on some silent auction items. (The LACE auction is a great way to enjoy art and build your own collection without busting your budget. Also, there are sometimes celebrities in attendance. You know, if you're into that.)

Call 323-957-1777 x17 or see www.welcometolace.org for tickets.

Resistance

Reify Recordings has just released "Widerstand", a CD of experimental music by Chris Heenan and Michael Vorfeld. This intricate combination of electrical surges and blips are created with the unique combination of light bulbs (Vorfeld) and analog synthesizer (Heenan).

Inspired by the use of light bulbs, DGS created artwork for the CD based on artwork by Michael Vorfeld.

For more information about this CD contact Reify Recordings.

Protagonist

We had the pleasure of working with Academy Award-winning director Jessica Yu and Diorama Films in designing the movie poster for their latest film, Protagonist. Inspired by Euripides, the film addresses the essence of storytelling by creating a documentary about drama itself. Focusing on the trajectories of four lives, Yu poses a crucial question: what happens when people are driven to such extremes that they become the thing they most abhor? The film is debuting this weekend at the Sundance Film Festival.

2007 Sundance Film Festival

Invisible Trajectories

The Invisible Trajectories project, featuring the work of urbanist Claude Willey, artist Deena Capperelli and photographer Mark Tsang, will function as a story archive about the experience of traveling and observing the landscape of the Inland Empire at the end of the age of oil. The stories will be told with maps, web logs, photographs and travel documents; as well as through personal accounts collected and reassembled in an effort to understand the Inland Empire’s increasingly heightened movement patterns that continue to define the region as perpetually transforming, continually blurred, overwhelmingly dynamic and arguably placeless.

January 22 – March 3, 2007; Reception: TBD
at the Wignall Museum at Chaffey College

Getting their sh*t together

We have just finished a new logo for GYST (Getting Your Sh*t Together), a software development company for artists, by artists. Written expressly for visual artists, the GYST software is a database program to help artists keep track of their artwork, business aspects, proposals, mailing lists, etc. It also includes tons of information on every aspect of an artists career, including over 200 web links and resources for additional perspectives on business aspects of the arts. For more information about GYST, visit www.gyst-ink.com.