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Life & Arts

Graphic design students challenge trends

UH artists' works on display during exhibit at Blaffer Gallery

by DUSTI RHODES
The Daily Cougar

Editor's note: This is the third in a four-part series focusing on UH graduate students featured in the 2006 School of Art Masters Thesis Exhibition running at the Blaffer Gallery until April 29.

Graphic design conjures up a slew of ideas and creations in terms of using it as a creative medium. However, before it takes the shape from anything to an advertisement to a band T-shirt, the discipline is an exercise in communicating an idea.

"Design is really about seeing in a different way, granted you want to make something that's interesting, but it's also about getting people to respond," graduate student of graphic design Ray Ogar said.

The ideas brought forth by the School of Art graphic designers serve as warnings for our potential trends in technology and consumerism. Sometimes the comments are even directed at the very tools the designers themselves use to express their ideas or the creations by others who most likely practiced the same discipline.

Time for change

Graduate student Kathryn Kelley began her career at UH in the design studio, but her education catapulted her across campus to the sculpture building. Her mind, however, is still back on the third floor of the Fine Arts building.

"Graphic design totally affects my way of image making and researching analysis," Kelley said.

During Kelley's time at UH, she said she discovered sculpture as a more effective way to portray her ideas, adding that her process will never stray far from those of a designer.

Kelley's use of industrial object like tar, tires, nails, rope and plaster have an audience first focusing on the ugliness that is associated with the objects but with a longer look the beauty of the objects surfaces. This realization can also be translated in how we see one another, Kelley said.

"If we look at people enough ? past their funkiness ? most people have a beautiful aspect to themselves," Kelley said.

She said her materials also serve to communicate her ideas about herself and society.

"The decay and age tell me that a life is lived and, when things are slick and plasticy, I don't see life in them," Kelley said. "I've really started to move away from plastic reacting to the superficial nature of the consumer culture."

Thoughts on the cell phone

If you have used your cell phone on campus you might have attributed to Ogar's research for his work that comments on society's obsession with wireless technology. Using personal observations and those of others, Ogar developed a series of characters used to describe the various relationships cell phone users have with their most trusted device.

Through Victorian-style drawings and typeface, Ogar created a book depicting characters that portray a different type of cell phone user; the "Thigmo" takes on a rodent-like appearance as it represents those whose obsessive fiddling with their phone has them conjuring up the image of a squirrel or mouse with something in its hands.

Ogar's work serves to present the dangers of trusting in the usefulness of mass communication without realizing its effects on personal interactions. Ogar said that his work tends to focus on problems he sees developing around him.

"My design has always been about a social issue or something that can hopefully affect change, or at least speaks of change in society," Ogar said.

Save, delete

Methods of control build the backbone of graduate student Eddy Roberts' video that incorporates computer commands with body language to demonstrate the similarities of artists and designers.

A set of hands creates digitally created sculptures and drawings with a voiceover that sounds the commands and brings the physical and virtual worlds together.

"Before when you wanted to make physical things you had to sculpt it out of a physical material and this permits you to reconnect the idea of the physicality of the materials, but it's still sort of an ephemeral media, in that it's digital," Roberts said.

The gestures for each command such as save, delete and select were pulled from historical religious paintings in order for Roberts to point out the control established through the use of interfaces and religion.

"Religion and input devices or computer interfaces are both mechanisms of control. You could view it in the parallels between selecting (data) or singling someone out; there is a fine line between those distinctions," Robert said.

Advertising invasion

When design graduate Li Qiao left her home in China, she never expected she would see so much of her new home when she returned three years later.

"I took a trip back to China; I found there were a lot of differences than when I was there due to globalization," Qiao said. "I saw a lot of changes, so, I felt a little bit sad because I couldn't find traditional food anymore, a lot of traditional houses had been replaced by big buildings."

The wave of westernization is depicted in Qiao's piece "The Lost, The Next," where a dragon is created out of American corporate logos like KFC, Pepsi and Nike. What was once a mythical creature (derived from the anatomy of the snake, ox, rabbit, deer, eagle and fish) and symbol of prosperity in China is now used to warn of a potential loss of culture.

"Like China, the dragon is changing. It is no longer an amalgam of creatures, but a chimera of the west," Qiao said.

Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu