Please join us Thursday, October 9th from 5-10pm

ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN FIRM ART WALK
BENEFITING FREE ARTS

START 5-8pm

• KIMBALL OFFICE SHOWROOM 500 S. Grand Suite 2400

END 8-10pm “Finish Line” City National Plaza 555 South Figueroa Street For food, drinks, live music, auction and amazing raffle prizes! benefitting: Free Arts LA | http://www.freearts.org follow us on facebook for event updates or visit www.artswaggerlosangeles.com

Participating Firms

• Kimball Office
• 500 S. Grand Suite 24
• AECOM
• Gensler
• IA
• SAA
• Wirt

YOUR WORK. YOUR WAY.
your art show

Kimball Office and United Interiors present art by unique Los Angeles artists displaying their work, their way. Collectively the artwork explores how society interacts with our world through technology, time, place, and creation. We invite you to share your art and inspiration tweet and post #artswagger2014. Make sure you add your Wish to our Wish Tree.

Artists

 

ART by YOU

MAKE A WISH TREE

Visitors to Art Swagger where invited collaborate in the performance art sculpture “The UI Wish Tree “. They sat in, the new Wish chair by Kimball Office and wrote or drew their wishes and attached them to the United Interiors “Wish Tree”.

The UI “Wish Tree” will be on display at the United Interiors Woodland Hills Showroom and more wishes will be added. You can also add your Wish, by following us on twitter and instagram, tagging photos or text @uiinteriors #Wish.

 

MOVING ART

24 1.5″ by 1.5″ laser print miniature art pieces inspired by Kimball Office and United Interiors ideals of providing unique furnishing that work your way. Guests where invited to wear or collage the pieces their way. Participants chose what Xsite-d them and collaged them on their “Wish”, Art Swagger Map or clothing becoming living canvases that they could bring home.

 

#ARTSWAGGER2014

Living art on the web. UI created a scrolling landing page to capture images from twitter and instagram. Signage throughout the event encouraged participants to share and follow the event using #artswagger2014. Our visitors shared there experience and showed us what they where Xsite-d about.

MICHAEL BLASI

Michael is a  compulsive doodler, since middle school.  His most inspired, balanced, and evocative doodles become the loose blueprints for his paintings and sculpture. The sculptures investigate the interplay of color and pattern meshed with undulating forms, inspired by nature. They embody a concept of sound made physical, rhythm made visual, energy as form. They take the tradition of “viewing stones” as a starting point. Also known as scholar’s rocks, (suiseki in Japan; gongshi – literally spirit stone – in Chinese) these rocks evoke real or imaginary landscape features with, surfaces that suggest great age, forceful profiles that evoke the grandeur of nature, overlapping layers or planes that impart depth, and hollows or perforations that create rhythmic, harmonious patterns.” He is attracted to the collaboration between nature and a refined human aesthetic in this two thousand year-old sculptural tradition: the original “assisted readymades”, ala Duchamp. Through a process of subtraction, accretion and refinement of styrene foam, paper pulp, clay and plaster forms the sculptures. Drawing and painting follows, exploring the contours of the form, building rhythm, contrast, and unity. The process is in some ways planned, and in some ways improvised, as a relationship between form and surface is realized.

JANA CRUDER website

Beneath the beauty of their flawless and sunny facades, each of Jana Cruder’s fine art photography series invites the viewer in for a deeper examination of both self and image. The prim and proper content of her works invokes both attention and questioning, mirroring the subtle layers of social influences and incongruities that have evolved over the decades. Coming of age in rural Pennsylvania, Cruder’s keen observational sense developed early on, as she related her image of what existed around her to her goal of what her future should look like. Since her early years of developing film in her home darkroom, Cruder’s focus has evolved around the social ideals and expectations built up for women and their counterparts, using currently the iconic figures of Barbie and Ken to represent the contradictions of perfection among individuals and relationships. As the artist’s own sense of self has matured, the significant nuances of her images have grown as well, creating a dialogue about the choices men and women make and why they do so. What lies beyond the goal of a perfect life in American society? What other paths have been socially fostered since collective norms were fractured in post-WWII America? How have the changes necessitated during wartime continued to evolve American gender and sexuality roles to the present day? The shift in Cruder’s  vision of what constitutes the ideal life provokes a comparison of expectations: the superficial expectancy from others and the authentic expectancy from oneself. As an individual and an artist, she has experienced the constant desire for more in life, and this investigation is paralleled in the depth of her work. Drawn to California by the magnitude of light and vast open space, Cruder found a nostalgic connection to her sociological themes via her fascination with the mid-century modern design movement. In Los Angeles, the ideal of perceived perfection is unceasingly evident, and there the context grew clearer for her creative photography work. With her series “What Lies Beneath” and “Great Expectations”, the space between the external appeal of beauty and the darker, more complex subtext is represented with the symbols of Barbie and Ken. Cruder connects this context with the dramatic gender and sexuality shifts following WWII, where roles and expectations shifted forcefully due to contemporary demands. Cruder explores the concepts of sex, sexuality, roles and societal influences with her images; the viewer’s immediate impression of beauty in each provokes a conversation of underlying meaning. In “What Lies Beneath”, three Barbie’s are shown on their quest for the ideal male counterpart, each restless and discontent throughout her pursuit of an unrealistic goal. The story evolves in “Great Expectations”, which examines the present-day complexities of relationships. As Chaos Magazine stated, “The sanitized environment brings feelings of discomfort, rather than inviting the fantasy we’d expect from a make-believe world“ (January 2013). An imbalance is subtly emphasized in each series, as quixotic dreams are contrasted with flawed outcomes to exhibit society’s obsession with ideals. As American social roles continue to evolve, ideals from the past endure. Evolving on these themes, Cruder will continue to examine not only individual roles in society but also their association with environmental and consumer changes.

 

MATTHEW LAPENTA website

Matthew paints and sculpts Internet things. Constantly connected, our eyes glued to a glowing screen, sharing and updating on a minute to minute basis… these are the realities of living in our society today. Matthew’s work seeks to explore this relationship by examining the impact of our constant consumption of technology, social media, and entertainment. Themes of control, obsession, dependence, and hypnosis are explored in the work. “I’m attempting to provoke a conversation about digital media and it’s effects on our culture. Are we are using them for social good or just to brag to one another about our luxuries?” Matthew was born and raised in Cleveland Ohio where he studied art all throughout his adolescence. He attended grad school in Chicago and works as a commercial art director. He moved to Venice, CA in 2012 where he now lives and works on his art. Matthew is represented by Axiom Contemporary, Santa Monica and Galerie COA, Montreal.

Art Swagger 2014 Participating Firms
KIMBALL OFFICE
500 South Grand Avenue, Suite 24

Presenting: Michael Blasi, Jana Cruder, Matthew Lapenta, Erin Trefry & Kristen Wright
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AECOM
555 South Flower Street, Suite 3700

Presenting:
Johannes Giradoni
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GENSLER
500 South Figueroa Street

Presenting:
Suzanne Tick, Calson Hatton, & Kainoa Westermark
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INTERIOR ARCHTECTS
515 South Flower Street, Suite 2050

Presenting: Eddy Streets & Aiseborn
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SAA
515 S. Flower St., Ste. 100

Presenting: Laure Joliet & Mike Vegas
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Finish Line Party
515 S. Flower St.

Presenting: Frankie Crocker II