2X4 (New York, NY), Founded in 1994 by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers and Georgianna Stout, 2×4 is a global design consultancy headquartered in New York City. The focus of 2×4’s work is brand strategy for cultural and commercial clients who value the power of design. The organization creates innovative, experiential, participatory and visually-dynamic ways to engage audiences worldwide. 2×4’s intellectual and creative conviction is that thoughtful design can make an essential contribution to every level of cultural discourse.
In a world that is increasingly moving towards digital media over printed means, 2×4 creates an installation that explores the very act of translation – the way an idea translates from thought to form. Instead of predicting the future, 2×4 polls the internet using the key word “future”, and creates a two-part experience: intimate audio juxtaposed with large-scale visual graphics produced in the gallery and posted daily.
Candy Chang
Candy Chang is an artist, designer, and urban planner who strives to make cities more comfortable and contemplative. She is the co-founder of Civic Center and Neighborland, and is passionate about redefining the ways we share information in public space to improve our communities and ourselves.
She is a TED Senior Fellow, a Tulane Urban Innovation Fellow, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and was named a “Live Your Best Life” Local Hero by Oprah Magazine. By combining public art with civic engagement and personal well-being, she has been recognized for exploring strategies for the design of our cities in order to live our best lives.
Projects include the award-winning Street Vendor Guide in New York City, I Wish This Was, which gathered residents’ ideas for vacant storefronts—an idea that further developed into Neighborland, a tool to help people see, share, and build on ideas together for the places they care about, and Before I Die on an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans for people to reflect on their lives and share their personal aspirations in public spaces.
Dawn DeDeaux (American)
Dawn DeDeaux is considered among America’s pioneering artists in new media, and was a featured artist in the 2012 international art biennial Prospect Two, which was held in her hometown of New Orleans. Her massive installation Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces in an Effort to Make Sense of It All, which was inspired by the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, received national and international acclaim.
DeDeaux is an author, curator and publisher, and is acknowledged in two current college textbooks, including Understanding Art and Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media. She is also an avid arts educator, and established a comprehensive arts program for a 6,000 inmate prison facility in Louisiana. This inspired her exhibition Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths, which featured her own art as well as the work of her inmate students. This exhibition was presented in several American cities.
Works by DeDeaux have been exhibited widely throughout the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Baltimore Museum for Contemporary Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut.
Tom Leeser (American)
Tom Leeser (Los Angeles, CA) Director of the Art and Technology Program and Director of the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts, serves as a participating artist and curates 22 works by emerging and significant video artists in the CLA Video Gallery, a 6,000 square ft. raw industrial space with dramatic 30 ft. high ceilings.
Future Tense
We cannot perceive the future directly or ‘remember’ it.
– Oesten Dahl “Tense and Aspect Systems”
An embedded installation of moving image, spoken word and sound art within Centre of Living Arts’ Futures Project.
In grammar, the future tense is used as a reference to time. It is used to describe an event that hasn’t yet occurred, but is expected to occur. Tense also refers to a mental or nervous condition.
Future Tense does not function as a singular reference, instead it is positioned as an assemblage of possible futures culled from past and present media. It’s my curatorial intent to exhibit work, host workshops and conduct artist talks that can be framed as multiple space-time shifts. These future shifts represent past and present tenses derived from cultural anxieties, social complexities and political instabilities. The exhibit strives to translate these precarious conditions into a poetics of trepidation.
Body Envelope, Nina Waisman
Body Envelope is an interactive installation that makes the visitor’s body a tool for tuning an extended cosmos, by mapping sounds of far-flung worlds into the visitor’s immediate space. “The volume of space around your body out to arm’s length – what neuroscientists call peripersonal space – is part of you. Through a special mapping procedure, your brain annexes this space to your limbs and body, clothing you in it like an extended, ghostly skin… Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings…”. (Blakeslee, Sandra and Matthew, The Body Has a Mind of its Own).
Nina Waismans work highlights the roles that movement, gesture and rhythm play in forming our thoughts – neurologists and cognitive scientists call such physical thinking the pre-conscious scaffolding for all human logic. How, then, might our new tech-inflected gestures be shaping our relationships with the bodies and systems we connect to when we move with technology?
Kenny Scharf (American)
Born in Los Angeles, Kenny Scharf received his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1980. During the 1980s he rose to prominence alongside fellow contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring in the East Village art scene. As one of the first artists to inject elements of street culture into mainstream contemporary art, Scharf continues to pioneer projects like Cosmic Cavern—a now legendary all-night DayGlo disco party, held in the basement of a Brooklyn warehouse from 2009-2010.
Scharf’s ambition as a professional artist is to maintain the course he started over 25 years ago, by establishing his work in the fields of painting, sculpture, and performance. A guiding principle of his work “is to reach out beyond the elitist boundaries of fine art and connect to popular culture through my art.”
Scharf refers to his art as “Pop Surrealism” and his paintings incorporate imagery from advertisements, cartoons and classic Americana. He uses animated cartoon characters from his childhood, like the Jetsons, to bring pop culture to the fine arts, and as a prolific artist, he has worked in traditional media, while also designing a lifeguard station, Zippo lighters, and carousels. His work is found in numerous museums, galleries and private collections throughout the United States and abroad.
Art Park (American)
In conjunction with the Futures Project, the CLA will develop a CLA-owned vacant lot in downtown Mobile into a vibrant Art Park that will be accessible and engaging for all ages. Plans for the park call for a designed landscape, including changing art installations, educational programming and a green stormwater management system.
Funded in part by a $150,000 challenge grant from the Connecticut-based Educational Foundation of America, the park will be a major component of the CLA’s exhibition program and be fully incorporated into our visual identity. The CLA, working with a nationally distinguished advisory group, will commission a landscape artist/architect of national or international stature to lead site planning and design development.
This group includes:
Mary Beebe, Director of the Stuart Collection at the University of California-San Diego
Thomas Doyle of LA & South, whose previous projects include the master plan for the Frank Gehry-designed Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, MS
Peggy Fogelman, Frederick P. and Sandra P. Rose Chairman of Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dr. Vini Nathan, Dean and McWhorter Chair of the College of Architecture, Design & Construction at Auburn University
Georgie Stout, Partner and Creative Director for the New York-based design firm 2 x 4 (the CLA’s design partner for our website, exhibitions, and publications)
Site plans for the art park will be displayed as part of the Futures Project exhibition, and presented in the context of economic development through the arts.
Xavier de Richemont (French)
Xavier de Richemont is a French artist best known for intricate, large-scale light installations. Born in Algeria, he currently lives and works in Paris. Richemont studied painting at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Aix en Provence, France and during the course of his career he has worked closely in the fields of theatre and opera with artists such as Robert Wilson and David Salle.
In recent years, Richemont has won international acclaim for his massive outdoor video installations projected on monuments and historical sites found across the globe. In 2003 he created a large-scale video installation which projects images on Chartres Cathedral. This installation is open from May through September every year, and has become a popular destination attracting thousands of visitors annually.
Richemont recently made his U.S. debut with his signature video installation Hokushima in The Memory Project. Projected as an immersive, 30-foot-high video installation, the piece spanned an 8,600 SF gallery.
Richemont will contribute plans and visualizations for his next CLA commission, a long-term open-air video installation that will be projected onto a local landmark.
