DA | Summer 2011 Conversations Evening

Conversations on February 23rd 2011

Conversations & Collaborations – MAKE SOMETHING (Bevan Tonks & Tana Mitchell)

November saw the inaugural exhibition for MAKE SOMETHING. A group show focussed on cross-disciplinary collaborations between graphic designers and a creative partner of their choosing. Founder (and 2010 collaborator) Bevan Tonks talks about how it all came to be and where to from here. Also hear 2010 participant Tana Mitchell talk about her experience collaborating with singer/songwriter Julia Deans.

Anagraphs: photo collage books (Philip Kelly)

Philip Kelly will show a selection of his photo and type collage books constructed from second hand bargain basement photography publications, old typesetters catalogs and other print based ephemera. These personal works were made in the late 1990s in New York City as an antidote to increasingly long hours spent designing on a computer. The books update the Surrealist parlour game of exquisite corpse using a combination of chance and design with a scalpel and glue stick in hand. The cutting and recombining of the contents within the covers of predominantly fashion oriented coffee table books (or in some examples, the melding of two different books into one) creates a series of surprising and often humorous narratives. Sequences of images collapse and flow into each other in a chaotic alternative to the logic of traditional book design.

Being in two places at once (Joanna Alpe)

Working in two places at once, living in two places at once is probably as close to being in two places at once as I will ever get. Ideas however, get to travel first class, in the blink of an eye – a youtube upload, a blogpost, a twitpic from a remote place, an email, a text. There really is no excuse for idea jet-lag. This talk will look at the recent escalation of ideashare as we become more upwardly mobile, working in with the wanderlust, and what this means for us here in New Zealand.