meredith cutler :: arts marketing :: artist

In part 5 of my exhibition highlights from "Welcome To The Conversation": RISD's Graduate Thesis Exhibition, I would like to call attention to the graphic design department, which exemplified some very strong conceptual design work through displays in print, video and book format.

My favorite work from this department was by Leslie Kwok. I first noticed her work in a collaborative wall drawing/video piece "The Group Portrait", undertaken with the help of her cohort.

The site-specific wall drawing, an outlined portrait of the graphic design '08 MFA candidates, is documented in a time-lapse video placed alongside. By watching the video, the viewer is invited into the micro-world of the department, where each student is responsible for a portion of the outline that will stand for their portrait. Of course, the outlines remain empty, and the video offers a point-of-view of the back of each artist. This leaves it up to the viewer to "fill in" the blanks, perhaps to assign a face and personality to the graphic designer, a role which outside of the microcosm of school often exists as a transparancy (or work horse!) behind which the work itself takes center stage.

This stands in ironic contrast to the role of the "art star" that comes to mind when one considers the high stakes luminaries of the contemporary art world, into which the entire crop of RISD MFA candidates now emerges. (For another take on this, see part 6!)

Also of great interest were Kwok's visual and narrative explorations of social ties, in a print series titled "Social Constellations" (depicted below), and video, "Sociograms", which can be viewed as a Quicktime movie on her website.