Organization: Personal Practice
Role: Artist
Year: 2023–Present
This is an independent project inspired by my time as a researcher in residence in Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Freetown Christiania’s experiment with anarchy began in the 70s and continues today. The squatters who initially inhabited the 19-acre site in the Christianshavn neighborhood of Copenhagen were young, queer, radical, anti-hierarchical and anti-capitalist. They were also willing to fight to protect their communalism.
Using the rainbow as a guide, they self-segmented into armies, with each color of the rainbow representing a different skill. The orange army—those who were doing orange work—were, among other trades, poster-makers. They were tasked with telling the story of the commune to the masses, communicating their collective ideals to the rest of the world.
This experiment takes inspiration from the work that the orange army was doing during the early years of the establishment of Freetown Christiania.
Using the tools of poster-making—of communicating ideology in a visual way—this work imagines alternate governmental structures, prefigures practices that do not rely on ammassing capital in order for group survival and visualizes ways that we (all humans) can live in a more harmonious and communal way.
You are now leaving the Schengen area :)
Organization: Southern Utah Museum of Art
Role: Designer (Exhibition Identity & Catalog)
Year: 2021-22
This Earth: Notes and Observations By Montello Foundation Artists was an exhibition of the works created by 41 artists from around the world during their residency at The Montello Foundation in Montello, Nevada. I was brought in to design the exhibition identity and catalog with director/curator Jessica Kinsey and co-curators Hikmet Sidney Loe and Stefan Hagen. Exhibition images & sample catalog pages to right.
The work in the exhibition focuses on the connection between humans and the natural world, set forth as chapters in the catalog: Observing Nature, In Dialog With Nature, and so on.
From the design perspective, some of the important elements are colors selected from key artworks, using a unique typeface that balanced contemporary art with the timelessness of earth, a natural colored and textured paper, and the addition of embossing on the cover.
Organization: Personal Practice
Role: Artist
Year: 2020–Present
Manifesto for Voting Reform isolates five oppressive aspects of U.S. voting—the design of all documents and systems governing federal elections, the two-party system, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and minoritarianism. This is accomplished by printing succinct statements on brightly-colored polyester flag material. In the same vein that the outgoing President’s re-election campaign flags proclaimed to “Keep America Great,” these flags aim to create a cult mentality around streamlining, reforming, and democratizing the design of the U.S. voting system.
These flags were on display at the Southern Utah Museum of Art from January–March 2021.
Watch my talk introducing the project to Design Week Sacramento in October, 2020.
Photo courtesy of @lolaaudrey
Organization: Department of Art and Design, Southern Utah University
Role: Curator
Year: 2020–22
Art Insights is a bi-weekly lecture series hosted online for students in the Department of Art and Design at Southern Utah University, as well as the greater creative community of Southern Utah. Guest lecturers have included (at right, top to bottom) Will Wilson, Hjalti Karlsson of Karlssonwilker, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., Aida Lizalde, Silas Munro of Polymode Studio and BIPOC Design History, Syd Carpenter, and Wayne Martin Belger, along with many others.
From Fall 2020-Spring 2022, I organized this lecture series by selecting a lineup of highly relevant practitioners in each of the major emphases of the Department of Art and Design: graphic design, illustration, fine arts, art education, and art history. I introduce guests, recorded their lectures, and moderated a Q&A at the end.
Organization: Personal Practice
Role: Artist
Year: 2019–Present
—
—
Images from 2023 Installation, Latvian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Photos: Estere Rozkalne
—
Review by C. Torgersrud, MSc (Kungliga Tekniska högskolan)
‘Out Freedom Way’ provides a sensitive view of American unexceptionalism from the inside.
As the piece opens, the screen frames the façade of a gun shop on a busy suburban road which would not be out of place in the outskirts of almost any state. The piece moves steadily through a series of moments on this stage, transporting the viewer through the course of a year.
While the jaunty orchestral soundtrack can at first be seen as a trite metaphor to the patriotic flair common of rural America its sudden disappearance makes the room tone of road noise and wind almost deafening. While this choice feels harsh at first the audio/visual connection of pedestrian presence and deft scoring choices generate moments of anticipatory levity with each pedestrian sighting. The play of sound and subject softens the unblinking quality of the scenes, lending a sense of levity and playfulness. While the pomp filled orchestration can draw illusions to the tuba following a fat man, the audio in this work feels much more kind. Instead of mockery the deft scoring feels cautiously optimistic.
In addition to the musical interludes the persistent gaze of the piece comes off as a contemplative choice. This staging is simultaneously public by definition while yet feeling extremely intimate in its presentation. The vignettes are elegant in their simplicity and touching in their editing. As the piece progresses the juxtaposition of the simple stage with the jaunty scoring builds an almost childlike sense of anticipation drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into the scene.
With the obvious commentary of the American overdependence on automobiles laid bare the more insidious implications of this careful staging are able to develop.
The mundane pastiche focuses the viewer squarely on the dichotomy of the American idyll. Everyday life flows past the lens, past the viewer, but yet, one cannot forget what we are looking at. The set piece of this stage, while mild in appearance, radiates potential violence. Nestled among homes, decorated with the seasons, its stand still and monolithic like a tomb LED signs blinking like a gauche lantern.
This choice of staging device forces the viewer to engage with this dissidence. While this scene may be abundantly common, if not even slightly comforting, to the American viewer the reaction of the outsider provides an energy to the potential life of this work.
A thoughtful meditation on automobiles, guns and the future of the American psyche, ‘Out Freedom Way’ provides a nuanced look at the crossroads from which we can observe, contemplate and engage with the fleeting zeitgeist of the American dream.
Organization: UC Davis Department of Design
Role: Design MFA Candidate
Year: 2017-19
Local Actions, National Outcomes: How Piecemeal Election Design Has Led US Voting Into Chaos
Local Actions, National Outcomes was my thesis project—the final installation showing two years worth of research and creative practice aimed at understanding the issues with voting in the United States. This work explores how states (and sometimes county municipalities) create chaos for US voting because states have the right to plan and execute their own ballot design, gerrymandering, and voter identification laws. In order to illuminate these problems, this project uses simple information design and physical interaction to transport visitors mentally and physically.
After visitors digest some of the information on the panels, they are invited to go inside the wooden voting booth (left) to answer the question “How do you envision the future of voting in the United States?” In order to ‘cast their ballot’, visitors write or draw on cardstock and pin their response to a corkboard mounted to the wall.
Thesis committee: Tim McNeil, MFA (chair), glenda drew, MFA, Simon Sadler, PhD
Organization: Höfuðstöðin - The Home of Chromo Sapiens / Shoplifter (Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir)
Role: Graphic Designer
Year: 2022–Present
Taking care of creative projects—graphic design, print/digital advertising, image retouching, social media, etc.—for this new museum in Reykjavík.
Poster image by @mariahelloh
Organization: Department of Design, UC Davis
Role: Co-designer
Year: 2019
Fellow graduate student Jonathan Parris and I created this puzzle game designed to teach about voting district line drawing and the problem with Gerrymandering in the U.S.
In particular, we wanted to focus on how, regardless of which party is in power, Gerrymandering is a dubious and technically illegal practice that continues to happen and undermines popular voting outcomes.
The puzzle is constructed from a wooden puzzle basin and three variations of puzzle pieces: best-case scenario for Republicans, best-case scenario for Democrats, and current scenario of line drawing.
Organization: Manetti Shrem Museum
Role: Senior Artist
Year: 2016-17
As the lead graphic designer for the brand new Manetti Shrem Museum, my role was to create a suite of print materials leading to the grand opening on November 13.
Using the existing visual identity assets, I pulled together a suite of postcards, square cards, and additional items to get the word out that a new museum was going to open.
This was coupled with a paid advertising plan that I implemented for social media. Additionally, there was a marketing/advertising push from other colleagues on the Manetti Shrem Museum team.
Architectural Photos: Iwan Baan
Organization: Gallery Port
Role: Designer
Year: 2022-23
An exhibition and series of events under the title Legislation Kitchen. AIVAG’s (Artists in Iceland Visa Action Group) main aim of these events is forming a proposal of changes in legislation to immigrant labor laws, focusing on artists living in Iceland coming from countries outside the Schengen area.
Exhibition up at Gallery Port in downtown Reykjavík 17-27 February, 2023.
Organization: UC Davis Department of Design
Role: Researcher, Graphic Designer
Year: 2018
As a graduate student in the Department of Design, I began exploring a variety of topics, especially focusing on the intersection of politics and design. In this project, I collected and analyzed the text from each state’s voter I.D. law. The visualization compares law word count to the political party affiliation of the state’s two senators.
Pushing this work further, I partnered with UC Davis’ Data Science Initiative (DSI) to run the laws through Natural Language Processing algorithms. They ran the algorithms and helped me to understand what is interesting amongst the massive files. Two of the algorithms that produced interesting findings were the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and N-gram analysis. The TF-IDF algorithm output showed the word that was most unique to each law in the context of all of the laws combined.
Publicly Presented: November 26, 2018
Organization: UC Davis Design Museum; Robert & Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
Role: Exhibition Designer, Graphic Designer
Year: 2017-18
Responding to the themes in Janet Mock’s book Redefining Realness, Exit Through the Bathroom transformed the UC Davis Design Museum into an interactive studio apartment. Installations focused on issues of identity, safety, family and love in the LGBTQIA+ community.
Work by Adriana Arriaga, Persia Masoudi, Jenna Pyörälä, Adam Taylor, Iris Xie, Dee Dee Yang and Iris Zheng
Course taught by Glenda Drew
Abstract and illustrations submitted to Strelka Mag
The United States elections circus spans more than half of every presidential term—a little over two years, restarting every four. During the primary season, citizens vote one state at a time, starting with Iowa, continuing on a path of arbitrarily spaced-out primaries and caucuses to determine party nominees. At the general election, each state—and, without rhyme or reason, sometimes each county within each state—creates their own rules regarding ballot design, voter identification protocol, polling place practices, etc. Before 2020, it was already a systems-design nightmare.
Even in a pandemic, some Americans must still vote in person at polling locations. On Tuesday, 7 April 2020, citizens of Wisconsin were forced to go to the polls on the same day that 129 new cases of COVID-19 appeared in that state. And while numerous doctors and scientists try to convince Americans to physically isolate, Republican-led states are on track to continue forcing people to risk their health by voting in-person. Kentucky has gone a step further, changing their voter identification law mid-crisis, requiring a stricter form of ID. Meanwhile, Kentucky ID-issuing offices are closed due to the virus.
The history of voting in the US reveals an absence of coherent design strategy and a country whose elections have always been hackable. This pandemic has torn the facade further back, making it more obvious that America’s obsession with decentralization and individualism converge in the design of the ultimate shitshow election. Is there a collective imagination potent enough to save the United States?
Organization: California Museum
Role: Lead Exhibition Designer
Year: 2016
I was hired to help the California Museum design and implement their recent exhibition exploring the history of voting in California, Power of the People: Voting In California, 1850-2016.
There were many goals for this exhibition, and they were keen to have many sections fitting into a fairly small space.
One section, Campaign Posters, was to go into an awkward space; with very tall ceilings and building facades from different decades all around. Instead of ignoring the facades, I recommended that we build a foreshortened “yard” in front of the facades using picket fences to give visitors the sense that they were viewing campaign posters in a kind of yard near a house.
Organization: Boulder Associates Architects
Role: Environmental Graphic Designer
Year: 2016
Within the Midtown Sacramento office of Boulder Associates, the team wanted to create a more inviting informal meeting space. I was charged with coming up with a solution.
The result was a floor to ceiling map of Midtown & Downtown Sacramento printed on cork and affixed to 2 walls. The rest of the walls were painted with whiteboard paint so the whole space could change constantly.
One exciting result of the cork map wall was that staff and visitors would try to find where their home or office or favorite coffee place was. So we started placing little location bubbles for people to write on, making the map more interactive and more meaningful to the office.
Collaboration with Kevin Funkhouser
Organization: UC Davis Department of Design
Role: Researcher, Graphic Designer
Year: 2018
In this research project, I collected the logos from all political parties in the United States, and began separating them out based on color, iconography, and then plotting them on graphs to understand any correlation between color and belief.
Organization: Crocker Art Museum
Role: Lead Graphic Designer
Year: 2012-13
I was design-lead for the ArtMix logo & visual identity. Art Mix is an art party held at the museum every 2nd Thursday with cocktails, music and live performances.
The inspiration for the logo comes from frequency lines on a stereo showing lows and highs, reflecting the dynamic & ever-changing nature of the event.
Here you can see the logo featured as a projection on the building, on the cover of Art Interactive February/March 2013 and on a poster in a bus shelter.
