Sep. 09, 2009 - Issue #725: Sex in the City 2009

Design Celebrating Hope

Design Celebrating Hope suffers from the incomplete-ness of the works it presents

The central issue of Design Celebrating Hope is one of uncertain purpose. Its main role, and the reason that it's in FAB Gallery, is that it is a showcase of the work of design students at the University of Alberta who worked on concepts for the packaging of a CD of music by Liberian refugees, one of whose concepts was selected for production. But the show also needs to present the background of the project and unfortunately the presentation of this information marks the show overall: as a museum exhibit, it is not tremendously exciting, and it seems like an awful lot of time and space spent to bring an incomplete presentation of the student's work.

The best way to view the real content of Design Celebrating Hope would be to allow us to see, or better yet to handle, the CD packaging that they have developed. I've already written here about the difficulties of showing student design work in the gallery, and while this collection doesn't seem as overwhelming as the graduation shows which are packed with overflowing tables full of random projects, it still suffers for its presentation. We can only see a few parts of each project, and the ones that receive more space seem random. Plenty of them are overflowing with roughed-up photographic imagery and grungy or scribbly type, with a few more graphic and geometric designs standing out. Most of them have a paper cutout of a CD and some of them have pages from their booklet mounted on foam-core, but these items suffer from a poor production value, notably in poorly-cut CD stand-ins and undersaturated reproductions that lack the gloss and high production value that we expect in the final product. It makes the design look cheap, especially in the longer selections from the design selected for production.

More frustrating, however, is that roughly two-thirds of the wall space is given over to snatches of writing from various people involved in the project and descriptions and photographs of what the designers, musicologists, refugees and others have been involved in for the past few years. It's informative, perhaps, but I didn't find myself strongly compelled to read it. It's a presentation. The student design has a vibrancy coming from its nature as a disparate collection of ideas, some strongly portrayed, about what the project looks like, and also coming from the audio material at its core—some of which is played accompanying a fairly predictable slide-show and low-resolution video projected on one wall. The didactic presentation of interviews and background on the walls undermines this colour. It doesn't help that this is the second time that essentially the same show has been presented this year at FAB, since much of this material was displayed in the spring. This time they are releasing the final product, but it doesn't seem to justify the exhibit as it stands. V

Until Sat, Sep 26
Design Celebrating Hope: An Exhibition of Student Design Work for the Buduburam CD Project
FAB Gallery (87 Ave – 112 St)
 

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