California Design Biennial @ PMCA

The California Design Biennial is held every year to showcase artists in product design, transportation design, architecture, graphic design, and fashion. Each of these artists has found a new and innovative way of expressing their ideas under an overarching theme of Sustainability bringing together our attention on Action/Reaction.

Rose Apodoca who was one of the 5 curators and also a local professional, explained that each of the artist formulated their projects as a new way of handling the problems we are facing today. And going throughout the museum it was easy to see that the majority of these designs were meant to form a response to the ecological problem that our world is facing today but more than just the going green sense. It was the problem our country but more specifically our people as an American society of are facing today.

Under fashion design Kai Suwannagate who's women's wear was among the most elegant I consider to have ever seen and yet they were handcrated in North Hollywood out of recycled wood, leathers, and local-materials. Rose Apodaca's purse fashion was meant to instill quality over quantity of her set of clutches handmade in Italy from feathers and gold rings which were set up in the showcase to resemble a bird flying from a cage. The oddest design in the I saw as Michel Berendi's First Earth Battalion. He normally makes menswear but in the show he had women's wear which i find difficult even to explain as it is made of leather, fur, a helmet, stalactite heals, and a lot of hair.

Under transportation design my favorite was the Model S designed by Tesla. Another was the Virgin Galactic Space Shuttle which currently takes passengers to the edge of our atmosphere to view the stars. But the design in the show was of a model space ship they will use to take passengers into space.

In architecture the Charlie Sava Swimming Pool stuck to the theme most specifically in my opinion because of its use of concrete and its positioning in a park.

My favorite piece in the show was a music video done by OK GO and created by OK Go and Syyn Labs it was called This Too Shall Pass. They used an intricate set up which I can only describe as a path of destruction of a trail of art. Another piece in the back exhibit that I thought was awesome because I had just based one of my designs on his work was done by Gajin Fujita though I have no idea how it tied to the exhibit as a whole I thought the exhibit was amazing and made me realize how wasteful our society is and what we should be doing to overcome the mess we've put ourself in among our consumer culture.