Usha Venkat

BFA 2 - Art

Radical Practice

Radical Practice is a series of podcast conversations between CalArts Graphic Design Program alumnae and current students. Each episode features an alumna with a distinct professional practice, including BFAs and MFAs whose endeavors range from cultural to corporate and from singular enterprises to ambitious ideas. We’ll discuss how they have defined success for themselves and gather insights into how their CalArts education might have played a role.

Radicalpractice.calarts.edu

Collaborators:

Louise Sandhaus, Alex Meir, Natalie Gooden, Alene Tashjian, Usha Venkat, Lily Yeh,
Zhenyu Qu

Moon Wang

I miss my three boyfriends This is a series of posters we made based on a girl who have mental illness and have lived in the hospital for 34 years.

Max Harper

Apollo, Apollo! In this swift hell, firefighters wore upwards of seventy-five pounds of gear, as they walked atop a landscape rendered to burning coal. Guided only by headlights, the firefighters would soak the path in front of them. Every step released a fine silt of red embers and ash that moved weightlessly through the air, […]

Max Jaffe

The SOFT Glass “The S.O.F.T. (Sonification Of Flowing Temporality) Glass is an hourglass that makes and manipulates sound. In its final form, it will be a sculptural object that can double as a musical instrument, based on the simple and enduring timekeeping device dating back at least to the 16th century BC. Utilizing a variety […]

Christine Lee

Happy Headroom “Happy Headroom” was part of my mid-residency show titled “Living Threads” in February 2020. The immersive installation consisted of 4-channel video and sculptures. In this video, my mom and I perform rituals as a visceral process to create a dialogue between changing states of self and site. Hair, simultaneously dead and living, functions […]

Mia Yao Meng

Hyperreal Gesstures This project is a reflection of the gestures we perform on a routine basis in order to interact (as the trigger and the data input) with networked devices such as smartphones and laptops. These gestures are abstracted/flattened in the design process and transformed into online behaviors. This habit-formation process only takes us a […]

Fallon Williams

Originally located on the back wall of the MOD, IRIS was a 3-dimensional automated aperture that opened to about 17-ft in diameter to reveal a lit cyclorama in its opening. For the Virtual Campus, we will be modeling the iris in 3D software, then using lighting software to create various lighting looks. Christian Mejia (MFA2, […]

Dongpu Ling

ML Landscape I am interested in the inaccurate and unpredictable result that a machine can make. In order to understand its “mind”, I train the machine using images that have not been cropped, to see how it understands a thing that has not be seen before.

Ward Melnikoff

Return Of The Radiolarian After a 20 year pause, my Radiolarian Landscapes are returning. http://wardmelnikoff.com/