June 10, 2015

Port of Los Angeles Inspires Joelle Dietrick's Cargomobilities at ArtCenter College of Design's Hutto-Patterson Exhibition Hall

Exhibition open through September 4, 2015
Hours: Monday through Sunday, 8 a.m. until 8 p.m.

(Pasadena, Calif.) June 10, 2015 – Florida-based artist Joelle Dietrick has transformed Art Center College of Design’s Hutto-Patterson Exhibition Hall with a site-specific installation of artwork titled Cargomobilities. Consisting of a temporary wall painting mixed with pigmented ink prints on Terylene fabric, the largest recognizable form is an amalgamation of Port of Los Angeles inspired shapes, namely a shipping container and crane, along with a mid-century modern house and atrium from the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville near that city’s port and the site of a related installation. Surrounding this main image are clouds of colorful glitch prints, playfully encircling the central gray architectural forms. All artworks are applied directly to the wall and will be destroyed after the exhibition, reflecting the flux that characterizes the futures that predict the markets, which then distribute the goods of the global shipping industry.

Dietrick's Cargomobilities comes at a fortuitous time as the Undergraduate Art Department prepares to launch a new Photo and Experimental Media Track. This new concentration will support students working in games and gaming, networked systems, screen-based art, glitch art, 3D animation, interactivity, software as art, as well as experimental sound, film and digital photography.

Mimicking the complicated algorithms that move such markets, the production of the glitch prints has its own set of steps: 1) take systems quote from Steve Martin’s 2008 book Born Standing Up, 2) translate written word to image with open-sourced version of John Maeda’s 1995 custom software Color Typewriter, and 3) manipulate the resulting image with the most basic data bending techniques known. The arrangement of these prints follows the structure of the clouds of Turner’s 1836 painting Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm. Turner’s aesthetic approach to the sublime seems an apt model: Just as Turner considered large natural systems, so this installation considers large man-made systems. What has changed is the scale. With this focus for Dietrick’s work, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville curator Jaime DeSimone highlighted the following related excerpt from the recently published book Cargomobilities:

“...currently the largest cargo ship is 400 meter-long and 59 meter-wide Maersk Triple E class with a capacity of 18,000 20-foot containers (twenty-foot equivalent unit, or TEU). To put this into perspective, the ‘Halswell’ trading ship painted by J.M.W. Turner and sunk in 1786...was 42.5 meters long and 11 meters wide. It could only have carried approximately 14 modern cargo containers... Scale makes a difference.”

Inspired by these details and a recent site visit to Jaxport, relationships in scale become the focus of the objects depicted. Within SketchUp, using a found Ruby console script, the artist nestled a shipping container, within a 3D model of her own house, within the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, within a shipping crane, and aligned all with the 3D model’s center point. This absurd gesture of alignment makes the dramatic shifts in scale between objects clear while suggesting all is on order and predictable.

Inspired by the 2008 and 2015 Flash Crashes and other moments of glitch, the exhibition offers a space where a visitor can consider how automated, often unseen technological communications and economic systems, frenetically moving predictably, occasionally oscillating into free fall, affect our daily lives and basic human needs.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joelle Dietrick’s paintings, drawings and animations explore contemporary nesting instincts and their manipulation by global economic systems. Her recent artworks and research consider housing trends that complicate relationships to place. Her work has been shown at Transitio_MX in Mexico City, TINA B Festival in Prague and Venice, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, MCA San Diego, Long March Space Beijing, ARC Gallery Chicago, Soho20 New York and MPG Contemporary Boston. She has attended residencies at the Künstlerhaus Salzburg, Anderson Ranch, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre for the Arts and the School of the Visual Arts and received fellowships from the University of California, Florida State University and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).

ABOUT THE HUTTO-PATTERSON EXHIBITION HALL
In 2014 ArtCenter College of Design opened a new home for two of its dynamic visual arts programs—Undergraduate Art and Illustration—at the College’s South Campus in Pasadena. Renovation of the former post office was made possible in part because of the generosity of the Hutto-Patterson Charitable Foundation, providing a dramatic atrium space in the center of the building to showcase the work of ArtCenter students and visiting artists through a rotating series of exhibitions. Exhibitions are accompanied by public lectures and special events, and woven into the curriculum. In keeping with ArtCenter’s efforts to increase access, affordability and appreciation of art and design in our communities, the exhibition hall is free and open to the public.

ABOUT ARTCENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN
Founded in 1930 and located in Pasadena, California, ArtCenter College of Design (artcenter.edu) is a global leader in art and design education. ArtCenter offers 11 undergraduate and six graduate degrees in a wide variety of visual and applied arts and industrial design disciplines. In addition to its top-ranked academic programs, the College also serves members of the Greater Los Angeles region through a highly regarded series of year-round educational programs for all ages and levels of experience. Renowned for both its ties to industry and its social impact initiatives, ArtCenter is the first design school to receive the United Nations’ Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) status. Throughout the College's long and storied history, ArtCenter alumni have had a profound impact on popular culture, the way we live and important issues in our society.

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Media Contact:
Teri Bond
Director, Media Relations
ArtCenter College of Design
626-396-2385
teri.bond@artcenter.edu