NEW ZEALAND | designer | artist | curator
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Kelvin Soh (b.1974) is one half of Auckland based design group, The Wilderness. In collaboration with Simon Oosterdijk, past projects include: identity and bottle design for 420 Spring Water; album artwork and music videos for bands such as Dimmer, Concord Dawn and Funkstorung; the creation of Tiger Beer’s ‘Translate’ arts platform and print communications for New Zealand’s presence at the 2005 Venice Biennale. He has curated several design exhibitions such as ‘Everyday’ and ‘Terms of Use’ at the St Paul St Gallery and is currently working on a series of self-commissioned posters with Artspace, Auckland.
FOR MORE >> www.thewilderness.co.nz
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L E C T U R E | 1600h | 13.02.09 | view programme
Design and the space of fiction
Kelvin Soh makes design projects that aspire to what writer Harold
Rosenberg refers to as ‘anxious objects’ – objects that appear to
undermine their own status and elude conventional notions of ‘function’
to occupy ‘the space of fiction’. They often find company in things
like artist books, concept cars, film props, art that functions as
furniture, architectural models for buildings that never get made, and
unwearable fashion-forward clothing – where actual ‘use value’ is
imagined or displaced by an intimate but ‘other’ kind of relationship
with the world. Drawing inspiration from sources such as early 20th
Century typography, Conceptual Art, independent zine publishing,
amateur aesthetics and cartooning; Soh will present a selection of
projects which attempt to embody ‘anxiety’ as a strategy for
reflexivity and advocate an expanded view of practice which exchanges
mono-minded professionalism for a stereo-minded, dialectical sense of
design.
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About the images
The Alumni (2008), typographic treatment for Peter Stichbury exhibition and book, Te Tuhi | Brillo Boxing (2007), Terms of Use exhibition | St Paul St Gallery | Opticult (2008), unpublished | Home Made Adidas Tee (2004), Every Trifoil Has Its Story - Adidas Exhibition | Superpitcher Flyer, Grand Circle, Auckland
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