Viewing Hours: 8am - 5pm
Qiuwen Li's current practice involves systematic design and experimental typography. Her work explores the relationships between legibility and illegibility: typographic shape as image. In her work, graphic elements (shapes, color, pattern, type) are constructed, deconstructed and then reconstructed in order to create a richer experience and extend their meaning.
Qiuwen Li's design is strongly influenced by her international background. As a Chinese woman living in the US, she is in an in-between position, which also brings a distinctive perspective to her thinking, being, and making. In her design process, multiple ideas coexist simultaneously and she likes exploring a variety of solutions and answers.
Her work engages viewers in a way that evokes playing games and figuring out puzzles. For example, ‘Randomness’ used coding to produce an engaging experience for the viewer. If a viewer scanned a QR code, he or she received a randomly generated Haiku poem. The purpose for this project was to let the viewer pick a random poem, interpret it in their own way, and create their own story. To represent the relationship between legibility and illegibility, she designed each poem in three columns by using two different fonts: one is legible, one is illegible, and the third is the combination of both. She purposefully chose three vivid colors in different color families for each iconic QR code, and the text in each column was written with its own corresponding color.
Kathleen Thum's drawings, paintings, and wall installations investigate the presence of the petroleum infrastructure and the industry’s use of our natural resources.
In 2010, Thum closely watched the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico through the Internet live video streaming of the ocean floor. This image of the pipeline seeping oil clearly presented the earth as an organism suffering from a faulty and altered system. Since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the tubular structure of the pipeline has become a constant form in her work, using it to evoke and bring attention to the vast and intricate production systems of industrial landscapes. The pipeline form is associated with transportation, processing and refining of multiple fluids and gases, such as oil, natural gas and water. Thum is interested in the ongoing shifting of power between mankind and the earth and presents the intermingling of manufactured man‐made systems and biomorphic configurations.
