Alicia Lubowski-Jahn · Eco-Chick

Browsing all posts by Alicia Lubowski-Jahn

Alicia Lubowski-Jahn holds a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has worked for various museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Frick Collection.

This author has contributed 31 posts.

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Brown Paper Bags Gone Wild, Or How I Learned to Creatively Recycle my Brown Paper Bags

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03/30/09

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Joyce Robinson is an artist who has worn many hats (or, actually, purses). A former opera singer and music teacher, she now brings her soaring voice and strength of character to create the vibrant and fanciful handbags of Brown Paper Bags Gone Wild!

Robinson’s raw medium is the drab brown paper bag and with it she has wrought exuberant and, certainly wild, transformations. Always anything but plain, her bags are ornamented with beading, feathers, natural fabrics (including linen, cotton, and mud cloth), and paint. The sturdy bags have been used by her clients as functional handbags, table centerpieces, and artworks for home display.

Robinson recounts an early memory of her mother curling her hair using torn strips of paper bags. She has certainly proven that out of an everyday bag one can not only coif a child’s tender curls, but also ignite a Pygmalion-esque spark of the spirit.

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accessories, Add new tag, purses

Design Glut: It's Scrumdidilyumptious!

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03/03/09

Liz Kinnmark (right) and Kegan Fisher (left), Co-founders of Design Glut, wearing respectively earrings and a necklace from their Currency Collection

The delectable creations by Design Glut have much in common with the scrumptious confections conjured by Willy Wonka. One can almost imagine that the eggs cradled in Design Glut’s Egg Pants were laid by none other than Mr. Wonka’s golden geese. Still, it is less the designs themselves that bring us straight to the fictive Chocolate Factory of Roald Dahl’s story, than the behavior of all those children (four bad eggs and one good one) inside the candy factory. Design Glut begs the question, as an online personality quiz puts it, “Are you a Charlie, or a Veruca? Which “Willy Wonka” kid are you?” How we consume — sometimes more in tune with the melody of Veruca Salt (“I want the world. I want the whole world. I want to lock it all up in my pocket. It’s my bar of chocolate. Give it to me now.”) or the bottomless appetite of Augustus Gloop than the restraint of Charlie Bucket (“Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate.”) — is explored by Design Glut’s delightful morsels.

Eco-Chick.com: Your designs are extremely enticing. The definition of the ‘glut‘ is not far off from the ‘glutton.’ How does the pull of temptation (and the varied spectrum of desire) inform your design philosophy? When does tempting become toxic?

Liz Kinnmark: As a company, it’s our job to entice you. We need people to desire our products, in order to fulfill our desires, like paying rent! That’s the way the system works. So we, like every business, try to tempt you to consume our products. But unlike every business, we also have a lot of blue-sky ideas about changing the world for the better. I think tempting becomes toxic when businesses care only about selling and not about the long-term health of the system. In the long-term, your business won’t survive if you don’t take care of the consumers you sell to and the environment we all live in. I’m a big believer in socially-responsible capitalism.

Black Crude Necklace

EC: It’s fascinating how consumption is expressed in your products. You have highlighted several ways that we (over) consume materials — including our use of economic, dietary, and energy resources. Can you please comment on how the role of the consumer provides a point of view for your designs?

LK: Design is about creating objects for other people, for consumers, for the market. That’s where I draw the line between design and art. Art is about creating something because you want to create it, to express yourself. So by that definition, the role of the consumer is essential to any design. I think the design world often times tries to pretend that it’s not about commerce, that it’s about beauty and refined tastes and something much classier. We make fun of that. We embrace the fact that this is about consumerism. If you’re buying something because it makes you feel good or cool or whatever, fine. We all do it. Just have the decency to admit it. And think about who or what you’re supporting when you spend those dollars. You don’t need to give up consumerism, but you should consciously decide what to support.

Smoking Gun

EC: What are we craving through objects? Do you see the possibility of our society restraining the consumer diet or being satiated by a more nourishing kind of product?

LK: Everyone craves something different. I don’t see the appetite receding any time soon, but I do think people can be satiated by a more nourishing kind of product. With our jewelry, for example, I see it as feeding people’s appetite for fashion and yet slipping in a vitamin. You’ll look good wearing it, of course, but you just might start a conversation about important current events.

Kegan Fischer wearing World Links Brooch

EC: What is the educational mission behind the Design Glut webzine? What is the vision behind this design forum?

LK: Well, we stumbled right out of art school into trying to run a business. And it immediately became clear that school hadn’t prepared us for the business world. We ended up getting into all these crazy situations, like having pallets of merchandise delivered to our apartment, having to break them down on the street and then figure out where the hell we were going to store everything. We started talking with other entrepreneurs, and we realized we weren’t the only ones who had no idea what we were doing in the beginning! You learn by screwing up, and then getting up and dusting yourself off and trying again. Every start-up has these great stories about the trials and tribulations they’ve gone through. So we started collecting the stories and posting them to our website. We hope that they will inspire others to follow their own dreams. The central lesson, in my opinion, is that no one gets to the top because of their super-human abilities. They get there by working hard, not giving up, and a healthy dose of luck and coincidences along the way.

Slow Food Tray

EC: Tell me a little bit please about your creative collaboration. What brings the two of you (Liz and Kegan) together as designers?

LK: When we did our first show together, it was just because it logistically made sense. Neither of us had very much money or very many products, so we shared a space. And then halfway through the preparations, we looked at each other and were like, “Huh, I don’t usually like working with other people, but this is going really well!” We both work really, really hard. We both have a similar aesthetic. If you look at our personal artwork, it’s almost eerily similar, except Kegan works on a massive scale and I work on a tiny scale. But probably most importantly, we both have grandiose dreams. We convince each other that we can pull things off that, to everyone else, seems crazy and impossible. And then we do it.

gilded eggs in their Egg Pants beside Kegan Fisher

gilded eggs nestled in their Egg Pants beside Kegan Fisher

EC: What’s coming up for you in 2009? Next steps?

LK: Well, we’ve always got grand plans and new products in the works. We’re almost ready to launch one of them, so keep an eye out! Our next show will be ICFF (May 16-19, ’09). In the meantime, we’re really interested in continuing to grow the website. Readership has increased a lot recently; it’s very exciting. Right now we’re working on a redesign of the site. The look and feel will stay pretty much the same, but we’re bringing in more creative entrepreneurs to blog about their experiences. In celebration of the 1-year anniversary of our blog (July 2009) we’ll be holding a show with work from some of our favorite creatives that we’ve interviewed. I’m getting really excited about the play that can happen back-and-forth between the digital world and the physical world. For example, bringing a group of people, who share having their names listed on our website, together in a physical space. We’re also thinking about releasing a printed magazine. We’d like to approach designing a magazine from a product-design point of view; design it like an object which we want people to love and keep. We’d pull articles from our website which all fit a certain theme, and tie them closer together, elaborating on what the central message/lesson is. Eventually I’d love to make a book.

consumerism, design, Jewelry

Brainforest: How Does Community Sustain Us?

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03/03/09

Brainforest is a Chicago-based creative agency that has integrated an ethos of social service (people) and sustainability (planet) into the workplace (profit). The Triple Bottom Line seems to come effortlessly to a company that volunteers at the Greater Chicago Food Depository, dedicates pro bono service per annum to a specially selected client, including the Gilda’s Club Chicago, and established a non-proft organization Bfriend, Inc. to support charitable projects.

Most recently Bfriend, Inc. implemented a supply re-use program called Creative Pitch. Art materials donated by Chicago-area design and marketing businesses are gathered and distributed free of charge to neighborhood schools in need of art and educational supplies. Similar creative re-use programs have sprung up in other cities, including New York’s Materials for the Arts, Fort Lauderdale’s Trash to Treasure, and Oakland’s East Bay Depot For Creative Reuse. Unwanted and unused materials that would ordinarily be pitched in the dumpster, are creatively re-purposed and re-cycled to pitch in.

A reciprocal exchange lies behind Brainforest’s ”good works” initiatives, which are designed as “giving back to the community that sustains us.” As Dian Sourelis, a Partner at Brainforest and Founder/Chairperson of Bfriend, Inc, explains, the projects have grown organically from a wholehearted desire to serve others: “We are generous people. We think about what we can do for other people. People who work here really want to do that.” Behind Brainforest’s acts of giving back to the community, lies a message about the many returns of a circular sustainability. Through giving, lies the potential to receive again and again.

business, cities, community, creative reuse, design, Food, giving, Hair, Home, Organic, rainforest, reuse, schools, sustainability, trash

Lauri Lyons: Political Photographer and Thought-Provoking Critic of America

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02/18/09

from Flag: An American Story

The photographer Lauri Lyons is a storyteller who utilizes her photography as well as words, both hers and those of others, to recount personal and cultural journeys. Her latest project is the multimedia piece, Barack Obama and the American Dream, about the 2008 presidential election and 2009 inauguration. She has deftly woven the images and voices of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama together with those of Americans and the international community into a story about the power of dreams.

from Flag: An American Story

Between 1995 and 2000 Lyons began documenting our national dreams by traveling throughout the United States. The product of her journey was Flag: An American Story, a photographic portrait series of Americans posing with the American flag. In summer 2007, Lyons took up the American flag yet again on a European tour that wove together still more reflections on America into Flag International. In Lyons work, the American flag, much like the American president, stands as a potent symbol for reflection upon individual and collective dreams – both those that inspire the joyous fulfillment of their realization and still others that land empty and short of their promises.

from Flag: An American Story

Eco Chick.com: We are used to seeing Americans (including the faces of recent immigrants, Olympic athletes, and soldiers) posed with the American flag, but not foreigners. This “outsider” international perspective was very novel. What do we learn by listening to the multiple ways Americans are perceived (positive and negative)? What did you learn from the responses to the U.S. flag?

Lauri Lyons: My first book Flag: An American Story (2001) explored how Americans viewed themselves past, present, and future. For Flag International (2008), my intention was to create a two way dialogue exploring how people living outside of the United States view America today. To accomplish that goal I traveled to eight countries to photograph and interview the international community with the American flag. The responses from people abroad inform us how American political policies have a real effect on their lives (i.e.: immigration, war, and the environment). We also learn how American culture, especially entertainment, heavily influences and at times dominates their own national identity. Mostly we are reminded that America is the only country on Earth which was created based on an ideal, and how at times we have measured up to that ideal and also fallen short. Shooting Flag International taught me to always find my own answers to questions. We don’t need to wait for CNN to tell us what’s going on in the world, we can find out for ourselves.

from Flag International

EC: If someone were to suddenly toss me the U.S. flag, I have no idea how I would react. I am confident that the exchange would take me off guard and feel like a confrontation with a set of ideals about being American. We all know that our national flag is supposed to inspire feelings such as patriotism, heroism, decorum, and respect. The treatment and use of the U.S. flag is also codified by regulations – for example, how it is supposed to be raised and lowered on a pole, how it should be folded, how it must not touch anything beneath it (such as the ground or floor), and how it may be displayed on certain patriotic holidays. That is to say, we don’t usually interact with the flag spontaneously outside of codified practices. What do you make of the spur-of-the-moment reactions of the people you photographed? How does the flag transform real, everyday people?

LL: While conceptualizing the project my biggest fear was that people would not want to interact with the American flag. I was also reminded by many Americans that the U.S. was not riding a high wave of popularity, and therefore I should scrap the idea. Because none of the participants were expecting to be photographed or interviewed they were quite surprised when I pulled out a 3×5′ American flag. However, once they realized they could use the flag as a form of personal expression (i.e.: do whatever they want with the flag) their candor and creativity widened. People made use of the flag as a turban, sarong, and also folded the flag in the traditional manner. Each person brought something new to the table and I never knew what to expect next. I think the subject’s interaction with a tangible American flag forced them to be honest and public about their opinions of the U.S. and American people.

from Flag International

photography

Pretty in Portland: Plywerk Group Show @ Olio United

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02/11/09

They walked along listening to the singing of the brightly colored birds and looking at the lovely flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with them. There were big yellow and white and blue and purple blossoms, besides great clusters of scarlet poppies, which were so brilliant in color they almost dazzled Dorothy’s eyes.

L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

artwork by Yellena James

Olio United boutique in Portland, Oregon is exhibiting for the month of February (show opens Friday, February 6) prints by four female West Coast artists. The colorful and cheerful artworks by Yellena James, Betsy Walton, Joanna Bean, and Kim Oanh Nguyen are being sold online (sale starting Monday, February 9). To make things even brighter, pricing starts at $35 and all piece have been finished and mounted on sustainably-harvested wood and bamboo panels by Plywerk. Let the sun shine in!