School of the Arts and Architecture event brings together faculty, students

A photo booth designed by students from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture will allows students to get to know each other without having to speak.

The School of the Arts and Architecture will hold its new year celebration called “The Opening” on Thursday at the Broad Arts Center plaza. “The Opening” will feature artwork and games designed by UCLA arts and architecture students, alumni and faculty in the Broad’s exterior while the New Wight Gallery will feature artwork by students from other schools in Southern California.

Anne Marie Burke, executive director of communications and public relations for the School of the Arts and Architecture, said the school created the event to bring together students, faculty and staff members from its four departments and three public arts units.

“You have a student talking to a faculty member in a department they are not part of that is interested in the same questions that they are,” Burke said. “You forge these conversations and collaborations that might not otherwise have happened.”

The celebration will showcase collaborative creations of students and faculty from the art, design media arts, architecture and urban design, and world arts and cultures/dance departments.

“Not only has the event helped to build bridges and cultivate a space for dialogue, but it has also provided a space to showcase the culture of our institution,” Burke said.

Third year design media arts student Stefanie Tam will present a photo booth art project that she said aims to provide an interactive experience while focusing on the theme of storytelling. Hannah Madeline, a Daily Bruin staffer, is collaborating with Tam on the project. Situated near the Matisse wall sculptures, the booth will capture participants’ portraits and ask them to answer light-hearted prompts that provide insight into people’s personalities.

Tam will then compile each participant’s personalized information into a printed zine for the participants to take home. Tam said the zine for each person will include their own portrait along with the six previous participants’ portraits, as well as the participants’ answers to the questions.

“I thought it would be fun to have people interact with the other students of arts and architecture without necessarily even having to meet them,” Tam said.

Alumnae Samora Deng will showcase a conceptual creation and also DJ for the event with her partner Balan Bezaleel under the stage name “acpldjs,” pronounced “a couple of DJs.” Deng’s work is comprised of an animation piece and a physical model of what she thinks the Los Angeles commercial market will look like in the future. Deng said she envisions a market in which customers can order an item online and receive it in the same day.

Deng visited an Amazon fulfillment center to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into what happens once a customer has placed an order and discovered that the majority of the operation is carried out by robots, she said.

“After I saw the speed at which placed orders are processed,” Deng said, “this idea does not see as far-fetched as it initially seemed to be.”

The animation will present a clip of different scenarios for Deng’s market design: self pickup, delivery service or autonomous vehicle delivery of the desired item.

In the New Wight Gallery, graduate art students Adrian Abela, Shasha Dothan and Amedeo Polazzo curated the new exhibition, “I am Erica.” The gallery features works by 21 student artists in Southern California graduate programs from countries including America, Costa Rica, Turkey, Mexico, Israel and South Korea.

After acquiring the works, Abela and the curators found three main patterns in which the selected artists’ approached their political work, he said. Artists either reacted to current political situations directly, explored psychological topics in politics or made work as a political act itself.

Among the works are painted safety vests created to wear at the Women’s March after the election, photographs of the U.S.-Mexico border, comic strips, a collage of Hillary Clinton interweaved with pansy cutouts, and posters addressing Trump and Bernie Sanders urging readers to vote.

Dothan said she hopes undergraduate students who visit the show can draw inspiration or learn from the politically themed art in the gallery.

“I am a big believer in political art, so it would be nice if people would take that with them from our show and think more openly about what is art and how we can react to the world,” Dothan said.