This exhibition includes selected work by students graduating with bachelor degrees from the Design division of the Department of Art and Art History during the 2012–2013 school year. Structure & Sign acknowledges and honors the blending of spaces—three-dimensional, two-dimensional, time-based, and otherwise—and how design, in communication with these spaces, becomes greater than the sum of its parts. With a wink and a nod to Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, the BFA Design class of 2013 demonstrates how design and space are employed in the service of meaning.
In Structure & Sign, Design students act as bricklayers, negotiating chunks of meaning, connotation, and material to a purpose. They are unconventional solvers, building the solution in parallel with discovering the problem, and designing with no “center”—which reveals the infinite nature of the design process.
Contemporary design practice is negotiating more information from more sources than ever before. This creates diversity in application of structure, sign, and subject. While retaining the ability to explore outside their confines, each student has, over the course of the program, discovered niches in how to resolve work —giving each designer a unique viewpoint on what, exactly, design is.
