Whitespace Gallery Bangkok presents the work of an extraordinary American designer, Dann De Witt. REFRAMEDaims to reframe the conversation about design versus art, by presenting Mr. De Witt's work de-contextualised– stripped of the signifiers of its original design purpose, and presented in a way that allows the audience to experience, and evaluate it purely as artistic expression.
Whitespace plan to mount annual exhibitions exploring questions at the intersection of Art and Design, to promote discourse and inspiration within the creative community
Artist’s statement:
I was 23 or 24, a couple of years into art school and on fire creatively, when it began to hit me that the people who could really benefit from art, who could really use the insights, inspiration, and sheer pleasure it can provide—regular, everyday people like you’d see on the subway or driving a cab or repairing shoes—never seemed to show up at openings or galleries or lectures or museums. Why should they? Why should they have to come to art, on its terms? Why not the other way around? Why not bring truly challenging, emotive, thoughtful art to as many people as possible through mass media? This revelation ultimately led to a career in communications design, which I approach—passionately, uncompromisingly, and often subversively—as a form of artistic expression that is shared freely with audiences that number in the millions.
-Dann De Witt
Curator’s statement
“Design has to work. Art does not.” -Donald Judd
As an architect involved in brand design and contemporary art for a great number of years, I have come to question the accuracy of Mr. Judd’s statement about art. The idea that design must be dismissed as purely ‘functional problem solving’ and the inference that designers are at best, ‘lesser artists’. Whitespace plan to mount a series of exhibitions exploring questions like this at the intersection of Art and Design, to promote discourse and inspiration within the creative community.
For the first of these exhibitions, I chose to work with Dann De Witt, an extraordinary American designer whose career has spanned more than 30 years. In fact, we have collaborated on a number of design projects over the last 15 years—and I think it’s through those collaborations that I recognized that really exciting, inventive design can arise when the boundaries between pure artistic expression and pure design problem solving are blurred.
REFRAMED aims to reframe the conversation about design versus art, by presenting Mr. De Witt's work de-contextualised– stripped of the signifiers of its original design purpose, and presented in a way that allows the audience to experience, and evaluate it purely as artistic expression.
We hope this exhibition series will provoke our audience, especially designers, to reconsider the past way of thinking about design.Surely, all designs have to serve a function. I hope REFRAMED will begin to open the door for a more progressive view of design; perhaps, more aligned with the view of French Designer, Philippe Starck, “The first thing in designing is to be useful. But there are different ways to be useful–to be functional, to bring poetry, humor, low cost, to be political, sexual, surprising, the make people be more open, more alive, and more creative.”
-David Mayer, R.A.
*image (left)
courtesy of the artist
