i love this project

it is not really about skateboarding, specifically, but about the time and space that skateboarding has always invited for art and design to play and exist together. i have taken eight people, who understand the power and responsibility of the image; and directed them to design and develop a skate deck and apparel company. together we built an idea into a reality. our idea is called PROJECT, a fairly ambiguous name except for its obvious definition of our task-conceive, design, fabricate, deliver. this company are eight lines of goods, none of which are not frosted with irony, humor, and beauty.

project grandma

perhaps the most elegant and the most sarcastic of all the lines; using doilies, needlepoint, and a refined sense of wit to deliver beautiful designs that come from way outside the skateboard world and reside even further away when they are delivered. proudly not skaters, these artists succeed in making the impossible, desirable.

project connected

as our consciousness shifts due to connecting to the world in a matrix of digital societies, we must question the value of our social networks. are they frivolous? critically beneficial? is it really connectedness we achieve? the artist challenges us to pose this question in our own actions-are you just jamming the ether world with silly flirting, or are you making something really happen?

project exquisite corpse

not exactly the dadaist exercise its name suggests, but the literal meaning of the words themselves. flawlessly beautiful, death. eerie swirls of smoke float in waves of hair that flow over a decayed face. screams and spirits rise with elegance from gorgeous dead bodies. he makes nonsense from sense that is made from nonsense, perhaps the dadaists would approve.

project alimo

means nothing. when the artist was confronted with no clear conceptual motivation, he found solace in his own unconscious scribblings. these doodles became his strange world of goofy characters, plastic blobs, and cartoon nonsense. the results of his intuition proved viable and clear as his motivation, certainly for him “means nothing” can mean anything.

project tacofont

with a private joke rooted in a conscious understanding of how bad typography can actually be, tacofont makes huge fun of ourselves. poorly drawn mascots, psycho-sexual iconography, a cheap ad for the flavor of country, this artist tests our patience for irreverence, delicately dancing along the line of desirability.

project 6shooter

a hot haze won’t cloud this gunman’s vision, this work is derived both aesthetically from 60’s cinema of spaghetti westerns and from that persona of the gritty, smart, tough outlaw, who stands for nobody’s bullshit. got a light?

project propaganda

as communist china used (uses) every imaginable media device to communicate to its people that the communist way was (is) the best way of life, so does this artist as he appropriates original chinese propaganda printer images to promote his awareness of the power of propaganda. he uses propaganda to comment on propaganda, cleanly, powerfully and directly.

project project

deemed responsible for acting as the umbrella for all seven lines within the brand. the project line was charged to absorb art from all the lines and infuse that look and feel back in to the mother-ship. project could be simply called logo-development and iteration, but it’s actually a confident, beautiful, and informed reign that bridles the horses of all the lines.

who, what, and where

We are the Advanced Design I Class, ARTD 494, a Digital Arts course within the Art Department at the University of Oregon. The artists and designers in this class include Jess Andrews, Liz Bayan, Winter Gibbs, Alison Ho, Sean Kesterson, Nick Stokes, Steven Uppinghouse, Peter Yoon, and myself, Associate Professor Michael A. Salter. Always seeking to push beyond comfortable definitions of art and design, we set out to develop a company. From previous experience, I knew the skateboard industry to be one of the most exciting and experimental platforms for design, often acting as the leading edge for much of the visual culture we see today. It is a place where humor and irreverence confront their audience with ease. We spent many hours around a table in discussion over names, tactics and ideas, resulting in the brand PROJECT. This discourse bonded the participants conceptually as they laid down the ground work for the entire research. I charged them to serve themselves as a market. This company name acts as the umbrella for which many individual lines can exist, and it stands for a very open and experimental laboratory for its participants. Each artist and designer in the class carefully developed their own line. Each line was to be a tight and thorough application through both a series of skateboard decks and t-shirts. In all, 8 lines were created for PROJECT.

Throughout the winter term, nearly 10 weeks, the entire PROJECT was developed and delivered. Using a print on demand website called Deckpeck.com we are able to offer all of the company’s goods in a traditional online retail point. This is a free service provided by Deckpeck. We design, and they allow people to buy the goods directly from them. In addition to this commerce option, and elemental to the development process has been the creation and production of all our designs as actual goods. T-shirts and skateboards have been made available as prototyped; hand built-comps in an exhibition and sale event. The event was carefully studied as a retail experience and installation/environment.

Our commerce web site can be found at http://project.deckpeck.com/, and most of the products exhibited at the exhibition/sale are available for purchase.

PROJECT, and its participants, would like to thank the generous support of the University of Oregon Art Department, The Digital Arts Area of the Art Department, Barbara Herring, KungFu Nation, and BambooSk8.

This PROJECT publication was photographed, typeset, and laid out by Alison Ho.

For more information, please contact salter@uoregon.edu