First Friday: August 2024 - Time in Motion
Inspiration & Updates from Brian Madden Studio
“Great brands, great people, are insatiably curious.”
— Howard Lichter, VP Arc’teryx Tokyo Creation Center
Hi friends,
It’s great to be back in the cool gray city of love after an inspiring month abroad. Following Hot-Shop in the Netherlands, I flew to Japan. And with each sip of Pocari Sweat, a new (heat) wave of creative energy washed over me as I followed my curiosity from Tokyo through the Japanese Alps to Kyoto, and back again.
There’s something freeing about going where the winds take you, especially in the summertime. And even though it can feel vulnerable to sail into the mystic, I believe following curiosity is at the core of creativity. So let’s see where curiosity’s leading me.
I’m excited to relay some stories from the journey. This month, I’ll share:
WHAT I’M SEEING: Arc’teryx Tokyo Creation Center
WHAT I’M READING: The San Quentin Project, by Nigel Poor
WHAT I’M MAKING: Time in Motion, Japan
WHAT I’M HEARING: TYO / KYO / SFO / PDX
You’re getting First Friday because you’ve supported my artwork, visited the studio, or otherwise signed up to stay in touch. Thanks for being a part of this story!
WHAT I’M SEEING: Arc’teryx Tokyo Creation Center
Earlier this month during my trip to Japan, I visited my friend Howard Lichter at the Arc’teryx Tokyo Creation Center. Howard just finished building out the Vancouver-based brand’s Japanese base camp for creative exploration with his team and Torafu Architects, who I worked with to design Nike Japan HQ during my Nike days.
The gray cliff-like façade opened up into a cavernous open space with a beautiful courtyard and rooftop gardens. Howard and Torafu created this space with an austere Japanese design ethos punctuated with local artistic touches, each with their own alpine-inspired story. There are some great articles documenting the space, so I’ll focus on some artistic highlights that stood out to me.
The space wowed both the artist and the spatial designer in me. One element that stood out was the ikebana-like landscaping in the courtyard, made from native rocks and plants, all foraged from the mountains of Japan and carefully curated into living arrangements.
I loved the playful elements of this mural by manga artist Yuichi Yokoyama, featuring a Mt. Fuji poem motif on the conference room wall. Check out the custom slots in the edge of the wall displaying Yokoyama’s manga books! I loved seeing this thoughtful collaborative element between client, designer, and artist. Anyone who’s managed a renovation will know it’s not so easy to pull off such a nuanced detail on a build project.
Downstairs, washi craftsman and calligrapher Hatano Wataru’s large wall piece featured the kanji term for mountain ( 山 ) dashed loosely across the panels with actual stone dust from the mountains. I felt an immediate kinship with Wataru’s art because of my own work with stone dust, and marveled at the seemingly effortless script he had splashed across the panels.
I was also drawn to BUAISOU’s dyed noshi artwork. Howard and his team had commissioned the team of craftspeople to highlight iconic climbing knots through the traditional Japanese katazome dyeing technique. The artists used stencil patterns to dye the fabric in the same method used to create traditional noshi patterns, which convey longevity and prosperity.
As we walked past an inspiration wall in the main space, Howard reflected on his real priority now that the space was complete – building out the team and using the space as a gathering place to help create the next chapter of Arc’teryx. It was a reminder that beautiful workspaces (and jackets for that matter) aren’t just to be marveled at, but to be put to work. Thanks to Howard and his team for the inspiring visit.
WHAT I’M READING: The San Quentin Project, by Nigel Poor
Back in San Francisco after the Japan trip, I was able to check out the SF Art Book Fair at the Minnesota Street Project. I was fanboying hard after getting to meet one of my favorite contemporary artists, Stephanie Syjuco, and Lars Müller, the publisher behind one of my favorite design books – Designing Design, by Kenya Hara, a visionary behind MUJI and the Nagano Olympic ceremonies.
My eyes were drawn to a book on the Aperture table, called The San Quentin Project, by Nigel Poor. She’s an artist, educator, and the co-creator of Ear Hustle, a podcast about the daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it. The cover first caught my eye because of the hand-written annotations from Poor’s students about the meaning of the photo.
In The San Quentin Project, men in prison reflect on the richness of their inner lives while in captivity. The book is based on a history of photography class Nigel Poor taught starting in 2011 through the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. No cameras or books were allowed in the facility, so she led them through “visual mapping” exercises where they learned to decipher the meaning and structure behind the work of iconic photographers, along with thousands of developed negatives taken by San Quentin corrections officers from previous eras.
Through their work in the course, the inmates learned to compose their own “verbal photographs,” synthesizing and communicating memories from their lives from which they had no visual records. The book collects a largely unseen visual record of daily life in captivity, demonstrating how the state’s archival photographs are now being used to teach visual literacy and process the experience of incarceration.
The San Quentin Project provides a moving glimpse into the deeper world of incarcerated life, with all its raw, creative, human complexities. I’m looking forward to following along with Nigel Poor’s work, holding more space for the forgotten sides of our community, and looking for deeper meaning behind the imagery I create and consume. And of course, never shying away from the rawness and irreverence of celebrating the marks, notes, and annotations in the creative process.
WHAT I’M MAKING: Time in Motion, Japan
The inspiration of poetic Japanese calligraphy, minimalist East Asian painting, and irreverent mark-making intersected spontaneously in my practice this summer as I traveled through Japan. Part of a collection of drawings I originally started to document turbulence in the air and the motion of waves at sea, the work has turned into a meditative practice to capture moments in transit. These drawings tell the story of the when, where, how, and why I’ve been moving through space.
Before flying to Tokyo this summer, I was inspired to break out some old corporate letterhead from Nike Japan Headquarters that I’d been holding onto since helping design the space in 2017. Midway through the flight to Tokyo, when the pilot announced that there’d be some turbulence, I whipped out the piece of the paper, put my pen down and let the plane draw through me. My contribution to the visual poetry was simply lifting up my pen once during the 15 minutes or so, and allowing it to drop, changing the work from a single spontaneous mark, to a dialogue between the two.
When I wanted to capture the moment while traveling between cities on a bus or a train, I would reach into my bag, break out my favorite pen and a notepad from the hotel room nightstand, put pen to paper, and settle in. I also experimented with my iPad, to incorporate color based on the pattern of the bus seats or the train’s livery graphics.
I find joy in creating artwork that celebrates small moments that may otherwise be forgotten. I’m excited to start exploring the crossover of my media, combining the nonchalance of my time in motion sketches with the challenge and craft of working with marble.
I’m energized with this new body of work that captures time in motion, and I’m delighted to share it with this group first. To learn more, respond to this email or send me a note at brian@brianbmadden.com.
WHAT I’M HEARING: TYO / KYO / SFO / PDX
I’ve been keeping my ears open for songs this summer, and captured so many sounds across the western hemisphere, from Tokyo and Kyoto to San Francisco and Portland.
The First Friday Playlist can only consist of songs I’ve heard, received, discovered, or rediscovered out in the world, songs overheard at coffee shops, restaurants, bars, galleries, or received from friends and family IRL & online.
Keep an eye out for more updates around fall (Oct 5 & 6) and winter (Dec 7) open studios!
Thanks for your time. Take care and talk soon,
Brian
brian@brianbmadden.com
“To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. So do it.”
Kurt Vonnegut
