Every year for the past few years, The Design Kids (or TDK as the cool kids call them) have been holding exhibitions that engage, involve and display the creative and amazing talent of students and fresh graduates of the design world in Australia.
For this particular exhibition, TDK (I guess I'm a cool kid) completed their nation wide call out, signed up forty studios and paired up their top eighty creatives of the country. They were given a brief and the exhibitions... well they portrayed just how well these amazing artists tackled it and engaged their end users.
The result, a thoroughly engaging and interesting exhibition, demonstrating the creativity of the forces behind the ideas. This year, design teams were encouraged to pick a four lettered word and design a black and white incomplete poster.
For Perth, the exhibition was held at the Central Institute of Technology. The gallery was bright and open and the A1 posters pulled you to them, with some giving you instructions and others asking you to text a certain number for the next clue in the puzzle. Black and white lines adorned the walls and coloured pink and orange highlighters covered the floors.
Each art piece and poster was engaging in a different way. Some took the audiences back to their "colour by number" days. Others had cool "choose your path" puzzles which spelt out a four letter word once complete. A poster required you to send text messsages to an unknown recipient to be forwarded your next instruction on how to complete the poster. There was cutting, glueing, throwing of coloured powder at posters to reveal words, stick on eyes and connect the dots.
The posters (or rather, artworks) demonstrated the creativity and brilliance of the teams and the way designers and viewers interact through their hands on interpretation of their works. The same way that a person's views, attitudes and belief systems influence their thoughts, actions and way of life, so to do they influence their interpretations of art, which were greatly exemplified in TDK's Fourplay exhibition.
Fourplay is one of four previous exhibitions, including Threesome and Terrible Twos. Exhibitions like these are so few and far between and rarely do I find myself actually interacting with art outside of a kids whiteboard in the Art Gallery with magnets, but this clever exhibition enabled me to do just that. Had it not been for Matthew, I probably wouldn't have per chanced the exhibition. As Matthew had been selected to participate in the gallery and working closely with Studio Bomba, created his piece "Find", I thought I should pay a visit. I'm glad I did.
You can view more of Matthew's work here, or head over to The Design Kids website for a little perusal. Speaking of TDK and IAMTHEWONG, Matthew was also listed as one of the designers to watch for 2015. Keep your eyes peeled, folks!