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Gallery of work by Design and Studio Art Graduate Students. Click thumbnail images to display enlarged images of works and descriptions.
Light
25 x 23 inches
oil on MDF (six panels)
Self Portrait
digital video
This video contains a sampling of manipulated recordings of speech and sounds.
Michael David Coyle
5.5 x 3.5 inches
pen and Moleskin notebook
In printmaking, a proof is pulled to check for corrections before the final edition. It is a stage in between the imagining and the finishing of work, and is itself a document of making. If one lingers there, the core syntax of printing–repetition–materializes clearly.
I am interested in amplifying the actions and materials of the screenprinting process and, by so doing, open it up for analysis. By using unwieldy ink (viscous wax) or a cumbersome tool (gaping mesh) where the proper compliant article would normally reside, the process speeds up, slows down, or suspends. These distorted moments allow for a sort of unpacking of components, and reveal more than the usual uninterrupted procedure.
By building pitfalls into the system, I can learn more from my “mistakes.” By perpetually inserting errors, I can perpetually proof for corrections. An open–ended edition of proofs suggests ever expansive testing.
This slippery slope of arcane printing techniques triggers questions of use, accessibility, and place. Can information about printmaking be deployed in the world in a different form, outside of the studio practice? In attempts to address these questions, I design and investigate installations that repack discrete aspects of screenprinting. These “proofs” tether reconfigured ideas to the world beyond printmaking.
My method of unpacking, examining, and repacking resembles a set of coded operating instructions (programming), an array of controls and variables (scientific method), or a chain of associative material studies (craftsmanship). Systematically undertaken, proofing is a paradigm of design. Loosely considered, proofing is a meditation on design.
Paper Pulp Cube and Mold
2 x 2 x 2 inches
aluminum mesh mold and pigmented cotton rag pulp
A reconfiguration of screenprinting materials. The screen is three–dimensional instead of planar. Pigment is in the paper instead of on. The texture of the mesh is the transferred impression.



Paper Pulp Cubes at Sunrise
7:45 AM, Marfa, Texas variable dimensions
pigmented cotton rag pulp
An exploration of multiple, display, scale, time, and place, using the landscape as substrate. The grid composition generates from the mesh used in the screenprinting process. Different vantage points reveal toy blocks, façades, and cast striations. Actions and materials derived from screenprinting are subsumed, or “repacked,” as installation.
Manuscript III
13 X 10 inches
ink and watercolor on paper



Skyline Print: An Investigation of Format, Time, and Place
A contiguous edition of 17 screen prints, pulled at intervals between 5:50 – 8:41 pm, 13 June 2008. Installed on a backyard clothesline, Austin, Texas.
Materials: cold wax medium and pigment, aluminum mesh screen, and thermal fax paper scroll, 25' x 8.5."
Print notes: each print is noted with the time instead of an edition number, integrating documentation of the time required to print each individual print as well asthe entire edition. Serves as an automatic color gradation study. Different material qualities are activated when displayed as in indoor object, and then as an outdoor object.
Photograph notes: allows for presentation of specific perspectives. Captures interaction with natural elements (sunlight, wind). Allows viewing at the time of day the print was created (in situ).
Interior
20 x 11.5 inches
digital print
York Beach
24 x 36 inches
oil on panel


Public and environmental art provides me opportunities to work at a scale, and with an audience that has evolved from my experience as a landscape architect and urban designer. Public and environmental art has the capacity to balance the sublime with the pragmatic and allow for overt communication between the designer and audience, viewer or user. It is in this capacity that society may comprehend, and find balance between the natural environment, community and economics.
My intent is to persuade people to use all of their senses to discover the undiscovered in their own journey, stop to notice the world around them, and to embrace the delicate balance of humanity and ecology. I will achieve this by making the invisible become visible and creating a dialogue of natural time to human time.
My method for approaching the work is to register and then make overt temporal elements that embrace the ever–changing nature of the environment. In turn, this will reveal the overlooked aspects and abuse of the natural environment in our society. In order for me to succeed the work needs to be public with a broad audience; persuasive and poetic; and create harmony between humanity and ecology.
Allowing the earth to be my canvas and connecting society back to this canvas is inspiring, and allows me to articulate what I believe to be my purpose in life.
Through interdisciplinary design and public art works, it is my intent to inspire community collaboration for social and ecological change. My research has tested how visual, sculptural, and performance–based interactive public art and design can convey an ecological or socially engaged message and inspire the viewer to become involved and take action. As a designer and artist in the public realm, I work with social and political themes that cross lines between visual art, sculptural design, and ecological education.
Design now exists within a vast cultural terrain, that is filled with the artifacts produced by designers and artists who are merging, or functioning between a range of conventionally separate disciplines within the arts and reaching beyond into the social sciences. I find myself constantly returning to Fritjof Capra's Whole Systems Thinking Strategies* to organize my design methods. The Whole Systems Design approach includes the connections and relationships between the community; materials used; lifecycles; and social, ecological, and economic issues. I use my design training to point out problems and then propose viable alternatives to out–moded, unsustainable systems. This System Thinking technique helps avoid the current corporate “Green Washing” trends that try to cover up serious ecological and social problems.
For example, the redesign of an electric scooter into a “Solar Plug–in” was the result of the physical challenge of parking and charging my electric vehicle. This transportation challenge led to the creation of an off–the–grid solar charging station design and model that strives to solve a new urban transportation problem: How will electric vehicles interact with the existing urban environment?
My projects aim to inspire action in the viewer by highlighting something previously overlooked, and by creating strategies that assist communities in planning for social change. I am driven to create works that solicit exchange with the community and inspire people towards more progressive ways of living.
*Fritjof Capra , The Web of Life, A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, New York: Anchor Books, 1996
Face
16 x 9 inches
mixed media
Casas/Maquettes
23 x 23 inches
C–print


Public and environmental art provides me opportunities to work at a scale, and with an audience that has evolved from my experience as a landscape architect and urban designer. Public and environmental art has the capacity to balance the sublime with the pragmatic and allow for overt communication between the designer and audience, viewer or user. It is in this capacity that society may comprehend, and find balance between the natural environment, community and economics.
My intent is to persuade people to use all of their senses to discover the undiscovered in their own journey, stop to notice the world around them, and to embrace the delicate balance of humanity and ecology. I will achieve this by making the invisible become visible and creating a dialogue of natural time to human time.
My method for approaching the work is to register and then make overt temporal elements that embrace the ever–changing nature of the environment. In turn, this will reveal the overlooked aspects and abuse of the natural environment in our society. In order for me to succeed the work needs to be public with a broad audience; persuasive and poetic; and create harmony between humanity and ecology.
Allowing the earth to be my canvas and connecting society back to this canvas is inspiring, and allows me to articulate what I believe to be my purpose in life.
Beach Boys
16 x 16 inches
oil on canvas

This magazine page-layout study explores how the form can interpret the content visually. The content is an essay by Miwon Kwon, which discusses the out of place in society, and my photographs, which document the out of place. 8.5x11 inch pages; InDesign, Digital Photography.
Polar Bear Huntress
40 x 30 inches
oil on canvas
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