Charles Swazey
I am most interested in a moment that occurs when looking, when your attention shifts, and you follow one detail to another to another and back. I like when something grabs your attention with one line and doesn’t let go. As many designers have focused on simplicity and elegance of form in modern materials in the post WWII era, I take inspiration from them and am fascinated with the most repetitive shapes in nature and our deep artistic historical connection with representing form and color. My work exists in this post mid century soup where physical relics can be reincorporated and exist in a space that has changed visually and aurally from a half century ago with the emergence of electronic music and designed environments for alternate states of mind.
Since graduating from Emerson College with a Film major and Photography minor I have worked in the TV commercial and experiential marketing creating sets and props. Working in two different perspectives has deeply influenced my design work. I shift back and forth while working from making images for the camera’s perspective and conversely to be walked around and touched. These two perspectives ground my work and inspire constant revisions before I know something is working.
Scale is not often the first thing that drives an idea. I play with the structure and shape of a design before I even know what it will become or what materials and colors I will use. I have a need to blur the line between sculpture and furniture, music and painting through building the world I wake up remembering. Curiously creating every day in my studio in downtown Los Angeles I design and fabricate objects that steal attention.