Alumni art ‘Drawn’ to architecture and urban design exhibition

Kristy Balliet figured out she wanted to be an architect during a middle school technical drawing class.

Balliet, who received a master’s of architecture II from UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, is one of more than 100 UCLA alumni to submit work to an upcoming AUD exhibition called “Drawn.”

This is the second “Drawn” exhibition – the first of which was held in 2004 – and it will feature works from UCLA alumni from 1968 to 2014. The exhibition, which will showcase 118 drawings and inaugurate the AUD alumni association, will open Monday night at Perloff Gallery in Perloff Hall and also host a silent auction of the drawings for an alumni scholarship.

Balliet’s digital piece, “Beyond Volume,” took her more than two hours to draw and comes from an installation project Balliet created last year for an exhibition in Michigan.

“The (installation) piece and the drawing were a means to communicate what it is like to be in one space, but to see beyond into other spaces,” Balliet said. “In a lot of ways, I reference this contemporary enfilade – the idea where you’re in one space, but the layering of adjacent spaces creates an infinite series of spaces.”

Balliet has been drawing for the past 25 years and worked as an assistant professor to UCLA professor Greg Lynn in Vienna at the University of Applied Arts from 2006 to 2011.

Georgina Huljich, an AUD adjunct assistant professor, 2003 UCLA alumna and co-curator of “Drawn,” said the exhibition will not only display alumni drawings, but also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the department.

Huljich said that submissions from older alumni tended to be hand-drawn while many of the submissions from recent alumni were digital. She also said that there is more digital work than there is analog work because of the larger number of recent alumni submitting work.

“The idea was that everyone submitting was going to be part of the exhibition because one of the intents of this exhibition is to get the alumni association going, which is why we weren’t that interested in setting a very strict curatorial parameter,” Huljich said.

Narineh Mirzaeian, a design lecturer for the AUD department, 2003 UCLA alumna and a co-curator of “Drawn,” said that alumni had six weeks to submit their works.

“It made it interesting to bring real work, speculative work or sketches all together under one show, one roof,” Mirzaeian said.

Another digital piece in the exhibition is “Queering St. James Town,” created by Jonathan Crisman, a 2009 UCLA architectural studies alumnus who is currently working with Dana Cuff, an architecture and urban design professor, in the Urban Humanities Initiative as a lecturer and administrator.

Crisman said his drawing comes from a part research, part art project based on the specifics of a neighborhood in Toronto: St. James Town.

“I was just interested in unpacking this neighborhood, its history and in particular, with regard to a recent influx of LGBT residents in the neighborhood as part of this working class, marginalized community,” Crisman said.

Crisman said he worked with a friend in Toronto for the project and that their interest in the area grew because of the fact that it was an overlooked space.

“The particular drawing I submitted was one kind of imagined alteration of the urban space and transforming it from this super normative, rigid, square, superblock setup into something that was more fluid and dynamic,” Crisman said.

Mirzaeian said that some of the drawings are made entirely from linework on a white background while others attempt to contextualize the work with color, texture or pattern, which is why the areas of drawing expertise are widely represented.

“‘Drawn’ doesn’t happen annually, but we’re recontextualizing it now,” Mirzaeian said. “This is what we do as architects – we draw. So this time around, now, more than 10 years later, we’re sort of taking inventory on all of our collective output.”