Art d’Strada Competition, 2011

By Roxana Miu, Project Coordinator

In 2011, I made a last minute decision to enter the Art d’Strada Competition. My decision to enter the competition turned what I regarded as a hobby into an artistic vocation for object making. Ultimately, the exhibit I put together became the competition’s grand prize winner.

Art d’Strada was a juried competition where challengers worked with recycled materials to create works of art. Once the finalists were selected, they were each paired with a gallery owner who allowed the artist to use their gallery space for a one night solo exhibit. This competition was great for artist who used a lot of salvaged materials and for those trying to gain public exposure.

Filling in the entire gallery was a challenging yet rewarding experience, which resembled the challenge an artist experiences when working with a blank canvas. There were no limitations; it was up to the artist to make the gallery their creation. Being the sole exhibitor in the space allowed me to focus the gallery displays on aspects that accentuated and highlighted individual qualities of each and every art piece. The spatial arrangement of the art pieces within the gallery itself highlighted each object’s individuality while concurrently placing them within the broader context as a whole.

The Crafted Symmetry installation investigated the idea of symbiotic architecture in which individual components interacted to create a system. The Dichotomy of Black and White installation explored the concepts of light diffusion and object multiplicity. The remaining pieces explored the idea of design that arose spontaneously in nature.

In conclusion, the exhibition as a whole collated each of the individual concepts explored by the individual art pieces into a combined design philosophy. The result was the philosophy of reshaping and repurposing materials, of designing with light diffusion, and of creating objects that displayed their “structural skeleton” along with all the complex simplicities of their raw materials.

About the Author: Roxana Miu is the Project Coordinator for Ware Malcomb’s San Diego office, and Product Designer in her own MiuStudio workshop.