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Born and raised in México City, Rebeca Méndez has overseen more than 1500 Art Center projects, designing award-winning books, publications, and exhibition materials. Rebeca also created the short films "The Malady of Death" and "Orpheus Re:visited" and hopes to reclaim her title as best player of the Women's Flag Football League. Planned as the first AIGA NY Small Talks of 2001-2002, she'll now be here next Spring.
by Andrew Gura
1995. As her trip to Europe comes to its end, graphic
designer Rebeca Méndez meets writer Adam Eeuwens in Holland.
Spanish from Mexico City and Dutch from Holland are put aside
as they begin to speak the language of love at first sight,
but the plane returning her to Los Angeles is in sight as well.
She takes said flight, but images of Adam are forever pressed
into her mind.
Back in Los Angeles, she returns to her post as design director and graduate advisor for Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The emails and phone calls back to Adam follow suit. They're no substitute for his embrace.
Working alone one evening, Rebeca removes a photo from her scanner
and sees her own reflection in the glass. An idea. She scans
parts of her body and emails them to Adam. Again. Again. But
something isn't coming across. As the scanner is a three-pass
number, the scans take minutes to make (not counting getting
up the courage to embrace the hardware), but each of them only
represents one still moment of her loving touch. It should be
the other way around.
A week later. A computer lab at Art Center. Lots of Macintoshes. And one pass scanners. Look left, look right, then left again. Rebeca presses the "scan" button in Photoshop and presses up against the glass, just a finger at first, then a hand. Then more. Thirteen seconds of caress caught in a mass of beautiful blurs and streaks.
The rest, as we can now say, is history. These scans would become her Mediated Eros series, exhibited at SFMOMA and the Brandstater Gallery. Thirty-four very lucky ones would be feathered together into Mediate Eros Animation, 20 seconds of image and pulsating audio track. A woman calls out repeatedly "I love you. I love you. I love you," though with visuals so evocative, it hardly seems necessary. Adam would soon come to California.
"I like this idea that I can become so close, so intimate with my equipment that I can actually make love to it and then send that love to another person. To Adam" Rebeca observes. "Don't you agree, mi amor?" Adam, now her husband but no less her boyfriend, pokes his head in to agree from the next room and then returns to his writing. He's working on a forthcoming book on contemporary Dutch architecture and design, co-editing with Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam.
The couple shares a cozy Spanish home at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in Altadena, California. The living areas are sparse and immaculate, light upholstery gracefully dovetailing into dark, polished wood. Khaki butts up against stark ecru. Books line the walls of an alcove, sitting horizontally on shelves of Rebeca's own design, placing volumes-from Kahlo, Maholy-Nagy and Koolhaas to Hiromix and Deleuze-within every guests' reach.
Los Angeles lies a mere twenty minutes away, but sitting in the sun on Rebeca's garden patio, you'd never know it. "This is our conference room," she explains, "And, when I need a moment away from the machines, I just step out through the French doors and my mind is instantly free to wander and to reflect."
Stepping in from those doors, however, we see into one of the two rooms dedicated to reasonsenseÆ (a union of reason-logic, order, system-and the five senses-meaning and significance), Rebeca's design firm. The name fits her work well. She excels in creating what she describes as "an emotional, relevant design culture" for each and every project. Rebeca MÈndez is an outspoken woman, a dedicated scholar and a visionary artist. Her spirit, passionate and wise, is both generous and undeniable in each of her works.
Take the billboards, print materials and catalog she designed for video artist Bill Viola's exhibitions at LACMA and The Whitney Museum. Rebeca brought forth muted type and set video stills into elegant, rhythmic arrangements, offering subtle suggestions about the work they depict, but secure enough to encourage the viewer to draw their own conclusions. For a 360&Mac186; brand-logotype, interior and exterior signage, video projections (for which she directed an underwater film shoot) and a 20,000 (!) square foot mural-conceived for Tsunami Asian Grill restaurant in Las Vegas, she chose a very different approach. Fusion cuisine blends elements from different cultures into new, hybrid culinary forms. Rebeca's mural gathers a vibrant palette of visual Asian "flavors," fuses them together with a delicate translucency, and then wraps them around an architectural substructure courtesy of architect Thom Mayne and his office Morphosis.
Of course, we haven't even mentioned her other film and video work. After meeting her on a RES panel, Mike Figgis insisted that Rebeca be present on the set of Timecode to direct MÌa Maestro. There's Orpheus Re: Visited, a collaboration with designer Rick Morris. The print materials for UCLA's Department of Architecture and Design. The many catalogs for Art Center College of Design. The Hannover World Expo 2000 poster. Lectures, papers, essays. There simply isn't enough space in the format of Digital Habitat to do any justice to a body of work so vast and influential. Someone should write a book. And someone will, sometime soon.
We've been treated to a glimpse of what Rebeca Mèndez creates. Now, in her own words, let us see where this creation takes place.
This article originally appeared in RES magazine and is reproduced with the permission of the author. |
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