Instead of making things as a way to survive obsolescence, the physical remainders that will outlast us all, Adi Goodrich’s work lives for only a few days before being broken back down into pieces. “I’m not really into all that ego of trying make stuff that stays forever,” the Los Angeles-based designer admits. “I’m much more interested in the cycle of creativity, in making things happen, and surrounding myself with everyone who wants to come with.”
Which means that Goodrich, who was just honored with an Art Directors Club “Young Guns” award, might have willed herself into a perfect job: set design. Not only is impermanence a built-in part of the process, but putting up temporary environments also allows Goodrich to run with a large crew, including her best friend since third grade, Eric Johnson. Where they once built skate ramps and treehouses, they now build photographic backdrops and festival sets for clients such as Sony, Wieden + Kennedy, and Target. “A lot of times when I put together a budget, the materials cost almost nothing,” says Goodrich, who started her own studio last year. “But really it’s the manpower, and then [clients] are, like, ‘Why do you have so much crew?’ And I’m, like, because we make this all by hand, and this is what it takes.”
Making everything by hand tops Goodrich’s short list of job requirements, the standards by which she works. The other rule? She doesn’t stay still, even if clients ask for it: “I don’t repeat. This should be exciting, this should be learning. That’s it. And I just stick to those boundaries, and that’s how I know if the project is right for me,” she says. In a new series, published here for the first time, Goodrich refers to paintings from the modernist canon, seeing what happens when shapes and compositions are reconfigured in another medium, and through the filter of her hand and eye. “I was working full-time and going to school full-time, so I didn’t really have any friends,” Goodrich says of her time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead, she would eat sandwiches at the museum in front of a Matisse or in a room of Joseph Cornell set boxes, “and in a funny way the artworks became my friends. When I go back to Chicago, I visit paintings.” The resulting “These Are My Friends and Their Friends” project isn’t just an opportunity to work with people she likes outside of commercial jobs, but actually brings Goodrich’s old buddies with her to Los Angeles.
After all, maybe another way to think of obsolescence is as some sort of party. The whole thing is over by tomorrow, and in the meantime Goodrich keeps refilling everyone’s glasses. “We throw the object away but the photo lasts,” Goodrich told me from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, on a rare break to recharge and visit a mentor, Ludmilla Barrand. “And also what’s lasting is all of us working together, and all the skills we’ve learned. That’s really the core of it.”
The exterior of Goodrich’s studio. “B.L.S.” stands for “Breakfast, Lunch, Snack,” a reminder of the space’s former life as a coffee shop.
Goodrich landed in downtown Los Angeles after outgrowing first her kitchen and then her garage. Situated at the intersecting edges of the Fashion District, the Flower District and the Pinata District, the location is a perfect starting point for walking around and discovering new materials, “to try to find the most common denominator and see what I can do with that,” says Goodrich, who got her start doing windows for Barneys and Anthropologie.
A remnant prop from a Warner Bros. photoshoot. “That’s the beauty of construction,” Goodrich says. “You’re always using stuff that’s cheap, and it’s the time and the craftsmanship that makes it expensive.
A photo by JUCO of the original set.
Goodrich comes from a family of semi-truck drivers, and laughs when I ask if she’s a hard worker: “It’s the most insane hours, and draining and cold, going over mountains. Even my mother was a semi-truck driver, so work is in my blood.”
“Something art school definitely doesn’t teach you is how to run a crew and how to take care of your shit,” Goodrich says. “All of a sudden I had a business, and I was, like, I have to get a business license, and I have to get a studio. I think I was always just chasing exactly what I wanted.”
Goodrich once took a color theory class that was, in its entirety, “looking at colors for eight hours a week, for 15 weeks.” The professor had been teaching the class for 50 years, and both her parents had taught the class for 50 years before her, and she told the students, “you just have to look; you can’t teach this.”
“There are ways that colors are really funny together, like colors recess when you put them together, or they vibrate — there are vibrating colors — like certain values of blue next to a certain red will vibrate. Your eye will not be able to adjust. And I think the only way to know that is to be constantly laying out colors.”
Stuart Davis’ Ready-to-Wear (1955), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the source materials for Goodrich’s “These Are My Friends and Their Friends” project.
The “These Are My Friends and Their Friends” photograph inspired by Davis’ painting, on which Goodrich collaborated with Chad Kouri and Brian Guido.
Henri Matisse’s La Musique (1939), another source of inspiration. Goodrich is drawn to surrealist imagery, “things that are a little off, or where odd things pass through one another.”
The set and photograph inspired by La Musique, a project with Jimmy Marble, with whom Goodrich also created “Be Cool,” an inspiring Public Service Announcement for creatives that has already become my personal self-help mantra.
In collaborators, Goodrich looks for optimism, a critical eye, intentional decision-making and the desire to do new things: “You’ve gotta just keep it together, keep it clean, keep it organized,” she says. “I’ve kind of become the mother of the shop, keeping it together so the guys can just come in and build.”
The main difference between making sets and making something more permanent is material choices, not the know-how of how to actually put it together, Goodrich explains. “You still need the foundation of craftsmanship. But instead of using screws, we’re using an air nailer, or instead of using three-quarter inch wood, we’re using luan, which 3/16th inch thick,” she says. “Basically, it’s the same understanding, but different materials to save money and time.”
Goodrich takes notes of what she likes, and is constantly collecting images. “One of my collections is toilet paper-roll covers from the bathroom, these amazing prints that I can use as patterns, or rips of paper that are an interesting color, or a photo of how something rests against another object.”
Props in her studio.
A still-life by studiomate Stephanie Gonot and leftover yellow set piece from a job for Apple. Working with clients “is actually really exciting,” Goodrich says. “In a way, there are fewer choices, but more decisions to really be precise about.”
The blue line of a lamp by Johnson, on Goodrich’s work table.
The parking lot, holding yesterday’s set. “If we sit and have a conversation, all I’m doing is looking everywhere and my mind is always thinking about how surfaces are put together and glued together and screwed together, and how paint is applied and what adhesive is used,” Goodrich says. “I’m just always building and thinking about the choices that people make. And when the choices aren’t made well, I want to talk about it. It gets real geeky, Su. It gets real geeky.”
For a designer whose most high-profile interiors client is Christian Dior, David Wiseman has none of the flamboyance you might expect — neither the stylized degeneracy of John Galliano nor the leather chaps–wearing showmanship of Peter Marino, the architect who in the past year-and-a-half has hired Wiseman to create massive, site-specific installations in his newly renovated Dior flagships from Shanghai to New York. Rather, Wiseman is a 29-year-old RISD grad whose studio is located in a former sweatshop in the industrial Glassell Park area of Los Angeles, just behind an unmarked door in the shadow of a taco truck.
Los Angeles designer Tanya Aguiñiga already had two studios when she took up a third this summer: the first in the backyard of the Atwater Village bungalow she shares with her husband and two sisters, and the second six blocks away, in a converted industrial-park-turned-artists’-community near the train tracks. But in early July, Aguiñiga picked up and moved her shop 2,000 miles south to the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, for a five-week residency — the first in a project she calls Artists Helping Artisans. “I had gone to Oaxaca and Chiapas in 2007, and there was so much amazing stuff being produced by the women there,” she says. “People aren’t aware of it because the skills aren’t being passed down anymore and because people are scared to travel within Mexico. There’s isn’t enough tourism or income to sustain these crafts.”
When Jonathan Nesci was 23 — with a one-year-old at home, and working as a forklift operator at FedEx in Chicago while attending night school for 3-D drafting at a community college — one of his coworkers gave him a fateful nudge: “He knew I wanted to design furniture, and he was like, ‘You can do it!!’,” recalls Nesci, now 31. And so he cold-emailed Richard Wright, founder of the eponymous Chicago auction house, and promoted the heck out of himself until he landed a job managing Wright’s restoration department, where he stayed for five years before founding his own studio in early 2012. As he tells it, his cheerleader at FedEx deserves substantial credit for inspiring him to take the leap that changed his life. But to know Nesci is to realize that no matter what happened, the results would have been the same — he was destined to be a designer.
