SET DESIGNER AND DIRECTOR
Atwater Village, Los Angeles
ONE OF OUR MOST MEMORABLE workshops was led by Adi, a Los Angeles set designer and art director whose portfolio is filled with larger-than-life sets, each imbued with surprise and wonder. She builds these sets primarily for advertising campaigns but also occasionally for music videos, most notably in collaboration with her fiancé, Sean, a filmmaker and animator (who also happens to be the brother of Robin Pecknold of the indie folk band Fleet Foxes). They seem a match made in heaven, dedicated to turning dreams into physical experiences through the studio they founded together, Sing-Sing.
Adi and Sean’s Spanish bungalow sits on a rather quiet street of Atwater Village, a Los Angeles suburb known for its diverse cast of residential architecture and its proximity to the freeway, where cars flow barely faster than the adjacent Los Angeles River. The exterior of their duplex gives no indication of the large amount of space within and also out back (at least by Los Angeles standards).
“Art will always find a place in the world to live; you just have to make it first.”
Welcomed inside, we ask about details like the hand-drawn quote tacked above Adi’s bulletin board, “Everything yields to diligence,” a reflection of her Midwestern appreciation for patience in cooperation with hard work. “We both believe that working hard is the best thing you can do. I mean, what else is there?” Whatever seriousness implied at the moment is humorously defused by another nearby drawing of a dismembered hand embellished with the cursive missive: “Let go.”
“It’s really important to have friends’ work on our walls; it means we can look up and see them often, think about them in the world also making things and living the true hustle.”
The couple’s tastes and inspirations tend to overlap, occasionally diverging only to meet again. They cite the likes of Yuri Norstein, Mary Blair, Ettore Sottsass, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Jim Henson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Josef and Anni Albers, and Ellsworth Kelly as inspirations. Upon listing these favorites, Adi stops to reflect, “We love imagining artists of the past are our relatives or ancestors. These people paved the way, showing us what it means to be a working artist.”
An improvisational rhythm rules here, characterized by the couple’s preference for relaxed visual compositions. Colors and shapes spread out, abruptly stopping, to be continued again elsewhere. The décor is loosely strung together in literal and figurative fashion. A clutch of flowers held by the tapered neck of a colorful ceramic vase by Adi sits underneath a hanging garland of graphic cutouts. One piece particularly catches our attention, a “motion painting” originally made for the video for the Fleet Foxes song “Third of May / Ōdaigahara.” It’s one of seven different paintings made for the video, created using paint manipulated into movement with compressed air. “We think it looks like the shape and color of dreams, a fitting piece for above the bed,” says Adi.
“For several years, we’ve been of the mindset that you always have to be moving. Everything in your body is moving all the time, and good things come when you’re also moving. Creative breakthroughs often happen while you’re walking; philosophical insights bubble up while traveling on a train,” explains Sean. “The body wants to be in motion.”
We asked Adi and Sean what keeps them moving, what keeps them inspired. Sean immediately replied, “I think about how big the universe is and how fast it is moving outwards, expanding away from us faster than we could ever catch up with.” Sean then quickly sketched on paper some of their life mantras. After glancing at them, Adi chimed in, “This is everything!”
