Christopher David Gauthier
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  • Contact
  • HIGHLIGHTS
  • Design Projects
    • 12th Night
    • A Christmas Carol
    • The Boy Friend
    • Cold Comfort
    • Fourplay: New Work by Excited Writers
    • Ga Ting
    • Gruesome Playground Injuries
    • Hardline Productions >
      • Redpatch
    • Herr Beckmann's People
    • Honest Fishmongers >
      • Hamlet
      • King Lear
      • Measure for Measure
    • The Illusion
    • It's A Wondeful Life: a musical adaptation
    • King Charles III
    • The Lawyer Show 2010 - AS YOU LIKE IT
    • The Lawyer Show 2011 - A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
    • The Madness Of George III
    • The Matchmaker of Montreal
    • Munscha Mia
    • The Priory
    • Proof
    • Romeo and Juliet
    • Spinning You Home
    • Treasure Island
    • The Winters Tale
  • Resume
Picture
Design is presentation. 
Presentation is about context.


If I tell you the photograph to the right was taken in a prison I have told you one way to feel about the image.
If on the other hand I tell you it was taken from the top of a monument several hundred feet above the ground, I've told you something else...

In a very real way what a designer does is tell you what they want you to see, and helps you to see it in that way, and (possibly) that way only.
 

Picture
Working as a designer for the performing arts I rarely chose the actual world I help create.

Rather I hope I help the director present their world a little more clearly by working as part of the creative team. Set must work with costume, costume with light, light with sound, sound with set and so forth. All these parts make a greater, more cohesive, and more easily understandable whole.
One of the great joys of designing for me is that collaboration. 
It lies in taking an idea and elaborating it, clarifying it, shining light into the darker corners to help the audience to see. And perversely sometimes the trick is to allow an audience to think they are seeing one thing until they are told it is another. To obscure what is, with the appearance of something else.
The picture on the left is the monument from which I took the images above. 

The lines in the picture above right are a safety grate attached over the window to prevent the viewer from falling.
But it makes a great prison image, no?
                                                                                    Design, like so much of art, is the attempt to tell a truth by the means of a fiction. 

                                                                                    Design is manufactured context.

My working methods are flexible. 
I believe strongly in adapting myself to the preferred style of the director I work with. 
Providing the widest possible set of choices coupled with sound advice on how to most effectively utilize available resources for maximum impact is what I do. 

Whether it's and entire outfit or just a belt buckle I like to give a director more than they ask for and allowing them to pull me back. 
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