Watches came with many faces at the Education Center last week, faces made from giant playing cards, basketballs, the Chuck Taylor All-Stars logo and a Tibetan Buddhist mantra.
Seventh and eighth grade students from Kenmore Middle School spent their art classes making Swatches designed like the Swiss watches popular in the mid-1980s, and last week 60 of those three-foot-long Swatches hung on the walls of the Arlington Public Schools administrative offices. With battery operated clockworks behind the face, the second hands moved in a synchronized passage of time.
The Swatches all centered on some theme, with the band, the face and the hands all reflecting that theme, said Kenmore art teacher Jeff Wilson. With little coordination, most students tried to choose an individual theme.
“As soon as one person said, ‘I’m going to do this,’ anyone else with that theme would either say ‘I had that idea first,’ or abandon it,” said Wilson.
<b>AS AN ART PROJECT,</b> watchmaking was a departure from the norm, said seventh grader Anthony Tran. “It’s a lot more independent,” he said. “There’s not very many rules.” Anthony made his Swatch out of a deck of playing cards, forming the band from 39 cards strung together, and creating a giant King of Diamonds for the face.
The Swatch project came as Wilson remembered his own student days, studying architecture in design school. His professor, a fan of Bauhaus design, looked at Swatches then as an ideal mesh of style and function, a message Wilson passed on to his students.
“I told them Swatch was challenged by disposable watches that came out, that you could get for a quarter at carnivals and in vending machines,” said Wilson. “They had to come up with another, more modern way of thinking about what a watch is.”
That meant looking at ways to make watches more cheaply, with a greater emphasis on style. Wilson took some students on a field trip to a Swatch store to get a good look at what that produced.
<b>THAT TRIP SERVED</b> as a motivation and inspiration, said seventh grader Ingrid Pierre. Most students began their Swatches in February, but Ingrid, in a different art class, finished the project before Christmas. Still, “knowing we were going was a motivation to do something more than mediocre,” she said.
On her Swatch “Analog Mantra Fish,” Ingrid looked to Tibetan Buddhism. Two koi fish intertwine on both sides of the face, a lotus flower with a Buddhist mantra written in paint.
“Lots of times in art, you see Christians being represented by crosses,” said Ingrid. “I thought it would be nice to get other religions represented.”
Rather than looking to religion, Edy Jimenez looked to his shoes, Chuck Taylor All Stars. “I always wear them,” said Edy, pointing to his black Chucks. “I was thinking of the shoes, and I like airplanes, so I added wings.”
After six weeks of work, his Chuck Taylor wall Swatch was done, with a tiny basketball glued to the second hand, a foil watch buckle and a Chuck Taylor logo in the center. “This was a lot better than drawing it,” Edy said.