Courtesy Photo

Costume designer Andy Byers creates animal mating scenes for the Sundance Channel’s short film series “Green Porno.”Byers is speaking at 3 p.m. on April 21 in Science Hall Room 72.

The series is written, starring, directed and produced by Isabella Rossellini.

“It’s (Rossellini) dressing up, usually in a unitard with some sort of crazy eyeballs on or wearing wings and she’s humping some sort of paper sculpture that I’ve made,” Byers said.

In the series, Rossellini wears costumes created mostly out of paper. The set design is also predominantly made of paper. Byers said that Rossellini wants to keep the design simple.

“Usually if it’s silly and simple, she goes for it, and a lot of times if I try to make things more complicated, she shies away from it unless she finds it really attractive, so I usually try to go somewhere in between making things really attractive and making them really crappy,” Byers said.

Byers said that he will show some of the films and photographs of his work. Professor of Photography LarrySchwarm said Wichita State University’s art department was interested in a speaker ESU had last semester, so they did a sort of trade. This week, Byers is speaking at WSU for the TallgrassFilm Festival at the Ulrich museum.

“Last semester we had a speaker that they were very interested in and so they piggybacked onto us and since we were bringing him in anyway, they got him to come up to Wichita, and in doing that, it sort of opened up some doors,” Schwarm said.

According to the Sundance Channel Web site, Byers received his bachelor of fine arts in ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and his master’s degree at Ohio State University. Byers said by the time he was in graduate school, he wasn’t really using clay all that much.

“I was just using clay as a material like anything else, so at that point in time I was building these sort of theatrical pieces and I was building animals and things, but the only thing that was ceramics anymore was usually the eyeballs of the animals,” Byers said.

Byers said he never really understood costume design and that’s why he became interested in it. He said after he started listening to The Beatles in college and saw the “Magical Mystery Tour” album cover he figured out that costumes design and fashion design are not the same.

“It doesn’t have to be the elegant pieces that some really super famous designer made, you know, they can be a trash bag with a light bulb hanging over your head and you call yourself an idea, or whatever. That’s kind of how I’ve been looking at them,” Byers said.

Schwarm said the art department has art forum as a requirement for all students enrolled in the art department because it’s difficult for the students to see other contemporary work.Art forum is funded mainly by the Visual Arts Board. Every other Wednesday, a different artist comes to speak.

“The art department feels like a very big part of education for an art student is to see what other artists are doing and Emporia being somewhat isolated, it’s difficult for our students to get in to see galleries and museums,” Schwarm said.

Schwarm said any students or members of the community are welcome to attend any of the art forums.

“We try to cover as many different disciplines as we can, glass, ceramics, painting, this is the first costume designer we’ve had to my knowledge,” Schwarm said.

Byers said he’ll talk a little bit about what to do after graduating with an art degree and how to get out there and become an artist.

“I would like for (students) to get out of it that they can make stuff that looks shitty as long as it’s cool,” Byers said.

Send article as PDF to