Hasta La Ideas

Becky Stern, scanned and RP’d by Jonathan Monaghan / MakerBot for “New York Notables”

Becky Stern makes objects, for one thing, with unusual properties that occasionally make them difficult to classify. Her silver “Firefox” necklace is straightforward, but her “Laptop Compubody Sock” is decidedly not. Her Vicodin-pill-holding “In Case of Emergency” rings, earrings and necklace could be reasonably classified as jewelry, or maybe Medical Jewelry, but her “TV-B-Gone” Jacket isn’t really mere clothing when it can shut off nearby television sets (at a bar or a Best Buy, for instance) by sliding the zipper.

Then there’s the “Cell Phone Ski Mask”, the tablecloth made out of artificial sweetener packages, her Tron-ified knee brace adorned with electroluminscent wiring. And when I ask her about her persistent knee injuries, she pulls out a stuffed animal, only it’s not a stuffed animal: It’s an articulating plush model of her actual knee, complete with cartilage, ligaments and dislocating action, based on arthroscopy images and MRIs (the latter of which she also, by the way, embroidered).

She makes these things in her tidy apartment/studio in Brooklyn, by hand tool, sewing machine, power tool, soldering iron. When I stop by to visit, a jewelry tumbler is running in the background. Like her creative capacities, Stern’s tools don’t belong to one discipline, and she displays the classic mark of a multicreative: When you ask them the cocktail-party-standard “So what do you do?” they can’t just spit out “Patent Attorney,” “Yoga Instructor,” “Production Designer.” They have to think about it.

“It’s so complicated,” she says. “Do you want what I do for work, or what I do for not work, or…?”

“That’s exactly the relevant question,” I say, curious to see how she’ll run with it.

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