Hasta La Ideas

Last week, a vacant industrial loft was magically transformed into an elegant gallery space for the evening, as the Rhode Island School of Design’s Department of Furniture Design celebrated its graduating Masters Candidates in a show titled, ‘The New Clarity.’

The show opened its doors in downtown Providence to members of RISD and the local community who came out to show their support. ‘The New Clarity’ exhibited the Masters’ theses of seven graduate students, featuring work by Adrianne Ho’o Hee, Elish Warlop, F Taylor Colantonio, Chen Liu, Carley Eisenberg, Simon Lowe, and Marco Gallegos, this year’s graduating Masters’ candidates of the department.

Woven vessels by F Taylor Colantonio

The title of the exhibition drew its name from “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke:

…Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”

Each designer took a fresh approach to that understanding, re-envisioning what furniture could be and giving a glimpse of what that development looked like on the path to their final work.

Bent-wood room divider by Elish Warlop

Pieces ranged from the bent-wood room divider above to a chair to facilitate sex with multiple partners simultaneously–running the gamut of what comes to mind (and doesn’t) when one thinks of ‘furniture design.’ The diverse array of work explored not only a new understanding, but varying motifs of tradition, from daily traditions of the everyday to ornate, woven tapestries re-imagined in plastic.

One of the most memorable pieces from the evening was the latter, the work of Colantonio, which looked at commodities of the past, seeped in ancient tradition, and adapted them utilizing contemporary tools and technologies.

Plastic Persian carpet by F Taylor Colantonio

“Most of my work deals with historical ‘types’ of objects, at least as a point of departure,” said Colantonio. “I’m interested in taking a thing like a Persian carpet, and all the baggage that comes with it, and abstracting it beyond the qualities we would normally associate with a Persian carpet. I wanted to create a kind of a ghost of the source object, something that is both familiar and entirely strange. In many of the pieces, this is done with a shift in material, often as a result of exploiting a manufacturing method in a new way.”

F Taylor Colantonio

Patterns on patterns on patterns by F Taylor Colantonio

The Beer Bag, by Marco Gallegos

The aptly titled “Beer Bag” was part of Gallegos’ “Rethinking the Familiar” Collection, which looked to further the relationship and value people place on everyday objects. With the capacity to carry a six-pack of beer, the bag fits snugly onto one’s bike. Beer holders included.

The Lilu Table, by Marco Gallegos

The Lilu Table is also the work of Gallegos, who sought to create a self-supporting structure, where each part provides vital support to the rest–working together as a system. The power-coated steel legs fit into the top, locking them all together in a secure fit.

The breadth of the work left little to be desired in terms of heterogeneity, leaving the future work of each designer just as varied and unpredictable as the collection produced. We’ll be eager to see what divergent paths they take after graduation this June!

The Graduate Furniture class, photo by Anelise Schroeder

More photos from the opening night after the jump.

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Paola Antonelli, charmer of Stephen Colbert and the most curious of octopuses, will be honored this evening in New York by the MEDIUM Group. The art and commerce go-between is presenting Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design and director of research and development at the Museum of Modern Art, with an award in recognition of her curatorial achievements and contribution to contemporary culture. Hosting the “Cocktails and Curators” bash, a kind of Frieze kickoff, are Hannah Bronfman, Amani Olu, and Larry Ossei-Mensah. We’re not sure what the award consists of, but might be suggest forgoing a traditional trophy in favor of a carbon-fiber “robo-fly”? “Hello, world’s smallest flying robot!” Antonelli tweeted recently of the insect-scale innovation, the subject of a newly published Science paper. “Where have you been all my life?”

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Richard Misrach, “November 20, 2011, 3:36 PM” (2011). Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery.

“I grew up in L.A. and went to Berkeley from ’67 to ‘71. I started out as a math major and ended up in psychology, but that was also when Berkeley was just going insane. I didn’t take formal classes in photography at all. I started taking photographs of tear gassings on the Berkeley campus with my uncle’s camera….I was being exposed to Berkeley street riots and the politics of the time, which was very important to me, but I was also being exposed to the f/64 school of photography—Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange—and I was just falling in love with photography, so I found that that combination of social, political engagement along with my passion for the aesthetics of the medium of photography were coming together very fast and hard. For the last forty years I think my work has reflected those two polarities, and it’s been sort of interesting the way they have been pushed. They’ve never really reconciled—art and politics.”

–Richard Misrach today at Paris Photo Los Angeles, in an on-stage conversation with John Divola and curator Douglas Fogle. Misrach’s work is on view through June 16 at the Cantor Center at Stanford University. A exhibition of his new largescale photos opens next Saturday at Pace/McGill Gallery in New York.

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Thom Browne is on a roll. Last fall he received the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Award for fashion, and a few months later First Lady Michelle Obama sported his necktie-inspired navy silk coat to the inauguration. Now Pratt Institute is honoring the designer with its 2013 Fashion Visionary Award, which in previous years has been bestowed on fashion greats including Ralph Rucci, Diane von Furstenberg, and Fern Mallis.

Browne will receive the award this evening at the Pratt fashion show, an annual affair that showcases the reliably remarkable thesis collections of seniors in the school’s fashion design program. “No American sportswear designer better represents the aspirations of Pratt fashion than Thom Browne,” said Pratt fashion department chair Jennifer Minniti in a statement announcing the award. “His highly conceptual runway presentations and impeccable craftsmanship have set standards for excellence and originality that push forward and inspire our fashion students to do the same.”

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“After so many years of averting the border patrol between the disciplines of art and architecture, while inhabiting both yet claiming to be outsiders, this is the ultimate validation,” said Elizabeth Diller last Wednesday at the Plaza Hotel, as she joined partners Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro in accepting the American Academy of Rome’s Centennial Medal for their exceptional contributions to the worlds of architecture and the visual arts. The trio spent the previous evening at the New York Public Library, where they discussed their interdisciplinary design studio’s renewal of Lincoln Center. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to attend the event and harvest some memorable quotes. Learn more on May 10, when Diller and Scofidio will be joined by DS+R monograph author Edward Dimendberg for a book talk at the Center for Architecture.

Redesigning Lincoln Center was an epic undertaking that involved a prominent public landmark and a painstaking process that evolved over nearly ten years. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the design studio behind most of the project, has chronicled their experiences in Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account (Damiani). The three principals shared their views on the project and the book at a recent event hosted by New York Public Library and moderated by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA. The DS+R trio is just as articulate as they are creative, so here are excerpts from that discussion.

On Lincoln Center’s design:
Diller: The old Lincoln Center was too elitist, solid, and turned its back on the neighborhood and community. We were drawn to the promenade levels where everyone pours out in the middle of events. We wanted to extend that social feeling to the rest of the project. We broke down the edges to enable events in the public spaces. There’s more symmetry now across the public and private spaces.

Scofidio: There were no photos of the old Lincoln Center except the main plaza with the fountain. Someone said that in the 1960s, plazas were designed to be desolate.

On how they approached the project:
Diller: To win the project we showed many ideas, since we tend to think in multiples, with different approaches and solutions. We demonstrated our affection for the place and showed how to take it to the next step. We felt we could do it justice and interpret it for contemporary culture. We wanted to transform Lincoln Center for the logic of our time.

Scofidio: We didn’t go in and say here are the problems we have to correct. We just said we can finish Lincoln Center.
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