Design
Just Add Water: Grow Your Own Furniture with These Pop-Up Sponge Designs
A team of industrial designers prototyped a furniture collection that dramatically transforms from flat sheets into fully functional objects, no tools required.
Taking Gaetano Pesce’s spectacular “Up 5” chair as a starting point, Under Pressure Solutions (UPS) is an experimental research project helmed by industrial designers and ÉCAL teachers Camille Blin, Christophe Guberan, Anthony Guex, Chris Kabel, and Julie Richoz. The team recognized the rampant demand for online commerce and subsequent shipping processes that, for furniture, was often cumbersome, expensive, and wasteful given the size and bulk of the products.
As an alternative, they produced a line of stools, chairs, wine racks, and more from cellulose sponge that can be squashed and dried flat, sometimes small enough to fit into a regular envelope. The biodegradable material activates with water and expands ten times its size. Once dry, it hardens into its final form and is more durable than other plastic-based foams. As the furniture bows or dips with use, a spray of water allows the material to spring back to a more robust position.
UPS departs from the particle board and plastics often seen at big box stores. During a two-year research process, the designers tested 56 materials before settling on cellulose sponge made with vegetal fibers, sodium sulphate crystals, softeners, and wood pulp. After various manufacturing and sustainability tests, the team produced 16 unique objects from pendant lights and shelves to chairs and coffee table bases.
The project was recently on view for Milan Design Week, and you can learn more about making process on the UPS site.
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Art
Tune into Your Own Brain Waves with Steve Parker’s Suspended Constellations of Salvaged Brass
Many therapists advise patients to reconnect with their inner voice, a part of treatment that, as anyone who’s tried it can attest, is easier said than done. But what if you could tune into to your internal ups and downs in the same way you listen to a song?
In his Sonic Meditation for Solo Performer series, Austin-based artist and musician Steve Parker fashions immersive installations of salvaged brass. Suspended in clusters with their bells pointing every direction, the instruments envelop a single viewer, who wears an EEG brain monitor and silently reads a series of meditations. A custom software program translates the ensuing brain waves into a 16-part composition played through the winds. The result is a multi-sensory experience that wraps the viewer in the soft vibration of sound waves and makes their inner monologue audible.
Parker frequently incorporates unique ways to interact with instruments into his practice, including in the sprawling 2020 work titled “Ghost Box,” which produced sound in response to human touch. He recently installed the towering purple “Fanfare” sculpture in a Meridian, Idaho, public park, which similarly invites the public to listen to the sounds of the surrounding environment through small trumpet bells at the base.
For more of Parker’s musical works, visit his site and Instagram.
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Art
Imagining Worlds After Climate Disaster, Julie Heffernan Melds Chaos and the Sublime
Julie Heffernan likens her paintings to “advent calendars gone haywire.” Working in oil on canvas, the Brooklyn-based artist renders vast dreamworlds with tiny vignettes scattered across wider landscapes. Appearing from a distant or aerial perspective, the pieces envision the possibilities of life after fires, floods, and other climate disasters and potential opportunities for emerging anew.
Grand in scale and scope, the intricate paintings bear titles like “Self Portrait as Emergency Shipwright” and “Self Portrait with Sanctuary,” which nod to the personal details within each work. Various characters recur in the pieces, but where they once appeared alongside fresh fruit as an enduring metaphor for youthfulness, today, they’re surrounded by imagery of decay.”I find myself repeatedly drawn to landscape painting in order to explore my own issues, both planetary and personal,” she says. “I imagine landscapes that bear witness to our rise and fall as a great power but also to the workings of one woman’s mind.”
Painting, the artist explains, is a way “to see better” and to place the struggles and difficulties of the world within a context. Despite fires raging in the background, or in the case of “Weather Change,” a massive iceberg rapidly melting in the seas, Heffernan’s works are not fatalistic, instead highlighting the immense beauty of human ingenuity. She adds in a statement:
I wanted imagery that might suggest other ways we could cope and possibly even flourish in a new extreme climate and to give my characters things they must tend. I give them water and tools to stop the burning; the tarred and feathered heads of big polluters; a library of great books to surround themselves with as they contend with the madness of man-made calamities.
Evoking the tradition of Hudson River School artists like Thomas Cole, Heffernan’s paintings focus on landscapes that appear amidst chaos as a sort of paradise. She’s also known to paint over and retouch works even after she’s deemed them complete, each time revising her idyllic vision and inching closer to the sublime.
It’s worth checking out an archive of the artist’s paintings to see how the scenes and characters have evolved. Follow her work on Instagram, along with updates about her graphic novel, Babe in the Woods: Or, the Art of Getting Lost, slated for release in September. And if you’re in San Francisco, mark your calendars for November, when Heffernan will have work on view at Catharine Clark Gallery.
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Art History
In Ernesto Neto’s Largest Installation to Date, the World Is a Crocheted Ship Moving to a Single Rhythm
An enormous, cascading installation of crocheted fabric strips stretches across a cavernous gallery in Ernesto Neto’s newest exhibition. At MAAT in Lisbon, the Brazilian artist (previously) presents Nosso Barco Tambor Terra, which translates to “our boat drum Earth,” a solo exhibition encompassing one of the largest suspended sculptures he has ever made.
Created with a team of assistants in his expansive Rio de Janeiro studio, the new piece draws on images of sails and maritime materials like canvas and rope. Neto nods to the history of transatlantic voyages between Europe and South America, stitching remnants of bright chintz, common in Brazil, into a swathe of fabric punctuated by points of interest like a vessel full of decorated drums or corn kernels, a symbol of international trade. Historically, the percussive instrument kept a rhythm for the galley rowers, some of whom would have been enslaved people.
Suspended from the ceiling, the central work in Nosso Barco Tambor Terra adopts a cell-like structure, with numerous colors and patterns that intertwine, drape, stretch, and overlap. The piece suggests “a ship, a primordial beast, a forest, or even, and more likely, all of those things and infinite others,” writes curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti in the exhibition text. He emphasizes that Neto portrays the world as a whole, defining the earth as “ancestral, pre-colonial, and even pre-human.”
The artist considers the dark legacies of enforced displacement and slavery during colonial rule, which the Portuguese implemented in Brazil. He situates the work as celebration of the planet’s array of people, cultures, and “worldviews whose strength and beauty one must recognise, reaffirm,” Visconti says. Amid destruction and chaos, Neto’s ark-like vessel envisions a way to propel the whole world forward.
The exhibition opens May 2 and continues through October 7 in Lisbon. Find more from MAAT.
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Art
Max Naylor Rambles Through Mystical Woodlands in Ethereal Oil and Ink Paintings
Through ancient wooded glens and along rugged sea coasts, Max Naylor invites us to wander along shady passageways, squeeze between lichen-cloaked boulders, and inhale the fragrance of wildflowers. His detailed landscapes in ink and oil paint (previously) capture petals, branches, waves, and an array of botanicals in dreamlike scenes that teeter elegantly on the edge of reality.
Time of day is often indeterminate in Naylor’s paintings, where blue may suggest nighttime or just the shade cast below the cover of trees. Sometimes the scenes entice us into misty distances or a hilly horizon beyond. The artist employs atmospheric light and repeating tree trunks or flowers that verge on pure pattern, playing with our perception of presence and depth by drawing attention to all details at once.
If you’re in Bristol, stop by Spike Island Open Studios between May 3 and 5 to see Naylor’s work in person alongside more than 70 other artists. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
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Art Design
Hot Dogs, Rats, and Birkin Bags: Paa Joe’s Wooden Coffins Are an Ode to NYC’s Ubiquitous Sights
New Yorkers are known for their unwavering devotion to the city, but would they want to spend eternity inside one of its once-ubiquitous taxis or worse yet, in the body of a wildly resilient subway rat?
In Celestial City at Superhouse, Ghanaian artist Paa Joe presents a sculptural ode to the Big Apple by carving an oversized rendition of the fruit, a Heinz ketchup bottle, a bagel with schmear, and more urban icons. Invoking the charms of all five boroughs, the painted wooden works open up to reveal the soft, padded insides of coffins, and two—the car and condiment—are even fit for humans.
Since 1960, Paa Joe has been crafting caskets, which are known as abeduu adeka or proverb boxes to the Ga people, a community to which the artist belongs. Coffins are a crucial component to the safe passage of the dead to the afterlife and a family tradition for Paa Joe. A statement says:
In the early 1950s, Paa Joe’s uncle, Kane Kwei pioneered the first figurative coffin, a cocoa pod intended for a chief as a ceremonial palanquin. When the chief passed away during its construction, it was repurposed as his coffin. This innovative art form quickly gained popularity, and Kane Kwei began creating bespoke commissions resembling living and inanimate objects, symbolizing the deceased individual’s identity (an onion for a farmer, an eagle for a community leader, a sardine for a fisherman, etc.).
He continues this legacy today with his Fantasy Coffins series. In addition to the New York tributes, his works include a Campbell’s soup can, an Air Jordan sneaker, fish, and fruit. The sculptures often exaggerate scale, including the diminutive Statue of Liberty and a gigantic hot dog that shift perspectives on the quotidian.
Celestial City is on view through April 27. For a glimpse into Paa Joe’s carving process, visit Instagram.
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