(It sort of reminded me of Bruce Lee’s wooden dummy.) Some featured dimpled surfaces, others were polished smooth they protruded from the central column like fungi on a log. Tree is composed of hand-carved and chiseled knobs, paddles, and tubes made from maple, walnut, oak, redwood, ash, pine, and fir that protrude from an eight-foot-tall bleached totem. The only option was to go with the flow.Ī couple of feet away from Liam Lee’s chairs at Salon was Julian Watts’s Tree, a sculpture the Oregon-based woodworker made from twigs he found around his studio. I was drawn to the free-flowing intuitive shapes of his hand-felted chairs, which seemed to embody the feeling of uncertainty and loss of control many of us felt during the pandemic. His home was like a seal against the outside world, and the furniture - which riffs on the shape of bacteria and seed pods - resembled things he didn’t think belonged in his home. ![]() Lee, who is interested in how someone’s home mirrors their psyche, didn’t leave his house for weeks during lockdown. ![]() My first taste of this would come from Liam Lee’s sculptural felted furniture, which I wrote about ahead of their debut in Patrick Parrish’s Salon Art & Design exhibition. Photo-Illustration: Curbed Photos: Courtesy The Future Perfect, Patrick Parrish Gallery, Simon Johns, and Shoshana Wayne Gallery Instead, much of it explored relationships between people and the environment and borrowed the shapes, textures, and materials of the natural world to do so.Īshwini Bhat’s Sky Trail, Julian Watts’s Tree, Ian Collings’s BLK Basalt table, and Simon Johns’s Ledge dry bar (background detail). The work exhibited during design week didn’t seem as concerned with having a sweeping (and insular) dialogue within the discipline of design. I was excited to see that design has become more wild, inward, and intuitive. Gone are all those cute and comforting jet-puffed silhouettes and audacious Memphis colors and patterns. What would emerge on the other side of all this?ĭespite the smaller scale and quieter presence - the next NYCxDesign is scheduled just six months from now, and I expect that edition to be more “normal” - there was a palpable enthusiasm in the air as designers and gallerists were finally able to share their work in person. For all of those reasons, I felt even more curious about this year’s Design Week presentations. “Whenever there are revolutions in technology, science, or in the political and cultural spheres, designers transform these revolutions into life,” says Paola Antonelli in At a Distance, a new book from The Slowdown and Apartamento that reflects on the past year and a half. For many people, it was the first time in two years that they’ve hosted exhibitions or presented work publicly. Because of that, ICFF and Wanted Design were significantly smaller this year and coincided with the collector-focused Salon Art & Design, which normally takes place in November. NYCxDesign this year was unusually timed, split between a handful of virtual events and self-directed tours in May followed by in-person fairs and gallery shows in November, a way of hedging against the uncertain reality of the pandemic but also insisting that the show must go on. Photo-Illustration: Curbed Photos: Courtesy David Mitchell, Bungalow, Friedman Benda, and The Future Perfect ![]() ![]() Bec Brittan’s Aries Rising Capricorn, Barbora Žilinskaitė’s Storyteller cabinet, Ellen Pong’s Golden Teacher, and Ian Collings’s Stone Object 56 (background detail) were exhibited during New York’s 2021 design week.
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