Project by Norman Kelley (Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley)

wrong I. a vagabondage of the imagination, of the mind that is not subject to any rule. [1]

The Wrong Chairs are an exercise in error. The collection consists of seven chairs that purposefully disrupt the notion of “correctness” by applying a medley of design mistakes to the iconic American Windsor chair. The Windsor chair, with its British roots, has become a symbol of colonial America—a chair that is unadorned and democratic in design. More importantly, however, it is also a forgettable chair. You might vaguely remember your grandmother having one in her kitchen. At first glance, the collection blends into the images we hold of domestic memories we’ve encountered at some point or another, but, at second glance, they’re more unreasonable. In using an object readily recognized and imbedded with nostalgia, the collection utilizes the Windsor chair as the control—a seemingly ordinary object— for the exploration of “wrongness.”

Read full article here.

How to Wake a Sleeping Modernist Architecture Giant/ Matt Shaw

Columbus, Indiana is a living architectural museum where you can see one of the largest collections of high- and late-modernist buildings in the country. There are 7 National Historic Landmarks and counting in a town of roughly 45,000 people. So this context — a town landscaped by Dan Kiley and home to over 100 buildings and sites, by architects and designers including both Saarinens, Robert Venturi, Kevin Roche, and John Johansen among others — is ripe for reinterpretation. Read full article here.

JONATHAN NESCI IN CONVERSATION WITH MATT OLSON OF RO/LU
10.14.14 — BY MONICA KHEMSUROV
PHOTOS BY JEFF BOND

When it comes to design, it’s easy to forget about Indiana. Easy, but unfair — just ask anyone familiar with the legacy of Columbus natives Irwin and Xenia Miller, whose Eero Saarinen house is one of many architectural landmarks the pair commissioned in and around their hometown. Or ask the editors of Sight Unseen, who included not one but two Indiana-based talents in our American Design Hot List last week. One of them, Jonathan Nesci, debuted a project over the weekend that underscored both arguments: Invited by curator Christopher West to create a site-specific installation on the grounds of Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church — also a Miller commission — Nesci conceived the stunning project 100 Variations, consisting of 100 unique, mirror-polished tables aligned in a grid in the church’s courtyard. He developed the tables using the Golden Ratio, an ongoing preoccupation in his work that similarly informed Saarinen’s. We snagged the first photos of the installation, which was on view for only three days, then invited Matt Olson of the Minneapolis studio RO/LU to discuss the project — and its oft-overlooked setting — with Nesci. Read their conversation here.

The Sight Unseen Hot List continue on today with another Volume Gallery collaborator – Leon Ransmeier. Follow the link here to read his thoughts on American Design.

The Sight Unseen Hot List today includes both Jonathan Muecke and Jonathan Nesci. Muecke quoting George Brecht:

Determine the limits of an object or event.
Determine the limits more precisely.
Repeat, until further precision is impossible.
GEORGE BRECHT, EXERCISE (1963)

See full list here.

The American Design Hotlist from Sight Unseen features a large portion of designers that we have worked with. Congratulations everyone!!

Click here for the full list.

Domus on Future Tropes
Aguiniga, Muecke, Olivares, Ransmeier, ROLU, and Ruhwald take part in an exhibition at Volume Gallerywas founded on a utopian correspondence initiated by Bruno Taut. Read full article here.

Jimenez Lai’s “Township of Domestic Parts” at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale investigates the basic components of residential typologies, isolating various purposes of the home into separate architectural structures. Read more here.

Design Miami/ has announced participants for this year’s Miami edition of the collectible furniture fair, which will run from December 3 through December 7 as part of Miami Art Week.

As in previous years, Design Miami/ has awarded a commission for the entrance pavilion to an emerging designer. This year’s entrance will be done by Jonathan Muecke. Explaining the choice of designer, Design Miami/ creative director Alexandra Cunningham Cameron said, “For our tenth anniversary, we wanted to pay homage to the type of young designer that Design Miami/ wishes to champion – one who experiments with materials, form and scale; who is as much a theorist as a maker; and who challenges us to consider how we relate to the world built around us.”

Read the full article here.

Fresh Prints: Interior Designer Kelly Behun curates a selection of striking colors and patterns for Modern Luxury Manhattan, including Jojo Chuang’s Graphic Utopia Folding Screen:

From September 27 to November 23, 2014, the Gallery at REDCAT will present Small Museum for the American Metaphor, an exhibition curated by Belgian architect Kersten Geers in collaboration with the Gallery at REDCAT Director Ruth Estevez.

Small Museum for the American Metaphor is an exhibition which brings together European perspectives on the American West, and more specifically, the particularities embedded in the idealized fictions surrounding it. The visual argument here is that there is a certain architectonic “idea” that dwells on the celebration of Endlessness as mythicized in the American West. The metaphor is the base for an architecture that blurs the distinction between building and object, collapsing the different scales. It is an architecture that celebrates the fiction of the “wide open” and seeks to re-evaluate/reinterpret the world as a gigantic interior. In that context, a successful intervention is able to define hierarchies, carve out places, and make shared points of reference. The exhibition, much in the tradition of showcasing objects in a defined space, such as a cabinet, “collects”artworks, architectural models, drawings and other elements that consciously fade the distinction between object and representation.

The exhibition includes works from artists and designers such as John Baldessari, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Stefano Graziani, Rita McBride, Valérie Mannaerts, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Manfred Pernice, Bas Princen, Ed Ruscha, Ettore Sottsass, Michaël Van den Abeele, Richard Venlet, Pieter Vermeersch, Peter Wächtler and Christopher Williams, as well as models of past and present architectures of the “big box”.

Read full press release here.

Recommended Shows: Beyond Chicago EXPO
by ROBIN DLUZEN on SEPTEMBER 17, 2014

“Future Tropes”
September 5 – November 7, 2014
Volume Gallery
845 West Washington Blvd, 3rd Floor
What’s on view:A group show of furniture by artist/designers Tanya Aguiñiga, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Leon Ransmeier, RO/LU, and Anders Ruhwald.

Between 1919 and 1920, German architect Bruno Taut exchanged letters with fellow German expressionist architects about how to shape the architecture of the future. That correspondence is now the inspiration for “Future Tropes,” a show which has assigned six artists to create work that is both timeless and futuristic, resulting in some works that are typical, and some that are truly original. Tables, rugs, cabinets and group seating are all reexamined; many of the pieces, like Leon Ransmeier’s stainless steel, sculptural “gymnasium,” Action Object, or Jonathan Muecke’s multi-purpose, space-saving Blue Cabinet are minimal and sleek and in this way match our idea of a “futuristic” aesthetic might look like. Tanya Aguiñiga’s contributions stand out in their warmth and internalized approach; in Tierra, a series of tubes filled with soil from various locations of personal importance are woven loosely into a rug that is both elegant and luxurious in appearance, as well as modest and base in its materials. Inspired by Aguiñiga’s experiences with her infant child, Support is a soft, floor-bound dining room table made of movable denim building-blocks, filled with rice and beans. Changeable, practical (and somewhat edible), the piece is both universally functional and intensely personal.

Find full list here.

Luftwerk showcases a nightly light and water installation at Chicago’s Couch Place alley with video compositions which will be projected onto “screens” of water. Read more about it in this article from Archinect.

09.09.14 — BY MONICA KHEMSUROV
“Timeless” is probably the most overused — and abused — word in design in recent years, typically employed by designers in the context of sustainability in order to imply that a piece has such a classic look or function that its expected longevity can somehow justify its existence in a sea of wastefulness and overproduction. Future Tropes, a new group show that opened this past weekend at Chicago’s Volume Gallery, approaches the concept of timelessness from a very different angle, however: “The work should be slightly ahead of the world, slightly un-contemporary, setting the stage for future codes yet operating in a place that precedes our ability to apply language to those codes.” (—Jan Verwoert, as adjusted by RO/LU.) In other words, objects that are equally linked to our prehistoric past and our distant, utopian future. Volume curators Sam Vinz and Claire Warner proposed that brief to Leon Ransmeier, ROLU, Jonathan Muecke, Tanya Aguiñiga, Jonathan Olivares, and Anders Ruhwald, who exchanged ideas on the topic before each creating a custom piece responding to it. Click here to see the results.

The Dynamic Design Duo Behind RO/LU: The founders of RO/LU, Matt Olson and Mike Brady, blur the lines between art, furniture and contemporary design.

‘I want to create a chair that my mind wants to sit in, not that my body wants to sit in,’ is a mantra for Mike Brady and Matt Olson of RO/LU.

This month sees a trio of RO/LU exhibitions: A collaborative performance piece debuts at Lower East Side art destination Jack Hanley Gallery at the same time that two furniture shows open at Chicago’s Volume Gallery and Patrick Parrish’s brand-new New York gallery (formerly modernist mecca Mondo Cane). Full content here.

RO/LU seems to be on a roll these days! Hot on the heels of the launch of their new website, the multi-talented Minneapolis-based design firm is taking part in not one, not two, but three exhibitions across the US. Read full content here.

In Waves: Arp + RO/LU + Paul Clipson September 7 – October 5, 2014 Opening Reception Sunday, September 7th, 6-8pm Jack Hanley Gallery is very pleased to announce In Waves, a group show featuring the work of Arp, RO/LU, and Paul Clipson.

For additional information.

Surfaces On Which Your Setting and Sitting Will Be Uncertain is a group of sculptural furniture objects by RO/LU with matching clothing by Various Projects. The work will be on view as the inaugural show at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York from September 4th through October 4th. The opening will take place Thursday September 4th at 50 Lispenard Street from 6-9 pm.

RO/LU continues to explore “art history as a material” by starting with very literal information from existing works and reinventing through intuitive connections to others. A collage of the past and the present—Superstudio’s Quaderna line, environmental installations by Ettore Sottsass, Scott Burton and James Lee Byars’ utilization of man as a symbol object—along with intangible new ideas that emerge through action. The objects, made from welded wire mesh, seem to change when one moves in their presence, in some way becoming different with each step taken around them.

Extending ideas embraced and explored by the Mono-ha movement in late sixties Japan and current philosophers like Bruno Latour, RO/LU and Various Projects explore the “life of things”—the belief that objects, images, and ideas included—have their own agency and won’t simply sit still under someone’s watch, on someone else’s terms. In fact, what makes them compelling is precisely what animates them, what they want, and how they behave when they are set loose into the world. In other words, objects, images, and ideas have lives to live. Suddenly we are interested in getting closer to these objects, establishing a poetic proximity that will allow these things to teach us in ways no person could.

Various Projects’ four square dresses, track suits, bangles, scarves and
turbans—produced in the same grid pattern as RO/LU’s objects—act as a playful “meta-mirror” and encourage a sort of performative approach to our everyday interactions with the living world around us.

For additional information.

Anders Ruhwald: One Thing Follows Another (And You Make It Happen)

Opening reception: September 3rd, 6 – 8pm

In the exhibition Anders Ruhwald: One Thing Follows Another (And You Make It Happen), the artist, who is artist-in-residence and head of Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, explores form, materiality, and perception through a series of installations that compare and contrast one design rendered in three diverse media: ceramics, wood, and glass.

On view through Tuesday, September 30, 2014

For additional information.

Interview: Snarkitecture Talk Reimagining Buildings and Objects, Projects for En Noir and Richard Chai

BY CEDAR PASORI

With their art and architecture collective Snarkitecture, Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen take over buildings and create objects that challenge the imagination. Here, they discuss how they’re changing the way people look at the world.

Preview the upcoming Collective Design Fair. Jonathan Nesci and Matthias Merkel Hess both make appearances in the critic’s picks!

CONGRATULATIONS to Norman Kelley for being named a 2014 Prize Winner at the Architectural League of New York!!

Click the link to read more.

Read about Thaddeus Wolfe’s latest show Unsurfacing at Volume Gallery in the spring issue of Cultured.

Vogue Magazine highlights some things to do in New York this spring…coming in at #20 Collective Design Fair and an image of a piece by Matt Merkel Hess we will be showing.

Can you spot Rome Prize winner Thomas Kelley (half of Norman Kelley) in this piece about the meals at the American Academy in Rome?

For a preview of tonight’s Thaddeus Wolfe UNSURFACING show, head over to Sight Unseen for an interview and images.

Check out the pictures posted by MoCo Loco of the WRONG CHAIRS by Norman Kelley.

Click here for the review of the Norman Kelley show WRONG CHAIRS on Visual Art Source.

Read the article on the interior of Anne-Gaëlle and Christophe Van de Weghe, pictured with a prized Basquiat in the living room of their Manhattan townhouse, which was renovated by Annabelle Selldorf and includes works by Thaddeus Wolfe.