Yeah it’s like a physical manifestation of something very real and problematic.
Niki Haas: Big Mouth is a perfect example—I personally think in cartoons all the time. If I don’t know how to make an emotion make sense inside in my head, I usually relate it to cartoons or ice hockey.
Some of the pieces even look like the hormone monster! Now some of it is furniture—or is it all furniture? And are they designed to be functional pieces of furniture or are they more pure art objects?
Simon Haas: Some of it has the intention of being functional, but we also make sculptures of chairs that you can’t really use. We came up through the design world, but we’re not limited to that. A lot of people call us designers because it’s simpler, but most of our stuff is useless. Our ceramics are a good example—it is technically a vessel, where it’s a nod to ceramics as an art form historically, and it’s supposed to be a vessel, but we use that to make something that is so unusable that if you try to use it you’ll actually destroy it. To me, that creates a tension that I really like—you want to use it, you want to pick it up, but it’s just not possible. We’ve always flirted with that—we use the language of design and the language of art interchangeably, and usually if design is involved, we’re using it with a purpose, to subvert what you would normally think of a chair as being, for example. But not everything is functional, and even if it has a function in name, it’s unlikely that it’s that usable. If I were to purchase one of the pieces I probably wouldn’t sit on it.
Niki Haas: People do, though.
I love furniture like that—that you buy and never sit on, like old, super fancy furniture that’s too beautiful to actually use.
Niki Haas: And by the way, we do make designs, that’s one of the things we do—we do many, many types of things, and if somebody calls us ‘designers,’ I accept that with pride. We’re definitely capable of creating a chair, or a table, or whatever it is that you might want to use. But the way our career happened was, we started as construction workers—we’ve been doing construction since we were kids, then Simon and I opened our studio as a cabinet shop, or a carpentry shop. That turned into high-end design, and then that turned into art. This is really our biggest moment of, ‘Hey, we’re artists,’ because we’re showing in an art museum, but we’ve been doing this for a while and it’s really about the evolution of what we’ve been doing all of our career. It went from, 'I want to build something that someone else designed,' to 'I want to design and build something that works for someone to use in their home that’s beautiful,' and then that became, 'We want to make designs that subverts their use and questions what it is, like what is that actual design piece?'
Simon Haas: It doesn’t have to be functional, which is nice. It gives us freedom.
Niki Haas: Then that became, 'We want to utilize our platform to talk about social and political issues that matter to us to engage and support communities that are in need, and to do things that are healing the world, or at least our version of healing the world.' That has become one of our main focuses. I guess it just depends on what you consider an artist, but to me, an artist is someone who is exploring social realities, who’s trying to relate to the world and understand their place in it, and is making work that interacts with those thoughts and feelings.
What social issues does your art engage with?
Simon Haas: A long time ago, we were focused on shame as a social problem. Because a lot of our early pieces had overt sexuality in them and we sort of encouraged people to interact with, for example, a penis that was on a chair. Another example would be when we made a room that we presented at Design Miami a long time ago where you would go in one at a time and feel all of these sex toys, and a video of a male and female where the male is more sexualized, I think. So, we started out that way—that sort of came from my own struggle with being gay and growing up in Texas, and Niki’s interest in sexuality as well, and we were thinking about that and it found its way into the furniture. So, that’s where it started.
Then we went to Cape Town and we started a project there with a group of women who do beadwork and it was really enlightening. I think it sort of pointed out—and I don’t want to sound too ‘white guilty’ here—but I personally was kind of crippled by white guilt when we went there, because I just had never experienced something like apartheid in South Africa. So, that threw us for a loop, and it made us consider ourselves a lot—like, are we successful because of our gender, our race? All of that stuff. But we tried to look past it to continue to interact with and employ these women in Cayo La Tia.
Niki Haas: Also collaborating with them, not just employing them And they get paid really well.
Simon Haas: They get 20% of the sale of each object, even after having gotten a much better salary than what they’re used to. So, that’s an important part of that project for us.