'Fluff War' and 'Wildlife' are on view through June 15, 2019 at Anton Kern Gallery. All images courtesy the gallery. Lead image: 'Untitled (Exhibition of Dust)' David Shrigley.
Through eerie still-life photographs of Sonoran Desert trees and a three-channel video highlighting the elusive lifestyle of Slab City's residents, Bouchard showcases their rejection of modern society. The art sheds light on how people band together, seeking collective freedom away from mainstream society.
The solo exhibition is now open at Arsenal Contemporary, as part of Toronto's Contact Photography Festival.
Bringing life to ideas and developing drawings into tangible objects, BD Barcelona literally elevated its repertoire and exhibited its design prowess with a palpable strength. 50 Years of Design at Peres Projects Milan ran from 17-22 April 2023, and it was no ordinary furniture showroom inside. As it has done since its conception at Club Boccaccio in 1972, BD Barcelona has taken influences from Milanese architects, artists, and Italian design as a whole. They stimulate a see-saw effect, their designs held in motion by a pendulum of practical necessity and aesthetic sensibility.
Bouncing between these planes is no easy feat, and thanks to the founders (Pep Bonet, Cristian Cirici, Lluis Clotet, Mireia Riera and Oscar Tusquets), their personal influence and architectural backgrounds have seeped into sofas and showrooms with a visual and tactile intensity that has kept them going for half a century. Last year, the brand grew, and its doors opened to fresh ideas and new people. BD Barcelona continued its story with a brilliant example of how the collective is both contemporary and deferential to its history.
They exhibited the tangible in an unimaginably close, frenetically desirable, yet accessible space. They showed off, but they didn’t boast. Curated by Apartamento Studios (who were a part of last year’s refresh), the collection featured an extensive list of BD’s most significant works — but they were mounted upon something new.
Designed by the member Igor Urdampilleta’s studio, Arquitectura-G, aluminium beams ran across and below the furniture like bands of skeletal limbs under muscles. The streaks rose, and pieces such as Konstantin Grcic’s ‘Chair B’ peeped over ‘Dalílips’ (designed by Salvador Dalí and Tusquets). Jaime Hayon’s iconic ‘Multileg’ rested upon thin rectangular bars, its solid alder limbs all modular and rippling, finished in a glossy, lacquered blue. The steel grasped the pieces into place like industrial prototypes. They echoed the analogue machine, playing the part of rigid grammar in the creative language of furniture design.
The chairs (or ‘artworks’ depending on your perspective) sit upon contemporary creativity and insist upon a precision that works excellently with its location at the Peres Projects’ art gallery in Palazzo Beligioioso. The nonconformist structures float between the painted backdrops of colour and abstract shapes created by Beth Letain, whose vivid palette adds to the harmony of the space with unintrusive lines and flat blocks of reds, greens and blues. Standing out against the red forms in Letain’s Obstacle (2023) is Ettore Sottsass’ table, ‘Mettass’, created the same year as BD and reintroduced in 2012 at Salone del Mobile during Milan Design Week 11 years ago. The bulging tables, stools, lights and couches punch through the centre of the space, pumping three-dimensional awe into the room. As much as they are inspiring, the furniture is still highly functional, and this combination supports the critical balance required for Design Week.
Of course, they still pertain to the artistic realm of design. However, the authenticity of its designers and the uniqueness of its products cements the eclectic into the now and the visible into the desirable. Beyond all the armchairs, beams and decorative infrastructure, BD showed Milan and the design sector its true refinement of ideas and functions.
The forms that follow such functions may vary, but the quality is premium. Their work has a curated rhythm with undertones of the modern world. Their showcase last week turns the page and continues the story: now it’s the world of tomorrow, and with these examples, Design Week shoppers are probably going to buy a couch before a home.
Just maybe more down-to-earth.
Plenty of ROA’s research since its conception in 2015 has been based on the needs of the everyday person and their ever-changing environment. Whether on rubble or carpet, mountain or floorboard, ROA holds hybridity at its core. Much of the intriguing patterns and elements from ROA’s design team (and their placement between the human co-existence with nature) play across these lines — their research replaces reliance on images with physical exploration and environmental immersion — and their fascination with the craft of creation would suffer without such passion.
However, this presentation was not about clothes — not as an end product. Insofar as the design of garments was concerned, ROA and DEEP went into the wild, exploring ecological intervention and analysing methods such as the seasonal burning practice of Noyaki in the hills bordering Mount Aso in Kyushu, Japan. Like Indigenous backburning practices in Australia, this form of swailing aids in managing forests and their surrounding environments. Another example of such intervention is closer to home for ROA: The Apennines that spread from the shin to the toe of the Italian peninsula. In the mountain ranges, rewilding is a preventative necessity that digs into landscape and ecosystem protection.
Even in a White Claw Crayfish breeding site, some changes can alter the framework of a forest or the face of a mountain. Reintroduction programs (such as the ones shown in the documentary displayed in ROA’s head office) offer glimpses of the labor and intense engineering nature that sometimes needs to keep thriving. Seasonal heatwaves and fecund hills shift like wind currents, and dry grass needs to be shed before new grass can grow. Human intervention can support this revitalisation, and as shown in the video, there are ways that this ‘interference’ can help. Promoting a biodiverse environment requires awareness and management.
The documentary footage flies over, around and inside natural landscapes in Japan and Italy. The searing yellow and red of the fires smoked into a birds-eye view of the charcoal rocks, the sloping ridges, and an honest, potent scene. The small crayfish are swaddled in the white bucket of a wildlife conservator, and the strands of sediment we call cills stretch around the open air in perfect silence. The tiny animals and the fresh grass following a burn are symbols and fragments of a bigger picture. One that DEEP and ROA explore to both educate and inspire them in making material changes, crafting with a corpus and direction in mind.
The effect of the presentation goes far in showing the audience a glimpse of insider knowledge. There’s more to fashion than meets the eye and more on a designer's mind than the clothes at hand. While the design team works away upstairs, the audience breathes in. There is a refreshing sense that the brand makes more than just ‘practical’ and ‘functional’ clothing. They are designed by experience in the real world and are reactionary. The forms and dictum respond to the environment in palette and purpose, and the brand wants to give back.
