'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.
Samuel Ross has had a multi-disciplinary approach since his time studying graphic design and illustration at De Montfort University, Leicester. His accolades—and there are a lot—are one thing, but he does more than receive prizes. His self-funded label A-COLD-WALL* was established in 2015 (and a womenswear line in 2018), but he began in fashion with 2wnt4 (a streetwear brand made in collaboration with Ace Harper), and this led to his discovery by the late Virgil Abloh in 2013. Ross also formed Concrete Objects (in 2017) with Joe Burns and SR_A (in 2019), which focused on furniture design and industrial design, and scattered some watch design within that. His brands have thrived, but his artistic vision has been the translator across his trades. A-COLD-WALL* was inspired by Ross’ upbringing (and the British class system) and comments on societal inequality. At the same time, SR_A (as his design studio) has architectural takes on furniture that signify something more significant than their material—they send messages through mediums.
On Tuesday, ‘LAND’ extended that message.
An industrial sentimentality hung from the walls and sat over the polished concrete floors of White Cube’s Bermondsey gallery. The message was open to interpretation, unconstricted, informative and discursive. Very Ross. Unlike the fast-paced and gruelling world of fashion, where the need to produce seasonal collections takes priority, these paintings were made over a year. Reminiscent of Richard Serra’s ‘let the work speak for itself’ mentality, the pieces were crafted over time—some of the larger works took up to 11 months—with industrial materials layered, scraped, swathed, and scratched.
Held in floating steel frames, the paintings reflect an emotive Samuel Ross, one held on a wall rather than worn with a tick or tucked into pants. These paintings are emotional. In contrasting blocked-out spaces (similar to Nicolas de Staël and his use of a composition as a perspectival device), Ross expands upon the ‘Black experience’ by exploring industrial materials and dislocated landscapes seen from above. Somewhat derived from old blueprints, their content echoes information, and the geographical references are implicit. Here, pigment is political. It communicates images: rust colours the mind into a picture of a factory, and a black-wreathed painting is as heavy as a welding desk. There is something to be seen behind the laborious work and meaty textures depicted.
OTHERS SEE IT (2022) is the darkest of the dozen. Painted over OSB board (made from compressed layers of wood strands), dollops of cracked, opaque emulsion and acrylic protrude alongside blackened aluminium tape and soaked card, their folds pressed like a pocketed origami. The refracting sheen of the acrylic and the light spray of metallic aerosol balanced the overwhelmingly dark painting that could easily dampen a room. Etched-over emulsions are mixed with masonry paint to form an intense craquelure rivalled only by the feeling of dry skin. They look ashy, and the paint appears to have dried like tar or igneous obsidian lava.
CLOSER TO DISSONANCE (2022) is a packed image. It absorbs a collection of mediums over soaked duck canvas. The colours of sand and honey mingle with speckled rust, parakeet green, and brushed eggshell and slate. A thin filament of light spreads across the boards like a Morandi backdrop with no bottles. The composition is less considered than, for instance, Robert Rymans’ To Gertrud Mellon (1958), which has a similar palette and a more restrained application of paint. The work hangs beside two other paintings. It appears sensitive, timid and unwilling to depart from its siblings. The expressive application of paint makes the works sit at ease in the apparent series, creating a wholeness that can only be felt when stepping back and observing all three works at once.
However, ANEW (2022) is heavily worked. It has implications of a topography seen from above. The honey-soaked card plays across the wood panels like glue on a draftsman’s table. The materials spread across bordered boards, displacing the panels in an allusion to broken geographical boundaries and overlapped space. The vincular cracked paint, and its similarities to shino-yu (allowing the surface glaze of ceramic to break), is potent, referential and intentional. Conservators have struggled with artworks by Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock thanks to decomposing and cracking house paints. Ross places this industrial material in its barebones reality. As damaged. As imperfect.
The exhibition featured not only paintings but sculptures: three of them. Made from powder-coated steel and aluminium, their presence crowded the space in the middle of the room, separating the painted works into oblique sections. Rather than muting the experience, the sculptures sat humbly on the floor like cuts in the stencils of Alexander Calder’s dials. The larger steel and aluminium bodies were derived from sketches, while the smaller works, such as DISTANCE COLLAPSE IN HEARTLAND (2022), were forged from found materials. 7 HOURS (2022) had pressed pigments of Indian dye that diluted the canvas, sparking an immersive experience with the surface. However, the sculptures merely added to the sensory environment. They somewhat placate the intensity of the paintings, but not much more than the concrete block attached to the burning incense sticks and the ambient soundscape that can be heard in the room. Whereas the paintings shared frames like bread and wine, sculptures such as BODY WITH LAND (2022) added scale and shared the space, but at the cost of padding an already full room.
The paintings were self-conscious but content, and there will always be deliberation in the uneven crust of interpretation. Nonetheless, the images speak for themselves in a clothed way. Their compositional portrayal and the impasto cracks, bulges, and creased canvas all add to the feeling of a rising chest and breathing being. A being with a history and pain. The unspontaneous voulu in the sculptures is forgivable. The paintings are the purpose of the show. They are the heavy movers, the forms that assuage. They performed Ross’ expressive energy and gave a perspective with a whisper of emotion that, with breaths and a gaze, can make one think.
What about? Ross leaves that up to you. But one thing is for sure. The story of Samuel Ross is not over, and he’ll be back — in some way or another.
The conceptual basis of the show spawns from Eagleton’s grappling with the inevitability of death, an idea that became all the more potent when Eagleton realized he was approaching the age at which his father passed 20 years ago. After learning of these origins, the work becomes all the more fascinating when chronicling the ways in which Eagleton both maintains these ideas and departs from such.
Though Eagleton’s motifs come from the works in his Grandfather’s collection, I find it particularly interesting to consider the his decision to eschew many aspects of these motifs, mainly the religious ideology that would be pervasive in these older works. Instead, Eagleton opts to render those same skeletal symbols as effectively futile, a decision which alienates them from any sort of religious ideology, or practically any ideology for that matter.
Instead, Eagleton asks us to grapple with the infinite uselessness of the human being in relation to its environments, an idea which is emphasized through the beautiful and unsettling landscapes that surround the subjects of the works. This emphasis on setting, maintained both through abstraction and an ethereal palette, effectively humbles the central characters that dance and contemplate in the works, making them seem almost secondary to the natural processes that exist with or without them.
Perhaps then there is an ideology within the work after all. I don’t want to fully commit to saying that the works resemble a nihilist picture, because I think that within Eagleton’s idea of human “futility” there exists a commitment to optimism: the half human - half skeletons continue to dance, in spite of, or maybe even because of the inevitable decay that surrounds them.
Following the opening of their collaboration last Friday at USM’s SoHo showroom, office caught up with Mercado to discuss the partnership, his creative process, and what it’s like to work with a furniture house that’s been innovating for over 50 years.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did you come to design and get started with your current practice?
Well, I've always made things; I went to school for art direction and design and got into graphic design in my early twenties. I still do it, but in college, I also had a few woodshop classes and that kind of changed my life. I got to really understand the tools I was working with, and then I ended up working at the woodshop. That's where a lot of my resourcefulness started because I was in college and didn't really have a bunch of money to spend on materials, so I was always digging through the scrap bin of the woodshop. I was always making stuff out of whatever people threw away.
It’s still very similar to what I do now — amateur style. I was always in the woodshop. Once I graduated, I didn’t have the woodshop anymore but knew I wanted to continue what I was doing. I had to scratch that creative itch of physically making stuff, so that's when I started exploring leatherwork. The process is similar — measuring, cutting, etc., but you can do it from your house, and it gets messy but not as messy as a woodshop. So I started really diving into leatherwork with small accessories — wallets and belts, hence the name @noel.walletchain.
How has your process evolved since the start?
Recently, I’ve wanted to tap back into my college days of coming up with crazy ideas and making them happen. Now I have all this knowledge of so many different materials — wood, metal, leather. During quarantine, I really used that time to my advantage. I was like, "I have to make something every single week. At the end of the week, I have to have a finished piece." I would make deadlines for myself and then be upset if I didn't hit them. I was pretty tough on myself about that, even though nobody else knew that the deadline even existed. If I slacked off the next week, I’d double it up. I was just always making stuff.
At some point, I started running out of materials — I go to the thrift store to source most of my materials — so I started hitting every alley within three miles of my house. I would track my movement, and it was just zigzag up and down alleys. It was kind of funny. I found a pretty decent chair, and that's kind of how I started with the chair stuff. That chair definitely set it off. I embroidered a Marlboro Camel chair on the back and the seat. After that, I became addicted to finding chairs, which slowly introduced me to furniture design. Whenever I do anything, if I'm actually interested, I go pretty hard on it.
What's the most important part?
Doing what I do, knowing how to do that, and knowing the history of what I’m working on is super important to me. I quickly became a furniture nerd about everything. I'm taking things apart and thinking about what that designer was thinking about and deconstructing it and seeing how this thing was fabricated or assembled. I learn a lot from deconstructing.
I’m also thinking about the other chair you did, “Choice of Champions.” You take something that had a particular function and give it a completely new one.
Yeah, that was a punching bag I found in my alley, actually right down the street... I was walking my dog and was like, "Whoa, perfect." It was after it rained too, so the punching bag weighed like 200 lbs, so I was in the alley with this dirty, wet punching bag, throwing all the stuff from the inside into the dumpster. I was like, "Dude, this sucks." But I was like, "The fabric is perfect." I like mixing the two worlds of high-end, super-expensive design and adding an element of grit and manual labor. Everything that I use is an everyday kind of object. I'm fascinated with production lines, especially the people who are assembling as their full-time job and don't think twice about it.
For USM, when I went to the warehouse, it was really cool to see where it all happens. They don't fabricate there, but they assemble everything there. It’s where everything in the US gets shipped out from. I'm very process driven, so I kind of geek out when I get to see the behind-the-scenes, you know?
What was it like working with a company as well-known as USM, considering that your practice has mostly been a solo act thus far?
USM was really awesome to work with. Everyone was asking me how they approached me. I was like, "Honestly, I just walked into the store." I'm from Chicago, so when I was in NYC, I asked my friend whether there was a USM store nearby and it was right there. I went in, started talking with them, and making art came up, and had a thought that I could work with them if I played my cards right. I showed them the RIMOWA piece that I did with MOBA for Art Basel a couple of years ago and then the seatbelt chair, and I was like, "I would really love to work with you guys one day. That'd be sick." Little did I know that the NYC showroom runs the whole country.
It kind of just jumped off from there, which was surreal because USM isn't cheap. It was crazy engraving on USM panels. Getting materials from the actual source has always been a dream. I got that with RIMOWA, which was great. It's the same feeling of, "Wow, this is completely unfabricated, raw materials that I get to do whatever I want with it." But with USM, it's crazy because it's modular furniture, so the options are limitless. There's no end to what you could do with it. It was like working with a blank page. I worked very closely on the team strategizing not only on design but on what sells the best. I learned a lot about sales strategizing, which I’ll definitely use in future projects, because a lot of it is retail, not just for the artwork. People are considering whether they want to buy this and keep it forever potentially.
I was working on this project for close to a year. I worked on all the leatherwork throughout. They even gave me a perforated trash can, saying "You could probably do something cool with this. Here you go."
I was going to ask about that one.
I decided to weave it with leather, which took me three days to do. My hands were really raw. They were dry and bleeding by the end, but it came out cool.
You made everything by hand, right?
Yeah, except for the bigger furniture, like the credenza. I just designed those and came up with the colorways. The vests, the trashcan, the magazine holder, all of those were tied into this idea of repurposing products that they either just had in the showroom or don't sell that much.
There are 16 vests, and I handmade all of those. That was an experience, making all those vests and how limited they were. And sourcing the fabric. I'm picky as hell with everything I use, so it had to be exactly what I envisioned. Conceptually, the whole wearable tie-in was that in fashion houses, they wear white lab coats, so I made these vests like, "This is what they would wear if USM was a wearable fashion brand." That was the idea, and then matching the vests to the units I designed.
What was it like coming up with the colorways for all the pieces, especially those that will be used as furniture?
Again, I worked really closely with the team. I'm always thinking of the people, what would people actually want in their house, and even what is something I would personally have in my house. I couldn’t pick a color so I picked five colors. I thought about what it's like seeing a car with a different colored door and knowing that person found that door in the junkyard.
I also wanted it to be subtle, having muted areas with pops of color. Having one drawer be yellow and then the rest tan and white. A huge yellow credenza would dominate a space and delegate the rest of the layout, that’s not what I’m trying to do. Visually, if you can reach a good balance, then you're good; you are in a safe zone. That unit you bought is different enough, but it doesn’t clash, it just pops.
Could you tell me a bit about the centerpiece I Can See My House From Here? How did that come about?
That was one of my original ideas when we first started rendering. Again I had to unlearn this idea of frugality working with USM. Usually, when I make art, everything is coming out of my pocket, so I’m always trying to be as economical as possible. USM just let me go wild. Originally, I Can See My House From Here was going to be triple the size. I wanted it to be a call back to Chicago because I live there. After conceptualizing this wearable aspect, I steered clear of going so big but still wanted people to know I was from Chicago. Mimicking the Sears Tower silhouette can very easily be corny and tacky. If you do it right, like when Virgil did his crazy skyline vest, that was sick. That was a big inspiration. I was like, "All right, Virgil did it maximalist. That was dope, and it looked cool as shit." I was like, "All right. How can I do it? Have the same effect, but—
Minimalist.
Yeah, exactly. That was a fun piece to make. I didn't know if it was going to happen because they've never built a piece like that in terms of the lighting, but we tried it, did some test runs, and it worked perfectly. I was like, "Sick, dude. This thing is fucking awesome. It's going to look so cool." The name came from what it’s like to be in the Sears Tower high up, mapping out where you are — where your house is, and where your friends live. You know what I mean? And then double entendre, I guess, of having this Chicago-inspired piece in New York as a piece of home. I'm like, "Oh, I'm in New York. I can see my house from here. I'm leaving a piece that's Chicago-inspired in New York, a city I love and visit all the time."
There are also those furniture pieces with the potted panel. How did those come about?
So USM has that as an option. It’s a custom USM pot made to fit into that panel. I kind of unintentionally always incorporate plants in my work if I can. This idea of my work actually living. I made a bootleg Louis Vuitton vase once, and I was like, "This is cool in terms of function, what it's made out of, and that it's something that has a life of its own because it's a vase.” You're always buying new flowers for that specific vase. Again, the life aspect of it is really interesting to me. That piece is called Take Off Your Shoes and Water Your Plant.
My idea was to have it as the entryway bench where you sit down and take your shoes off or put them on, whatever, because you do that most days, and it would prompt you to water your plant because it's right there. That was a fun piece to be able to incorporate something that I've already been adding in pretty organically, so it was dope. That's my favorite one.
What was it like working with both mobile and stationary bases?
A few of the pieces in the show were inspired by some vintage designs that I personally use. The wheeled shelving cart that I did was based on a trolley by Joe Colombo that I have at my studio. The one I made is called When I Move, You Move because I literally drag the trolley I have at my studio around when I'm painting on a canvas or have my tools on it. It’s behind me the whole time. I wanted it to be extremely functional, with this idea of mobility and maximizing its functionality and using it as a tool more than anything. Almost like it’s alive and working with you.
What was the opening like last night?
I mean, it was a lot of work, but it was great. I got in on Wednesday morning, came straight to USM, and didn't leave till 9:30 p.m. I was here from 12:00 to 9:30 p.m. I was in the basement where I'm right now and still sewing the vests at 9:30 at night, the day before the show. It wasn't stressful because I knew I was going to get it done, but I had to make some alterations to all of them. It was definitely down to the wire in the best way possible where I was like, "All right, cool. We're going to get everything done right on time."
The opening was fantastic. I got to meet many Instagram friends and people I'm a fan of — designers, creatives, and people I didn't know followed my work. It was cool interacting with everyone, meeting people, and just seeing people interact with what I made. I spend so much time with what I make that I get so used to it. When people are like, "Oh, you hand engraved this?" I'm like, "Yeah." A lot of people think I have things made, especially with garments. I'm like, "No, I made everything, literally everything. I was very close to everything that everyone saw. The turnout was fantastic. I was really, really grateful all the way around, just the opportunity, the city, not being from New York, and having the crowd that came out, it was awesome.
Do you have any projects coming up this year that you can tell us about?
I have some stuff happening back home but nothing that's as work-intensive as this. I'm going to be doing some collabs with some friends on garment pieces. A friend of mine in Chicago runs this thing called Print Object. Her name's Anna. She's giving me this opportunity to make whatever I want, pretty much, and then have it available to sell online, which I usually don't do. Not intentionally; I just have to figure out how to make a web store, really. I'm excited I've also always wanted to do this conceptual sculptural base type thing. It's just some one-off things, but yeah, nothing too crazy. I'm probably going to take the month off.
Yeah, I mean, after this, you should.
Yeah, I definitely need to chill out for a second.
