Newest/Department
One of the turning points in Ron Gilad’s career came late on a Sunday evening in January 2008, one of the coldest nights of the year. That’s when the designer, along with nearly 200 other artistically minded tenants, was evicted from his live/work loft building in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn — the result, the New York Fire Department claimed, of an illegal matzo operation being run out of the basement by the building’s landlord. No matter that the Tel Aviv–born designer was out of the country at the time. “I extended my trip a week, but then I came back to nowhere. For three and a half months, I was homeless. And that’s when I started really playing with the idea of spaces and homes, and what, for me, a home really is.”
When Dutch artist Eylem Aladogan took her first trip out West in 2006 — three months of driving alone through the Nevada, Utah, and Arizona desert — there was plenty to be afraid of: the wide-openness of the landscape, the sensation of smallness and isolation, the possibility that the only hotel for miles around would be fully booked for the night. “These feelings of restriction at the same time you’re constantly going, driving forward, really inspired me,” says the 34-year-old, who’s based in Amsterdam. “There’s so much energy when you feel that every day.” Enough, it would turn out, to fuel her art for the next four years, as she worked out a way to visually harness those opposing forces of anxiety and empowerment.
“We’re in mid-drip,” says Gregory Nangle by way of introduction when we arrive at his Philadelphia glass studio and foundry on a chilly Thursday. “Watch out, this piece of glass might blow up a little.” Nangle and his assistants were hard at work on one of his own sculptures, a totem of found hardware cast in bronze and dripping with glass, the likes of which show in spaces like Philly’s prestigious Wexler Gallery. But on any other given day, the studio’s attentions could be focused on a commission for Anthropologie (the sculpted glass-and-metal register displays for the store’s Regent Street flagship), Robert DeNiro (the Art Deco lenses that adorn the exterior of the actor’s Greenwich Hotel), or Animal Collective, the New York hipster band who earlier this year projected lasers through Nangle’s spiky glass stalagmites as part of a performative sound installation in the Guggenheim rotunda.
When he was an art student in the ’80s — in Kassel first, and then Berlin — Markus Linnenbrink worked primarily with grays and blacks. “I had no idea what to do with color,” he admits. “And honestly, I was a little afraid of it.” Which is ironic, considering that for more than a decade, the German-born, Brooklyn-based artist has built a body of work that centers around thick streaks of color — painted in stripes on gallery walls, poured in puddles on the floors of art-fair booths and installations, and dripped in lines down the face of his canvases. “Somehow a field trip to Italy where we spent three weeks painting outside got me into the idea of color, but I had a long period where I would mix, like, red and green. I feel like I had to walk through a lot of dirt and mud to get to the brightness.”
In their most famous works, Fernando and Humberto Campana construct by a process of accumulation, looping yards of sail rope around seat frames or folding velvet tubing in on itself to create amoeba-like sofas. So it’s fitting that visitors to the brothers’ São Paulo studio should find behind its unremarkable metal grate rooms and shelves stacked high with stuff — weird material experiments by the studio’s half-dozen in-house artisans, miniature models and prototypes, artifacts the brothers picked up on their travels, miles of scrap, and dozens and dozens of sketches. In some ways, it all seems an extension of São Paulo itself, a city of 20 million that in the last century has sprawled so far and wide it’s annexed, at last count, five different downtown areas.
For Brazilian artist Antonio Bokel, arriving at the Sid Lee creative offices in Amsterdam this May — where he was about to spend two weeks doing on-site prep for an in-house exhibition — was like a dream come true. For starters, the city’s garbagemen had just gone on strike, leaving mountains of detritus for him to incorporate into his Twombly-esque compositions. And then there was the location itself, arranged for him by local curator and writer Alexandra Onderwater: Having gone to school for graphic design, Bokel has spent nearly a decade using the visual tools of advertising and propaganda against themselves, Shepard Fairey-style, and here he was setting up shop in the back of a marketing agency. The juxtaposition “was a big influence on the show,” he says of his final installation, layered with spray paint, found objects, and words bleeding onto the walls.
In the mid-’90s, Matthew Waldman had one of those jobs that sitcoms often devote 22 minutes to making fun of. “My background is in corporate identity development,” he recounts over lunch at his studio one day. “I used to do those big fact-finding whiteboard meetings in conference rooms — you’re at a cocktail party, let’s make believe, let’s do some role playing, now tell me what you do. Or, imagine your product, and give me the first three adjectives that come to mind.” He thinks for a minute. “It was actually really successful. I should probably write a book.” Or, we suggest, you should found a watch-design company, wear your influences on your sleeve, and thus remain instantly-recognizable in a saturated market despite expanding into wallets, belts, a fragrance, and a certain forthcoming fashion accessory that’s top secret for now.
It takes the Zürich-based fashion duo Ikou Tschüss a full week to hand-knit the blankets from their winter collection — each ringed with dangling sleeves to appear as though it’s hugging the bed — and maybe a day to knit one of their bulky sweater dresses. Even silk shifts are hand-printed and edged with rows of crochet, the pair’s signature trope. Add to all that labor the fact that Carmen D’Apollonio spends the majority of her time in New York, where she’s been the right-hand-woman to Swiss artist Urs Fischer for the past eight years, and it’s a good thing she and partner Guya Marini have help. “Most of our knitting is done by Swiss grandmothers now,” says Marini.
For a studio that crafts objects evocative of summer-camp bliss, Fredericks & Mae have an awfully dark creation story. For the last eight months, Gabriel Fredericks Cohen and Jolie Mae Signorile have been hard at work fletching, painting, and spinning bright polyester thread around their custom-made arrows, which sell for $95 apiece at boutiques like Maryam Nassir Zadeh and Partners & Spade. But when they met senior year at Oberlin, says Signorile, “Gabe was really into the apocalypse and I was obsessed with nostalgia. When we got into it, we realized they were kind of about the same thing: a fear of the future.”
It’s easy to imagine the backstory of a Prada print: Miuccia has a concept for the season, and either a high-end Italian fabric vendor or her own design team supplies prints just for her. But consider a patterned polyester work shirt from Kmart, and you’d never guess that a RISD textile-design grad like Amy Voloshin might be behind it, translating those runway looks into something that appeals to mainstream Americans. It’s an art unto itself: “I have a list of things I roll through in my head when I design for those clients: Is the print pretty? Is it scary, thorny, or edgy? If it is, it’s not going to work.”
Between the two of them, Julie Ho and Nicholas Andersen had designed clothing, jewelry, movie sets, music videos, and Martha Stewart shoots, plus dabbled in painting, drawing, pattern-making, sewing, and crocheting before teaming up creatively in 2008. Ho had even been a studio assistant for Tom Sachs, making foam Hello Kittys with a medical scalpel (and slicing open her hands almost weekly in the process). So it took a particular kind of alchemy for the pair to decide that — out of all their talents and interests — they would devote their days to making paper party decorations, the kind you’d expect to find in a dollar store.
The story of Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings began, like many Dutch stories do, in a church. In the late ’90s, Baijings was working for an agency whose headquarters were located inside one of the country’s many abandoned houses of worship. Scholten, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, had a burgeoning design practice nearby. Scholten was asked to design a small bar for the agency’s office, and “the rest is history,” says Baijings.
Lineaus Hooper Lorette makes $650 leather medicine balls in a workshop just outside the desert art mecca of Marfa, Texas. He sells the balls to college athletic departments and “very rich men,” many of whom admire them for their old-school charm. (Mick Jagger once bought four.) But Lorette isn’t a hipster, nor is he an artist.
Ah, the impotence of the urban dweller. Ever since the Best Made Company axe debuted this spring, you’d be hard-pressed to find a New Yorker who isn’t dying to snap open that wooden case and heave the Tennessee hickory–handled thing at… well, what, exactly? “At first I thought a lot of New Yorkers would buy them,” says Peter Buchanan-Smith, the New York–based graphic designer who founded the company along with his childhood pal Graeme Cameron. But it turns out the best audience for an axe — even one with a handle saturated in gorgeous shades of spray paint — is a person who actually might use an axe.
When most of us get a package in the mail, it’s the book we ordered from Amazon, or a birthday gift from our parents. When Bec Brittain gets a package, it’s usually full of dead bugs. She orders them in bulk off the internet for a dollar a pop, then chops them into pieces and transforms them into hybrid bug-monsters.
“I’m a professional provocateur,” Sissel Tolaas says between sniffles, her Norwegian accent blunted by one of the colds the artist and world-renowned scent expert often gets after maxxing out her mucous membranes. Visit her at-home laboratory in Berlin, where she concocts conceptual fragrance studies for museums and for megabrands like Coty, and the provocations begin almost immediately.