“The item on the right is actually a scanned sugar cube, which I made when I was messing around with all these magnified small things, like the firefly,” Allen says. “I was going to turn it into a sugar container, but it didn’t have an iconic quality because people wouldn’t know it was a sugar cube — it looks like a piece of styrofoam. But it’s funny because Alessi has since done something very similar by Marti Guixé.”