Partners in both life and work, Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza share a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where they run an art practice together as well as a design company called Chiaozza. Yet the first two things they ever collaborated on belonged to neither of those disciplines: One was a stew they made for dinner soon after they began dating — which took so long to cook that joking about it inspired their eventual website name, eternitystew.com — and the other was the pancakes they made the next morning. “We were fascinated by their topography, so we took some printmaking ink, inked up a pancake, and started making monoprints with them,” Frezza recalls. “That was when it began, this idea of turning our everyday life and domestic play into some kind of product or work.” Two and a half years later, it’s still the motivation underlying many of their colorful projects, which they characterize as existing at the “intersection of imagination and the natural world.”
Their ongoing series of papier-maché plant forms, for example, began when Chiao, trained as an architect (Frezza studied fine art and sculpture), was constructing a foam model of a treehouse one night and wanted to populate it with miniature foliage. “When Adam came home, I had a feeling that he would know exactly what to do,” she says. “I didn’t even have to say anything. He got out pieces of paper and starting painting them, and then we stayed up all night making these tiny little plants and photographing them.” The results fueled not only a residency at the Wave Hill botanical garden in the Bronx — where the couple rebuilt the treehouse and its imaginary vegetation at full-scale — but also a forthcoming video animation project, as well as the collection of faux houseplants the pair will make available for sale for the first time ever at this weekend’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE show. Their rainbow rock cairn sculptures and Chiaozza wall mirrors in endless geometric iterations share an equal sense of whimsy and experimentation.
To be sure, though, the couple’s process isn’t just play for play’s sake; they both went to great lengths to commit their lives as fully as possible to their creative endeavors. A large part of why they formed Chiaozza and Eternity Stew in the first place, says Chiao, is because “both of us were frustrated with our respective disciplines.” Chiao in particular — she went to architecture school at Columbia and worked for OMA and 2×4 before she decided to follow her instinct of exploring environments from a more art-based standpoint. Frezza, on the other hand, pursued painting and drawing for years before giving in to a natural drift towards three dimensions, and building things with his hands. They met somewhere in the middle, sharing their individual practices with each other because they figured, says Frezza, “this is going to be way more fun if we do it together.”
Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao in the studio they share in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which happens to be just a few blocks from the home they share as well. The couple met in the summer of 2011 and began collaborating professionally less than six months later, after cooking together led them to realize how much they both loved integrating creative experimentation into their everyday lives. “We have a lot of ideas, but we only end up developing the ones that are able to carry our ideas forward in a way where we still feel like we’re playing,” says Chiao.
Many of the projects they now work together on, like the papier-mache plants and multicolored rock cairns shown here, began in one of their individual practices. Chiao, who studied architecture, comes from an interest in spatial environments, modes of living, and the unexpected ways that nature and plant life can factor into that equation. Frezza comes from a fine art background, but realized a few years ago that “all of my paintings seemed to want to become sculptures,” he says. “So they would have little shelves on them for objects, and lots of lump forms.”
Their very first joint endeavor was these unusually shaped papier-mache plants, which they adorn with matte acrylic paint and which mingle all across their windowsills with the real thing. We asked almost immediately if they were inspired by children’s books. “One of my favorite scenes that stuck with me is in Where the Wild Things Are, when the bedroom turns into the forest,” says Chiao. “That’s the absolute most beautiful page, and in a way I think it has influenced a lot of things. I think the forms also just come from us making what we hope to see in nature.”
Chiao and Frezza — both longtime houseplant junkies — especially love how the act of making the faux plants is a kind of metaphor for growing real ones. “You start with the base, a root system for it to stand,” says Chiao. “Then you have to build a skeleton or armature for things to go on. You have meat that fills it in. You have a surface coat.” Adds Frezza: “You start to feel like a gardener. So sculpture as gardener I guess is one of the big attractions to continuing that process.”
Frezza holding up the object that started it all: the architectural model of a treehouse that Chiao was making for a website called Paralellograms when — in need of miniature foliage to populate it — she first asked Frezza to join her. The pair eventually built Chiao’s model full-scale, in a project space at the Wave Hill botanical garden. “The idea is that it’s a house that’s made for plants, but you get to live with them,” she explains. “I think it starts to talk about the ways people can adapt to their environment, but also the ways you can make environments that allow for a different way to live.”
“Because there are those intentions there,” she adds, “I consider this to be artwork in a way. The line between building and art-making, I’m starting to not see that line as a hard thing. I don’t think I ever have, really.”
While the first paper plants they made were tiny (for the model), and the second set were huge (for Wave Hill), the third iteration of the project consists mainly of medium-sized specimens like this one, which are more object-like.
The pair have never made them available for sale, but will do so this weekend at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, where they’ve set up a pop-up plant shop.
Meanwhile, they’ve gone back to experimenting at the miniature scale, but in a different context — pictured still in progress is one of their new “paper forests,” which are built on lazy Susans. “We were interested in turning these into subtle animations where you could spin your way through a forest environment,” says Chiao, noting that the pair are taking classes in animation at the Brooklyn arts space BRIC. “We’ve been working with the software used for online product photography where you spin a shoe around 360 degrees.”
A close-up of one of the paper forests, featuring the couple’s characteristically bold colors and patterns. “Even though the colors seem unnatural, they stem from nature somewhere,” says Chiao. “We’ve spent a lot of time in the Wave Hill succulent greenhouse just taking pictures and observing the plants.”
These rock cairns were originally made by Adam from real sticks and stones, but evolved through a commission — to make a series of tropies for the arts organization Fractured Atlas — into a parallel project to the fake plants. “We started to cast the rocks,” says Chiao.
Frezza elaborates: “We took a stone, covered it in household silicone caulk, and then covered that caulk with this plaster shell. Then we took the rock out and filled the mold with Rockite, which is a powder that you mix with water that it becomes as hard as an actual rock.”
At some point in the process they realized they were “going through a lot of energy just to recreate what a rock is,” Frezza says. “Because Rockite is basically powdered rock that you form into cement. It’s the same with the paper plants — these things that are made from real trees, and we’re going through this huge process just to recreate one.”
In addition to the art the couple makes, they also run a small design company together; called Chiaozza. It revolves around wall shelves inspired by an old Danish folk object, an example of which Chiao found while traveling in Copenhagen. “I think it was for sailors,” says Frezza. “It’s triangular and hangs on one nail, so it goes with the rhythm of the boat and things don’t fall off the shelf. It’s like 1970’s kitsch.” Chiaozza’s version comes in dozens of shapes with different colored painted edges.
“We like to shop for art supplies at Artist & Craftsman off the Graham Ave L train stop. At the check out counter is an impulse-buy kiosk of rubber animals. We’re committed to purchasing one every time we go there. A friend of ours who works there admitted to us that those rubber animals are their best-seller. We’re such suckers. It’s fun!”
A studio experiment related to the mirrors is this “forever in-progress” medicine cabinet, whose stripes actually glow in the dark. “It has become a sort of studio pet, always getting shifted around but never really going anywhere,” says Chiao.
“Things pile up and collect themselves in curious ways in the studio,” says Chiao. “This particular collection of randomness is a kind of purgatory of objects, anomalies without a clear destination.”
Chiao and Frezza share the studio with three other artists. They’ve been in the space since they started working together two and a half years ago.
“Adam likes to chew gum,” says Chiao of this little montage. “Sometimes he sticks it to the edges of cups, or it ends up on the edge of the studio table. He started piling it up in one spot to keep it from getting everywhere.”
“We often have a lot of extra random wood pieces left over after building a project and we tend to keep them around for awhile,” she adds. “We also sometimes squeeze out a little too much paint for whatever it is we’re painting. Most of these blocks are an effort to save our scraps by painting them with our excessive use of paint. We have goals of turning this into a wood block project one day.”
The couple uses some of their larger wood scraps as painting palettes.
“Here’s an example of how some of our palettes evolve,” explains Chiao. “We save them all and have a large collection of them stored in a box. Every now and then we pull them out for inspiration. Often the palettes are better than anything we actually set forth to make.”
Another hidden gem made from scraps: This small business card holder we admired during our visit.
Whimsically painted sheets of paper that will eventually become paper plants.
“Adam has some ridiculous sunglasses,” says Chiao. “We also stage our wood for upcoming CHIAOZZA orders.”
The couple’s toolbox is relatively simple: paper, scissors, rocks, and paint for the plants and cairns, and woodworking implements for the shelves. “I think in general we work with pretty natural and accessible materials that we’re just as likely to find at the office supply shop or the hardware store,” says Chiao.
Also in the duo’s toolbox: rolls and rolls of various tapes. “We love tape. Especially colored gaffer’s tape. Masking tape is also an everyday tool of ours. Even brown packing tape is interesting to us. There can never be too much tape around.”
Chiao and Frezza’s home is just down the block from their studio, and it’s every bit as much of a design project for them as well. Pictured is the so-called “cabin nook,” they built inside it, “a private place where our guests hang out when we have them,” says Chiao. “The entire apartment gets a lot of nice daylight, so we populate as much of it with plants as we can. We also hang our friends’ artwork up in hopes that a traveler staying with us might want to take one home with them…”
The cabin’s bed. “It’s such a cozy place,” she says. “The blue-denim chair outside the Cabin was made by the local furniture studio Nightwood. The streamers are left over from a friend’s baby shower. We’ll probably leave them up until they fall down, or until another party calls for other kinds of streamers.”
A view of the stairs leading to the couple’s own bedroom, aptly named the Treehouse.
“Our cat Boo sitting on the table,” says Chiao. “The spotlight above him is generally on at night. We think it makes him feel like a star.”
See and buy Chiaozza’s papier-maché plants in their pop-up shop at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, taking place in New York City’s Soho neighborhood from May 16 to 20, 2014, at 200 Lafayette Street. The event is free and open to the public during the hours of 12PM to 7PM on Friday, and 11AM to 7PM Saturday through Tuesday. For more information, please visit offsite.sightunseen.com.
Portland is a place where, so the saying goes, the ’90s are alive and well. And it may very well be the only place that could have spawned an artist like Emily Counts, who deals with the self-reflective nostalgia of outdated technological innovations once found in her childhood home: dial-up telephones sculpted in porcelain and stoneware, a life-size fax machine, an interactive Mac SE computer made from walnut, casting epoxy, glass, porcelain, copper, and electrical wiring that acts as a two-way mirror after a button is pressed on the keyboard, lighting up the sculpture’s interior. “I’m interested in the mystery of these inventions that we seem to take for granted in our everyday life,” says the 35-year-old Seattle native, who we first spotted on photographer Carlie Armstrong’s blog Work.Place. “For me, there’s a thin line between technology and magic.”
It all started with the pistol, if only because it was “the simplest to do,” says photographer Adam Voorhes. He first studied the gun, looking for ways to segment it, then he took it apart so that its innards were exposed, right down to the bullet casings. “Some objects can be separated like a technical drawing, while others look more organic, like a football helmet with its straps weaving in and out,” he says. The pistol was squarely in the former camp. He took its disassembled parts and built a kind of 3-D installation, each part hanging from a fishing line in proximity, so that the gun would appear to have exploded in mid-air, a bit like the artist Damián Ortega’s axonometric Beetle or this iconic ad from the ’60s. The wires could be erased in Photoshop once Voorhes got the final shot. After the pistol he’d do an Etch-a-Sketch, and an old-school telephone, turning the studio experiments into his best-known series and then selling commercial clients like ESPN and Spirit magazine on the technique. This is how Voorhes works — he is a commercial photographer. He’s not interested in gallery shows. He tests ideas, and then he sells them.
It’s not every day that one of our subjects answers the phone by giddily announcing she’s just opened the mail to find the Legend soundtrack she ordered and proclaiming that 1985 Tom Cruise fantasy flick to be her favorite movie. But then San Francisco artist Sarah Applebaum has always tended to march to the beat of her own drum: Paying no mind when her work meanders back and forth between craft and art, she mostly uses dime-store materials like yarn, papier mâché, and felt. Unlike most crafters, she often turns those materials into three-dimensional symbols plucked from her subconscious.
