A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from Mexico Art Week, an unsung Dadaist ceramicist on view at Volume Gallery, and a side table stitched with freshwater pearls that we’re seriously coveting. 

Discoveries

Last month, we named Brooklyn-based Jenna Graziano to our American Design Hot List, and she’s already proving how well the designation was deserved. Her latest launch is a pleated steel side table stitched with freshwater pearl embroidery. The nude mesh tulle shown at the top is merely a prop for the photoshoot, but in my opinion, it’s also low-key the best way to style the piece. PHOTOS BY HAWA ALNAJJAR

The Melbourne-based designer Curtis Bloxsidge recently submitted his debut collection, and it’s a stunner. Bloxsidge makes sculptural, richly hued wooden furniture from jarrah, a mahogany timber native to the southwest corner of Australia, and sheathes all or parts of them in a loosely woven, natural cotton bouclé knit, contributed by his partner Taylor Brooks of 2AM Close. “The work is a reflection of my past histories of time spent in Asia, my birth area, and work history within cabinet making and theatre set construction. I wanted to create intimate characters for the home that carry their own space and mood whilst adding the organic knit element to prompt associations of life forms such as land surfaces, DNA, and mycelium,” the designer says.

Casa Shop continues its streak of perfectly executed in-house designs with their new Stone Cutlery Set and Cutlery Rests. Each piece is made from one of three natural stones — spotted leopardite, pink rhodonite, or black onyx, although the rests are also available in a multi set that includes onyx and blue dumortierite — while the cutlery is capped by silver-plated brass. You can get poppy with pink handles and a blue rest, or sleek with an all black set.

Exhibitions

Brett Miller of Jackrabbit Studio recently opened a solo show at Gallery 495 in Catskill, New York, called Please Touch. The name is a nod to Miller’s rule-breaking nature and the questions that haunt him: “Why does a table have to be rectangular, square, or even circular? Why does a chair need four legs? But before we ask ever why, we touch — to know, to understand, to feel.” Our favorite piece on view is this pierced wiggle of butternut wood which you could use as a valet, but we prefer as a standalone sculpture.

The Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Karina Sharif has a solo show on view at Lyle Gallery until March 2. Called Elsewhere, the show draws on Sharif’s singular experience recovering from brain surgery after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. “During this time, Sharif experienced a recurring vision—a dark, moss-covered landscape illuminated by the beam of a single headlamp, where she felt the protective presence of her ancestors. The images from this vision became the foundation for Elsewhere and shaped its immersive design.” The work shown in these images also pays homage to “Black women, femmes, and nonbinary individuals as divine beings,” with a recurring petal motif inspired by the natural coils of Black hair. “Once stigmatized, these elements are reimagined in Sharif’s work as symbols of beauty and pride; portals to inner reflection, connection, and vastness.”

I had never heard of Howard Kottler before my friend, Meaghan Roddy — now the West Coast Director of Volume Gallery in Chicago — started talking on Instagram about a show she’s curated for Volume called This is Not a Plate. Kottler was a Cranbrook grad who, after studying in Finland at the Arabia ceramic factory on a Fulbright, began to dabble in readymades and photocollage, becoming something of a counterculture figure in the world of ceramics. Collaging commercially available decals — of often clichéd imagery, like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper — onto mass-produced blanks, Kottler created a kind of Dadaist tableware that seems a precursor to Fornasetti or even Hella Jongerius’s work for Nymphenburg. Kottler’s work asks if images that have proliferated for centuries can be seen anew, often drawing attention to the underlying queerness of certain visuals. (Raise your hand if you never knew the Mona Lisa was speculated to be a Renaissance man in drag.) The face of Abraham Lincoln is also a recurring motif, which may have been an allusion to historians’ questions about Lincoln’s relationships with men and, as such, is also a delightful through line to “Oh, Mary!” (Something we also didn’t have on our proverbial bingo card this year.) On view through February 25.

Eny Lee Parker’s new collab with cc-tapis was presented this week at Mexico Art Week in a site-specific installation at the historic Casa-Estudio Max Cetto. For her designs, Parker first created three-dimensional forms in clay, using typical sculpting processes such as rolling and pressing, and then captured the shapes and textures using a scanner. Artisans in Nepal have translated these scans into a trio of Himalayan wool rugs, rendered in a neutral palette reminiscent of unpigmented ceramic. The presentation was curated and hosted by Studio 84 and also featured pieces from the Flos Archive and contemporary furniture by Unno Gallery.

Also for Mexico Art Week, MASA gallery teamed up with Luhring Augustine for a collaborative exhibition featuring three artist pairings — Pipilotti Rist and Alma Allen; Eva LeWitt and Hector Esrawe; and Diego Singh and Renata Petersen. Allen’s bronze works and LeWitt’s colorful aluminum and mesh ones are probably our favorites here, but the whole installation in Masa’s historical home is worth seeing if you’re in Mexico City before March 29!