Lesser Miracle’s Debut Solo Show is Fantastical and Deeply Felt

For some, a global pandemic was just the intervention they needed to change course or to finally give a latent vocation the opportunity to blossom. For Brooklyn-based art producer and sculptor-turned–furniture designer Vince Patti, a pandemic-enforced interlude of “being underemployed with a lot of time with my hands” — coupled with a newfound interest in the home environment — led him to escape more frequently to his Bed-Stuy studio. There, he began making side tables, dining tables, benches, and platform beds — and eventually hooked up with Mischa Langley, Patti’s now partner in furniture and life. Together, they formed the design practice Lesser Miracle, whose debut solo show at David Lewis’ home-cum-gallery in Chelsea is where we met for this interview on a sunny Sunday afternoon in May.

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06.10.21

Q+A

Dirk van der Kooij On Creating a Truly Circular Design Process — And On Using Your Old Nirvana CDs to Make Furniture

To ensure true circularity, Van der Kooij and his team of carpenters, welders, colorists, and finishers make use of proprietary technology including house-developed presses, robots, and extruders to transform waste materials such as discarded CDs, leather sofas, kitchen appliances, chocolate molds, and diseased wood into singular pieces made to stand the test of time and trends.

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04.05.21

Q+A

Peter Gudrunas Has Been Blowing Glass Since the 1970s. Now His Daughter is Helping to Bring Their Practice Into the 21st Century.

The 2008 financial crisis wiped out the majority of Gudrunas’ clients, and in the following years the interest in buying fine crafts sputtered. It wasn’t until 2014 that the business was revived, when his youngest daughter, artist and filmmaker Iris Fraser-Gudrunas, stepped in to manage, eventually developing a vision for how Sirius Glassworks could evolve.

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03.01.21

Q+A

James Shaw On Why He Hopes His Design Practice Will One Day Eat Itself

“Daffodils are great,” says British designer James Shaw when I point out the bright yellow bunch sitting behind him in his southeast London workshop during our Zoom call. “They always start off really unpromising as those little green buds, and then they get better and better and they last for ages.” It’s an apt metaphor for Shaw’s own work, which often begins as discarded post-consumer plastic that he turns into slightly trippy organic forms reminiscent of crude cake frosting, created with his self-built plastic extruding gun and sculpted into quotidian objects from toilet paper holders to bowls, candelabras, and chairs.

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11.05.20

Q+A

In Bower’s New Perception-Bending Collection, Mirrors and Materials Appear to Melt Uncannily

To mark the release of their largest-ever collection of furniture and mirrors — whose wood, marble, and upholstered surfaces appear to melt over their frames — the New York studio Bower collaborated with 3-D renderer Alexis Christodolou on a series of images that capture the pieces in an escapist indoor/outdoor fantasy world. We caught up with the trio about that project and more.

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10.13.20

Q+A

James Evans’s Photorealistic Paintings Are a Meditation on Impermanence

The suffocated images of artist James Evans’ “Constraint Equation” series are a photorealistic depiction of what appears to be houseplants wrapped up in sheets of humid plastic that obscure and abstract them. Created during a period in quarantine, they are a fitting expression of the limitations and discomfort most of us have experienced this year. Evans, who grew up in Colorado and now splits his time between New York and Mexico City, is a prodigious new force in the art world.

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10.05.20

Q+A

The Fantastical Fungi (And Other Subjects) of Phyllis Ma’s Supernatural Still Lifes

Photographer and animator Phyllis Ma’s work is centered around what she calls “special nothings:” ordinary objects that, in the right context, can appear “magical, surreal, or even uncanny.” Fuzzy flowers nuzzling each other, a block of aspic the exact dimensions of an iPhone, a phallic gherkin covered in warty bumps — all resplendent in hyper-stylized settings and hyper-saturated hues. Recently, Ma — who was born in China and immigrated to Brooklyn when she was eight — turned her lens on the mushroom kingdom.

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