
06.05.25
Excerpt: Exhibition
This Bower x Emily Mullin Showcase Was the Unexpectedly Tough — and Perfect — Exhibition New York Design Week Needed
Here is a list of things I do not particularly like: surfaces designed to look as if they were tattooed, ceramics bound by chains or ropes, almost anything with spikes. Part of the reason I don't like these things is that, as a child of the '90s, they often feel a little poser-y to me — like the designer thought that by using the signifiers of toughness that they could take a shortcut to actually being that thing. But you know what I do like? When designers use materials or processes that are often associated with something hard or edgy in an unexpected or weird or superfluous way. This includes Bower's new Woven collection of mirrors — which weave thin strips of leather through a grid of mirror-polished stainless steel, a kind of Anni Albers for the post-punk era — and Emily Mullin's raku-fired ceramics, which get their signature look from combusting in a blaze of smoke and straw.