RO/LU

Minneapolis, ro-lu.com
After laying low for a while, landscape designers and furniture darlings Mike Brady and Matt Olson opened three simultaneous exhibitions across the country this fall.

What is American design to you, and what excites you about it?
We get asked this. It can be an interesting question, but I don’t have an answer. I don’t consider myself an American designer. For me it feels like place is where my attention is, and that’s usually the Internet (or nature.) What excites me about the Internet is other people’s work and ideas and the proximity to it.

What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?
We try not to make plans so that we can follow the flashes that happen forward. We just closed three exhibits: Surfaces On Which Your Setting And Sitting Will Be Uncertain with matching clothing by Various Projects at Patrick Parrish Gallery (9/4-10/4), In Waves with composer Alexis Georgopoulos and filmmaker Paul Clipson at Jack Hanley Gallery (9/7-10/5), and Future Tropes at Volume Gallery (9/5-10/5) in Chicago and Design Miami. We are going to do a project at the Los Angeles Book Fair. We have several collabs happening. We are working on three books. Next spring we will be staging a performance piece we’ve been working on for a few years at multiple locations in NYC.

What inspires your work in general?
So hard to not say everything. I mean, what would anything be without everything else? But, here goes: Knowledge and non-knowledge. Humility and trust. Mistakes and misunderstandings. Waves and reflections. Questions and water. Listening to someone read aloud the same thing I’m reading from a page. Changing my mind over and over.
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