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On Paper: An Interview with Thomas Demand

Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK.

The Review has long been a fan of Thomas Demand’s work; our Spring 2015 issue featured a portfolio of his paper sculptures of cherry blossoms. His series The Dailies recreates quotidian objects and images: a coffee cup, a tray of cigarette butts. Only tiny flaws (pencil markings, tape) reveal them as constructions; otherwise his compositions are stripped of everything but their form. But paper isn’t just a blank canvas; it also carries meaning, even if these associations are subtle: it’s the medium of office workers, receipts, menus, greeting cards, origami, newspapers—and, of course, of The Paris Review. To accompany a selection of images from The Dailies, we talked to Demand about paper, literature, and the home.

INTERVIEWER

What does paper mean in your work?

THOMAS DEMAND

Paper is a formidable, malleable material that everyone touches on a daily basis. We all share this experience—we know its haptic and aesthetic possibilities more than perhaps anything else. We mostly use paper for temporary purposes—napkins, newspaper, coffee cups, the Amazon box, and so on. We make notes on it and throw it away, wrap our gifts in it and rip it to receive them. I find that important to consider, if I look at the more commonplace iconography in my work, like in The Dailies. I’m also interested in paper’s relations to information, model-making, and geometry.

INTERVIEWER

Paper has been disappearing from the real spaces you photograph for quite some time, being replaced by screens, stickers of QR codes, audio recordings. Do you have a sentimental attachment to paper?

DEMAND

I don’t think it has disappeared, actually—think of any sustainable recycled packaging effort, like Amazon’s. The production of paper has increased monumentally. But it might become a more valued material, which is good. People used to drink the worst piss called “coffee”—now it’s a drink prepared by baristas with butterflies in the milk topping. Am I sentimental about the old bitter filter coffee? No. Note, however, that that coffee was made through a paper filter, to be consumed in paper cups. As far as we know, the paper cup was first made by Chinese craftsmen around two thousand years ago. In all its forms, paper has accompanied our civilizations, enabling us not only to drink but to write, to remember. I don’t see this as a metaphorical value but as one which enables the production of other values.

INTERVIEWER

If The Dailies were the work of a particular writer, who would it be?

DEMAND

When it comes to The Dailies, I think of writers who don’t use an overarching narrative—Walter Benjamin, Alexander Kluge, Hans Blumenberg, Botho Strauss.

INTERVIEWER

What do your home and your workspace look like? Do you make frequent “Home Improvements”?

DEMAND

I need to wake up in an environment that is as empty as possible, and I like to live in a sparsely furnished place. I am not afraid of an empty room. I also try to part from things I haven’t needed nor missed for two or three years (apart from art, which mostly is from friends). However, I enjoy when the work spills over the tables I work from and the leftovers of my makings are scattered around the actual piece. But I need to return to a clean space to approach my next work. I hardly ever work on more than one project at once.

 

 

Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK.

 

Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK.

 

Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK.

 

Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK.

 

Thomas Demand is a German photographer and sculptor who lives in Los Angeles. His new, expanded edition of The Dailies is out now from MACK.

Kennedy Yanko’s Poetic Fusion of Metal and “Paint Skin”

Kennedy Yanko’s Poetic Fusion of Metal and “Paint Skin”

Brooklyn-based artist Kennedy Yanko uses salvaged metal and blanket-like “paint skins” to create incredible artworks that challenge the definition of painting and perfectly balance a range of oppositions. Her current exhibition Humming on Life presents 10 new artworks on view at Jeffery Deitch in New York through April 22nd.

Installation image with 3 works.

Kennedy Yanko’s “Humming on Life” at Jeffery Deitch, NYC, installation

Blue "paint skin" detail within "What we re-quire is / silence"

What we re-quire is / silence, 2023 (detail)

Metal feels weightless, refuse becomes beautiful, and paint breaks free from canvas. The “paint skins” in Yanko’s work are literally just paint – first created flat and then draped over, between, and within the crushed metal. The fabric-like folds and crushed-metal dents echo each other while both feel organically matched – as if the two elements have somehow grown together.

"Pink and green music" on wall

Pink and green music, 2023

detail of pink folds within "Pink and green music"

Pink and green music, 2023 (detail)

"Breath of the earth" sculpture

Breath of the earth, 2023

Detail of red folds within sculpture "Breath of the earth"

Breath of the earth, 2023 (detail)

These new 2023 works add a new layer to her process. On previous works, the color of the paint skins was inspired by an existing color on the found metal: perhaps a lime green from oxidized copper or a burgundy from a small patch of rust. But in these new works, Kennedy has introduced the act of painting onto the metal itself with more colors before pieces are fire-cut and additionally crushed. This process introduces more complex color interactions while maintaining a contrast of time and texture between the elements.

Sculpture "Imprint of three states" rests on the floor next to "A Persistence of memory"

Kennedy Yanko’s “Humming on Life” at Jeffery Deitch, NYC, installation

Detail of orange folds within "Imprint of three states"

Imprint of three states, 2023 (detail)

Besides the towering scale (some are over 7 feet wide or 8 feet tall), the play with gravity may be the most surprising element when viewing these in real life. Somehow the large metal chunks feel as if they’re levitating, even the sculptures on the floor feel like they’re about to lift off. Meanwhile the paint skins are fully engaged with gravity, finding their shape through their own weight and scaffolding of the metal. It all contributes a sense of wonder and curiosity.

"A persistence of memory" on the wall

A persistence of memory, 2023

Two works on the wall of Kennedy Yanko's "Humming on Life" at Jeffery Deitch

Kennedy Yanko’s “Humming on Life” at Jeffery Deitch, NYC, installation

Detail of orange folds of "Swelling to sound"

Swelling to sound, 2023 (detail)

Kennedy Yanko’s work is a beautiful dance of oppositions: a pairing of past and present, flexible and ridged, color and material, gravity and levitation.

If you want to hear Kennedy’s story in her own words and get a peak at her whole process in her studio, I highly recommend this 7-minute video segment from CBS Mornings. Then run to this current exhibition to be immersed in the magnetism of these works.

Two works from "Humming on Life" installation at Jeffery Deitch

Kennedy Yanko’s “Humming on Life” at Jeffery Deitch, NYC, installation

What: Kennedy Yanko: Humming on Life
Where: Jeffery Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, NYC
When: March 4 – April 22, 2023

Installation photographs by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Single artwork photographs by Martin Parsekian.
Detail photographs by author, David Behringer.

Leave what you can, take the rest: An Interview with Idra Novey

When I first came across Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, I was interested firstly by the title and, then, by the cover. There was something mysterious and inviting about the call to action paired with the pinks and blues of a sunset. Wandering into the novel, I took an immediate sense of comfort in the voices of our two protagonists, Leah and Jean. Both mothers, both artists, neither completely self-assured.

Take What You Need is a book about perspective. The narrative is shaped by the parallel lives of Jean—welder, artist, ex step-mother to Leah—and Leah—a wife and mother who has chosen to leave her past behind. Jean lives alone, erecting metal sculptures in her living room, battling the overt sense that her relationship with Leah refuses to ever be what it once was, and determined to reunite with her daughter. Jean seeks redemption in a relationship with the boy-next-door, a gangly kid named Elliot. Their neighborhood provides the landscape for the novel, weaving the overwhelming sense of displacement provoked by class and cultural conflict into the relationship between two women divided by a critical moment in the past. We begin our story in medias res: Jean has died and willed her sculptures to Leah who makes her skeptical journey homeward.

When reading Novey’s writing, you are likely to forget that what transpires on the page is not in fact transpiring in reality. I looked up occasionally to glimpse a hand-wrought sculpture by Jean and was met with the whiteness of my wall. Similarly, having recently become familiar with the Southern landscape myself, I could easily imagine the roads and the gas stations, the natural scenery that made me let out a long breath and the neighborhoods that could make me hold the next in tightly, wanting to call the least amount of attention to myself. Novey straddles the fine line between depicting the world we live in and finely illustrating her own.

Novey is the writer of six additional books, three of which are poetry collections including, Exit, Civilian, chosen for 2011 National Poetry Series. She is a recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s talk first about how much research went into this novel. It’s heavily laced with references to artists—specifically sculptors. How much of your personal knowledge were you bringing to the page versus how much research did you have to do, and what was that process like for you?

Idra Novey: I learned to weld boxes in order to get a lived sense of Jean’s choices as an artist. Over several years, I welded boxes with various metal artists, Julia Murray, Norm Ed, and also with Dan Denville at the Center for Metal Arts in Pennsylvania. I visited various scrap yards to get metal for the boxes, including the Novey scrap yard that has been passed down among the men in my maternal family for over a century. I have no material connection to the Novey century in recycling but I feel a strong connection artistically to my namesake, Ida Novey, who started the scrapyard in 1906.

Louise Bourgeois entered the novel after I found a beat-up book of her writing at Bull Creek, the flea market that Jean goes to in the novel. Bourgeois’s insights on sexuality and power, on her father, aligned potently with how I imagined Jean’s artistic drive. Bourgeois recognized the libidinal forces that compelled her to keep experimenting and taking new risks with her art. Agnes Martin’s writing aligned with Jean’s process in other aspects. Martin, like Jean, felt a strong need to retreat and work in complete solitude.

While writing Jean’s chapters, I immersed myself in the writing of Anne Truitt, Celia Paul, Hilma af Klint, and many other women artists, too. They were all repeatedly dismissed and written off, and yet somehow still found the conviction to keep taking their art seriously. One of the most deeply joyful and rewarding processes of my writing life has been figuring out how to convey Jean’s nerve, creating the scenes with her on the ladder, stacking her Manglements [sculptures] as high as the ceiling of her living room allowed.

Rumpus: There are two female protagonists presented in your novel. We meet Leah first. The stepdaughter/mother relationship is a very specific breed entirely its own and is often only understood by those engaged in it. We learn that Jean abandons Leah at ten-years-old. Why does Jean choose not to leave a note? Is the burden of abandonment what compels Jean to become so fixated by Elliot (her next-door neighbor turned pseudo-mentee)?

Novey: I agree the stepdaughter/mother relationship is a specific dynamic that people frequently misunderstand who haven’t experienced it. I’m close to both my stepmother and my mother and talk to them both often. I haven’t come across many novels about adult women relating to their stepmothers, and as so often happens, I ended up writing the scenes I longed to read and couldn’t find.

What happens to Jean when she leaves Leah’s father, the loss Jean has to assume of her role as Leah’s stepmother, is a loss I’ve seen a number of women consider, and take. Whether the stepdaughter/mother relationship will last is never certain, and in Leah’s case, at ten years old, she’s beholden to the good will of her father. I’d like to leave it up to readers to intuit why Jean doesn’t leave a note for Leah. Your insight is quite astute about Jean bringing some of her truncated experience of mothering to her relationship with Elliott, and yet she also brings to Elliott her truncated experience of marriage and sexual self. All that messy chemistry is there at once.

Rumpus: Jean is an artist through and through and driven by the compulsion she feels to weld with a freedom her father never allowed himself to have. How does Jean parse the freedom she finds in art with the ever-growing complexity of the world around her?

Novey: I think this is the driving question of the novel, how any of us make art given the ever-growing contradictions of the world around us, and also the complex past we inherit. The epigraph from Louise Bourgeois at the start of the novel addresses this question head on, and how art in itself can be a way to answer it, as it was for me, through the process of writing this novel: Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.

Rumpus: We get a sense of the current political fever within the first few pages of the book, however it’s evasive—Leah sees flags while driving through town, multiple people garbed in camo, a red hat on a woman’s head. Why did you choose to keep these things unnamed until the end of the book? The environment gives you the sense that this could be a town anywhere at any point in time: a town divided by those who are diverse and those who fight against diversity instead of for it.

Novey: In early drafts, I was ambivalent about how explicit to be about the slogans on the signs and flags. The deeper I got into the novel, though, the less necessary it seemed to name the slogans. I’m glad to hear it evoked to you a time of political polarization that transcended our particular moment. That was my hope and any reader living now will know what the signs and slogans say. Leaving the words unnamed added that timeless quality you described, and the novel is a fairy tale—as I suspect any novel attempting to dissolve even the smallest aspect of our current cultural divides, is a fairy tale.

Rumpus: Elliot is a character who got under my skin. He consistently demonstrates a quiet, but seething undertone: a man caught inside his own head, young only in age. I got infuriated with him a few times wanting him to do the right thing instead of being a passive bystander. Why did you make Elliot such a quiet character?

Novey: I heard Jennifer Egan speak once about attempting to take a new kind of risk with each work of fiction, and part of that risk-taking is creating a character who subverts stereotypes in a way she hasn’t written about before. With Elliott’s character, I wanted to subvert prevailing stereotypes about young rural men, who are often portrayed in reductive, demeaning caricatures. It isn’t in Elliott’s nature to be confrontational, and when he does finally speak up, he gets kicked in the face.

In all three of my novels, I’ve been drawn to write about power imbalances and how often people make choices based on the likelihood of retaliation. What causes people to resign themselves to inaction is a question that really fascinates me. Sevlick, the town in the novel, is an amalgam of various towns in the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia where I grew up, and where parts of my family have lived for over a hundred years. I’ve known many quiet young men like Elliott, who have limited options and who work in situations where they don’t have the luxury of being able to speak their minds.

Rumpus: Take What You Need—the title felt illuminated by the end of my first reading. I read it as a plea—take what you need, but leave the rest (an oft-repeated quote in twelve-step rooms)—but also a reminder that the world will take, leaving very little for those who need it most.

Novey: It’s wondrous to hear you read the title as a plea. Over many drafts, I came to think of it as a plea as well, although my original reason for choosing it was the biblical proverb about binging on honey: If you find honey, eat just what you need, lest you have too much and vomit it up. We are a species prone to indulgences. When we find honey, it’s hard to resist taking just what we need, even knowing the likelihood that a lack of self-control will leave us hunched over, hurling, and feeling ill. In the beginning of the novel, when Jean tells Elliott’s mother to draw as much water from the spigot as they need, they both know there will be implications to this offer. It is about far more than just water.

Rumpus: The sculptures that Jean erected in her living room shrouds the story that is told by the two women, interlaced by both Jean’s favorite artists’ quotes and the fairy tales Jean told Leah and that Leah now interprets as an adult. Are the sculptures extensions of Jean herself? Dreams coerced in metal, balanced between found objects, and haphazardly perfected?

Novey: Thank you, that is a beautiful way to describe Jean’s sculptures, and the allure of art for many people, to coerce their dreams into forms that can be experienced in waking life. When art lacks that haphazard pursuit you describe, it feels overdetermined, a cultural “project” rather than an artwork that involved moral risk and getting uneasy and uncertain, following all sorts of murky impulses that lead to failure and maybe, after various years, to something worth sharing with others.

Rumpus: Storytelling is an ancient art, sharing stories to recall those things—events, adventures, people—passed down throughout the ages. What is Leah’s fascination with turning her relationship with Jean into a fairy tale?

Novey: The allure of revisiting a fairy tale, the writer Helen Oyeyemi says, is to shift “time and location, and see what holds true, and why or why not.” I wanted to revisit all the depictions we’ve passed down about stepmothers, about Appalachia, about women artists and rural artists. What doesn’t hold true and why those depictions have endured were questions that took on new light when viewed through fairy tales.

Rumpus: Can all of the characters in your novel be assigned a character in folklore? How deep do the ancient roots run in the town of Sevlick?

Novey: Sevlick is an invented town and only exists in my imagination. It’s an amalgam of various Allegheny Mountain towns in the area where I grew up. The characters in the novel are composites of people I interviewed over many years. I listened to their voices every day before working on the novel to keep the vibrancy and singularity of each character present in each scene.

Rumpus: One of my favorite parts of your book was your ending. I don’t want to spoil it for any readers, so all I will say is that it presents the idea of “what could” in an alluring enough way to believe the truth of “what is.” How do we differentiate between the two in art? In building characters from the ground up and a book from the pages?

Novey: Belief is a shifting, fluid endeavor. I found it quite daunting to sit down each day and write about cultural divides and familial estrangement. It’s a painful subject and my sense of “what is” kept changing depending on which character’s perspective I was inhabiting. This novel challenged me in ways that felt different from the novels and books of poetry and translation that came before it. I couldn’t have written this novel without living through other books first. Until I reached the middle of my life, I wasn’t quite ready to listen—with a genuinely open mind—to artists in the region I left about what compelled them to stay.

 

 

 

***
Author photo by Jesse Ditmar

OBJECT Is an Umbrella for Anna Bera’s Utility Objects

OBJECT Is an Umbrella for Anna Bera’s Utility Objects

When creating the OBJECT collection, Polish artist and maker Anna Bera was searching. Searching for a place where an object suddenly appears without justification, but whose existence is indisputable. The series was on display during the 19th edition of Collect in London as part of the Collect Open exhibition, the international fair’s platform for pioneering, thought-provoking craft installations by individual artists.

At Collect Open, Bera debuted the latest addition to OBJECT: a 2.6-meter tall sculpture, hand-carved from sycamore wood with a mirror made of polished steel. Its design, like the rest of the collection’s utility objects – the form of which does not reveal the functionality – plays with form. OBJECT is full of sculptures that may perform the function of mirrors, but then again may not. You may view it as something else entirely. This curiosity of function doesn’t make the pieces any less legitimate, even if all they do is simply exist.

rudimentary wood object

mirror OBJECT CD N.2

rudimentary wood object

mirror OBJECT CD N.2

detail of rudimentary wood object

mirror OBJECT CD N.2, detail

man looking at a tall wood and mirror rudimentary object leaning against a wall

mirror OBJECT CD N.24

detail of wood and mirror rudimentary object leaning against a wall

mirror OBJECT CD N.24, detail

detail of wood and mirror rudimentary object leaning against a wall

mirror OBJECT CD N.24, detail

wood and mirror rudimentary object

mirror OBJECT CD N.16

wood and mirror rudimentary object with woman hanging on it

Anna Bera with mirror OBJECT CD N.16

detail of wood and mirror rudimentary object

mirror OBJECT CD N.16, detail

rudimentary wood object

mirror OBJECT CD N.29

rudimentary wood object

mirror OBJECT CD N.29

detail of rudimentary wood object

mirror OBJECT CD N.29, detail

wood and mirror rudimentary object

mirror OBJECT CD N.30

wood and mirror rudimentary object

mirror OBJECT CD N.30

oval-shaped rudimentary wood object

mirror OBJECT CD N.1

mirror OBJECT CD N.1, detail

collection of three rudimentary wood and mirror objects in a gallery space

collection OBJECT

To learn more about Object, visit craftscouncil.org.uk.

Photos by Emilia Oksentowicz.

The Doodle Collection Is Blind Contour Drawings Come to Life

The Doodle Collection Is Blind Contour Drawings Come to Life

It comes as no surprise that the chairs and table that make up the Doodle Collection are each one-of-a-kind. Designed by Leah Ring for her studio, Another Human, each piece of furniture resembles a blind contour drawing brought to life in three dimensions. Chaos, asymmetry, and an organic process were all welcomed in creating these unique pieces. Each features linework made of nickel-plated steel that’s been hand-bent and welded together, and the table includes a gravity-defying resin top. Ring describes the process of making the Doodle Collection as “free and exploratory” and different from past furniture pieces released through Another Human.

an abstract chair and side table made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

two abstract chair smade from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair and side table made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract side table made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

an abstract chair made from hand-bent, welded steel

To learn more about the Doodle Collection, visit anotherhuman.la.

Take 5: Sustainable 3D-Printed Vessels, Modern Flowers Three Ways + More

By: Vy Yang

Take 5: Sustainable 3D-Printed Vessels, Modern Flowers Three Ways + More

1. UAUPROJECT

This design studio in Warsaw, Poland founded by Justyna Fałdzińska & Miłosz Dąbrowski captured my eye for their vibrant, 3D-printed vessels. I learned that sustainability is a high priority for the designers, so they only use compostable or highly recyclable materials. From vases to sculptures, totems to candleholders, each piece is manufactured as needed, which means zero overstock and zero waste.

colorful 3d printed vessels

colorful 3d printed vessels

colorful 3d printed vessels

braided grass centerpiece

2. Studio Mondine

I’m not planning a wedding or big fancy dinner in need of centerpieces anytime soon but I can’t help but continue to be inspired by modern day florists, namely the ladies behind Studio Mondine, a San Francisco-based floral design studio that creates very moving, very intentional floral creations. When you start following many florist IG accounts (which is easy to do because who doesn’t like beautiful flowers peppered into their feed?), you’ll start noticing lots of similar trends and styles, but Studio Mondine strays from staying inside any one specific box as they continually evolve and finesse their style (I love what they’re currently doing with braided grasses and lotus leaves). The next time you’re at a Proper Hotel or checking out the latest Vogue Weddings feature, do a quick scan for the florist credit – you might find that you’re a Studio Mondine fan, too.

(PS: they’ve also written a book called Ikebana Unbound, a beautiful book that’s full of inspiration, even if you’re not arranging flowers anytime soon.)

bride with modern bouquet

braided grasses on table

large floral installation at wedding

New York Botanical Garden show

3. New York Botanical Garden’s 20th Orchid Show

Following the floral theme here, I highly recommend checking out the New York Botanical Garden’s Orchid Show this year if you’re able to attend. Landscape architect and artist Lily Kwong has transformed the grounds into a wonderland of colorful, exotic, and beautifully fascinating orchids, offering visitors a natural zen relief from the busyness of the city. Inspired by her heritage in designing the space, Kwong seemingly pulls illustrations from Chinese scrolls out and into the real world. The show, now in its 20th year, is on view through April 23, 2023.

New York Botanical Garden show

Lily Kwong

watercolored paper art

4. Silke Bonde

What can I say? I guess I have spring on the brain! Unlike my previous flower picks, Danish artist Silke Bonde’s paper art lasts forever. I enjoy discovering the different ways artists incorporate paper folding into their works and especially love that Bonde folds in the art of watercolor into her creations.

watercolored paper art

watercolored paper art

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Noah Deledda (@noahdeledda)

5. AutoHedron Chair by Crushmetric

Finally, I’m just going to leave this video here for your endless wonderment…

This post contains affiliate links, so if you make a purchase from an affiliate link, we earn a commission. Thanks for supporting Design Milk!

Wooden Sculptures Carved From Storm-Battered Trees

By: Vy Yang

Wooden Sculptures Carved From Storm-Battered Trees

On view through April 23, 2023 at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art in California, A Conversation With Trees exhibition showcases a series of monolithic sculptures and furniture carved out of recovered, fallen local trees from a windstorm in Claremont. The exhibition is presented by California-based furniture maker and sculpture Vince Skelly, who’s inspired by prehistoric forms, tools, and architecture. “I tend to turn to megalithic structures for inspiration, including stone Dolmen structures which are, of course, ancient but at the same time feel almost modern in their clean lines, minimalist shapes, and construction by way of natural materials,” Skelly shares.

wooden sculptures carved from fallen trees

While Skelly has long been influenced by Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, he is most directly inspired by JB Blunk, a celebrated sculptor who also hails from California. Like Blunk, Skelly primarily uses a chainsaw to tease out forms from the wood sourced unconventionally.

wooden sculptures carved from fallen trees

monolithic wooden chair

monolithic wooden chair

monolithic wooden chair details

A Conversation with Trees features seven sculptural forms, including chairs, side tables, stools, totems, and sculptures – the latter being a first of its kind for Skelly. Five of the works are carved from logs of magnolia, redwood, Brazilian Pepper, and pine wood recovered from a massive windstorm that blew through Claremont in January 2022, representing a physical metaphor of new life born from destruction and loss. Three of the works are 5- to 6-feet tall and roughly 22-30 inches in diameter. One piece is made from the discarded wood scraps of his larger sculptures.

“What inspired me the most about Blunk’s sculptures was that he worked with found material that was collected around where he lived. He could see the potential in firewood off-cuts, or a twisted redwood burl that washed up on the shore near his home,” says Skelly. “This had a huge influence on how I viewed material. It requires a trained eye and imagination, which often doesn’t get a lot of credit. It made me want to learn how to see what he saw in a dirty, wet, unassuming piece of wood. Because of this, I still go out to collect random logs on the side of the road, or off-cuts from arborists when I see them cutting down a tree.”

wooden chair backrest detail

wooden chair backrest detail

wooden chair detail

monolithic wooden totem

monolithic wooden totem

monolithic wooden totem detail

wooden totem and chair

monolithic wooden totem detail

wood sculpture detail

wooden sculptures carved from fallen trees

Humpback Chair and Inverted Arch \\\ Photo: Raymond Molinar

Humpback Chair, Mountain Stool, and Inverted Arch \\\ Photo: Raymond Molinar

Lowell Stool and Morelia Void \\\ Photo: Raymond Molinar

Lowell Stool and Morelia Void \\\ Photo: Raymond Molinar

Morelia Void \\\ Photo: Raymond Molinar

Vince Skelly

Vince Skelly \\\ Photo: Justin Chung

The Claremont Lewis Museum of Art is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, from noon to 4 p.m, and admission is free every Friday. To learn more, visit clmoa.org.

Venera Kazarova is an artist who incorporates her sculptures into real-life spaces through stop motion

By: Popkin

Venera Kazarova is an artist who incorporates sculptures into real-life spaces through stop motion. In this Kafkaesque animation, giant beetles climb around the walls of a bedroom as the artist sleeps. — Read the rest

Polestar’s Arctic Circle Is Literally the Coolest Automotive Showroom on Earth

Polestar’s Arctic Circle Is Literally the Coolest Automotive Showroom on Earth

From day one, Polestar has made a concerted effort to stand out among the competitively crowded EV segment. The brand’s stable of minimalist-modern vehicles have silently blazed their own aesthetic route; each Polestar model is easily identifiable even at a glance from the herds of similarly sculpted silhouettes of other brands, electric or otherwise. Add Polestar’s commitment toward achieving closed circle sustainability and engineering industry-leading safety, and you’ve got one of the most compelling automotive brands associated with the future of electric vehicles.

Polestar Space in Arctic Circle, a cube shaped building completely made of ice and snow.

Polestar’s effort to stand from the crowd has also been expressed with numerous projects distinct, yet complementary to the brand. Last year Polestar commissioned artist Thijs Biersteker to help lead in the creation of the interactive We Harvest Wind, an installation inspired by Polestar’s LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) data spotlighting “information about emissions from materials production, manufacturing, how the type of electricity used when charging affects use phase emissions, and so on.” Suffice to say, the brand isn’t hesitant to use design in a multitude of mediums to further communicate the values and motivations behind their ethos.

While Biersteker’s kinetic polymer sculpture might be perceived more as a conceptual exercise, the brand’s latest showroom doesn’t require all too much explanation. It’s simply cool. Cold even.

Polestar car parked in showroom's snow constructed entrance.

Polestar logo carved into snow/ice building facade.

Constructed in Rovaniemi, Finland by Frozen Innovation in a collaborative effort between Polestar and the Arctic Design Week, the Polestar Space stands as a 12-meter-high cube with 2-meter-thick walls of ice, an Arctic Circle showroom supplemented by ice sculptures of Polestar parts carved by local artists. You can even take a car out on a test drive around an Arctic Circle course.

All-black Arctic Test Drive signage against snowy landscape backdrop.

Lone electric truck delivering blocks of ice and snow driving across snowy Arctic Forest highway.

The city of Rovaniemi is known for its wonderful design. We wanted to honor this by creating a beautiful work that was inspired by our brand’s minimalistic and pure design language. The choice of building material was easy due to the location and our desire to use circular materials: of course, it had to be built from snow.

– Polestar Finland’s Marketing Manager Martin Österberg

One of numerous giant blocks of ice being transported to help build Polestar Spaces structure.

Numerous giant blocks of ice stored to for use to build Polestar Spaces structure.

Despite its rectilinear architecture, the Polestar Space was conceived as the epitome of circular material design, built with snow and ice, materials in great abundance in the city located just 6 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The Snow Space took approximately 20 days to build with 3,000 cubic meters of snow sourced and transported by electric trucks from the nearby Ounasvaara ski resort.

Details of Polestar automotive parts carved from ice.

Details of Polestar automotive parts/tire carved from ice.

Details of Polestar automotive parts carved from ice.

While Polestar could conceivably close the loop by simply allowing the Snow Space to slowly merge back into the snowy landscape, the showroom is planned to be deconstructed and returned to grace the landscape from where it was sourced after the Arctic Circle Space closes its polar doors in late February.

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