SLY DESIGN

I declined to attend ICFF this week, picturing endless stalls of hyper-crafted wood furniture, twisted LED light sculptures, and hand-blocked wallpaper. A last-minute invitation drew me instead to Sight Unseen Offsite (SUO), a small market curated by the design website. It was the perfect antidote to the theatricality, commercialism, and insistent luxury of ICFF. The sun-drenched 15th floor of the Grace Building, where SUO unfolded, was stripped to a bare concrete slab and white walls, and filled with young designers – makers of things – showing their wares on plywood tables.

Despite the number of Pratt graduates and Brooklyn-based industries, the sensiblity was less Outer-Borough Artisanal than Understated Postmodern. The designs (furniture, tableware, linens, carpets) shared a stripped-down 80′s formalism that tempered Memphis eccentricity with Real Simple minimalism. The entire spectacle was sweetly ahistorical, because the designers are too young to have any memory of that era. Products were crafted with basic geometries (thrown pillows shaped like pyramids, pipes shaped like cones, chairs shaped like cubes), bold graphics (checkerboard rugs, quilts with fields of squiggles), chalky pastels (hand-thrown dinnerware, shift dresses) and crayon-bright primaries (throw cushions, childrens toys). There was a smartness to the products. On the surface they seemed natural, simply put together. But achieving this kind of grace actually requires a great deal of sophistication.

Photo courtesy of Crosby Studios.

May 16, 2016 by Nalina Moses

I saw a young man at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) ride a bike through it, and it struck me that he had exactly the right idea. This year’s show is significantly smaller than it’s been in previous years, but it still fills the entire lower level of the Javitz Center. The show is usually fun to walk through, and each new booth has the potential to surprise and delight. But this year I spent just an hour on the floor and then took a seat while my friend finished her viewing. The show felt like an endless array of the same handful of products: artisinal wood tables, artisinal hand-blown glass lamps, and artisinal wallcoverings.

I’m all for a return to craft, sustainable materials, and small-scale fabrication. But most of the artisinal-minded products at ICFF are too obsessively designed and machined to be authentically artisinal, or even artsy. Their one-off hand-finished look is just an aesthetic. It’s obvious that behind the reclaimed materials and artfully irregular finishes, highly ambitious trained designers (frustrated architects, perhaps?) are at work. The rage for handmade stuff has already been parodied, lovingly, by the iconic Put a Bird On it! skit on Portlandia. What’s the limit to the number of artisinal products the market can bear? Isn’t it just a matter of time before the sensibility, like all other trends, falls out of fashion?

May 24, 2012 by Nalina Moses