Scottish sculptor Martin Boyce warps 20th century Modernist icons, household ideals.

Martin Boyce’s exhibition, “When Now is Night" (at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI, from October 2, 2015 to January 31, 2016) is a sobering reflection on the dark side of utopian 20th century Modernism, marking the first solo show in the United States by the contemporary Scottish sculptor.
Boyce’s exhibit was realized in conjunction with Dominic Molon, curator of contemporary art at the museum, who first met Boyce at a studio visit in 2001. The show opened Oct. 2 at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.
Molon said he was impressed by Boyce and his work, paving the way for development of the show to begin in 2013. Boyce had “developed this international reputation as an artist” by then, Molon said.
The exhibit draws significantly from the art and architecture of the 20th century, Molon said. Boyce “emerged alongside other artists that came out of the 1990s looking at two things: modern architecture and design, and how it’s a conduit for amazing things” as well as the numerous “complications that came with this modernist movement.”
One of the central themes of the exhibition is domestic life as it was imagined by prominent figures of the Modernist movement, especially designers Charles and Ray Eames. Boyce’s pieces take well-known forms from the early 20th century and distort them to uncover the darker aspects of Modernism. “We create structures that are there to help us function, but can turn against us,” Molon said.
Most of the pieces in “When Now is Night” feature disfigured products of early Modernism, such as the Eames Storage Unit, a functional cabinet that reflects the movement’s streamlined and optimistic driving force, Molon said. Boyce shows shattered splints, painted splints carved into masks and boarded-over storage units that reflect the sometimes grim outlooks of Modernist designs.
“When Now is Night” opens with a room covered in dark, crisscrossed wallpaper adapted from the office box-filled title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” In the largest space of the exhibition, a giant, fluorescent spider web hangs from the ceiling. It is the primary source of light in the room, but its form is clearly menacing. The ominous web is probably the most overt symbolism in the gallery, though most of the time Boyce uses subtler means to express his ideas.
One room is littered with identical, abstract paper leaves that might have come from a Modernist’s vision of the future. The leaves serve the same purpose as Boyce’s masks, which “act as a portal between the real, inhabited space of the gallery and the imaginary interiors and landscapes that have been removed from them,” according to a museum description of one piece.
Exhibit-goers noted that Boyce’s work was unique in the way that his sculpture represented his message.

Via Brown Daily Herald

read all at: www.browndailyherald.com/2015/10/09/risd-exhibit-explores-the-dark-side-of-modernism/

Tribute to Eameses at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Last Friday evening, there was a performance of “Superpowers of Ten”, a theatrical presentation created by Andres Jaque and his “Office for Political Innovation”. The piece is a play / puppet show experience that springboards off “Powers of Ten”, a film by Charles and Ray Eames from 1977, which was itself based on a book by Kees Boeke. “Superpowers” does have a kind of a echo-chamber quality, but one that keeps moving, expanding beyond expected boundaries.
The original Eames film, produced for IBM, begins with a man and woman at a picnic on Chicago’s lakefront one sunny October day. It then moves out through levels of scale based on the factor of ten - zooming out into the cosmos before returning back to the picnic where it plunges through the man’s skin and proceeds into the human body down to atomic level. This tight, specific, and scientific methodology moves smoothly into metaphor. The film has been credited with making people feel they are citizens of the universe with an expanded sense of responsibility.
“Superpowers of Ten” takes this idea of varying frames of perception and explodes it. Presented in the Athletic Association’s “Tank” (feeling very much like a tank with its swimming-pool-tiled floor), the area surrounding our chairs was jammed with puppets and objects used in the performance, and the whole thing had a cozy, ad-hoc quality.
The performance itself was a groovy cosmic ride through the universe, spinning atoms, and other elements from the original film, and then somehow, (in a process akin to how the Eames’ led viewers under the skin of their picnicking man), proceeding along into the politics embedded in a host of topics including sausage-making, the color balance of Kodak film, and Miss America pageants.

Via chicagonow.com

Read all: www.chicagonow.com/neighborland/2015/10/highlights-from-opening-weekend-of-the-chicago-architecture-biennial/

At Amsterdam’s Art Chapel the exhibition design borrows from Eames’ House of Cards

Amsterdam is opening up its inner circle of design with a new, albeit brief, exhibition hosted at the city’s Kunst Kapel (Art Chapel). Conceived by design studio Bernotat & Co and the international design platform Connecting the Dots, ‘The Design Circle’ brings together works by ten design studios and labels including Lensvelt, Kranen/Gille, New Window and Anne-Marie Geurink.
The exhibition design borrows from Charles and Ray Eames’ House of Cards – a playhouse for children made of interlocking cards. To wit, the pieces are presented among large, rectangular panels of honeycomb cardboard, designed to be especially durable and reusable, and with the hopes of finding them a new lease of life once the exhibition has ended.
Jacob Borstlap of Bernotat & Co explains, ‘We didn’t want all the exhibited objects to be seen at a glance, but rather that when you walk through the space, there is always something to discover.’ A tour around the modernist, Lau Peters-designed venue reveals a well-rounded selection that paints a diverse picture of current Dutch design.

Via wallpaper.com
Read more at: www.wallpaper.com/design/the-design-circle-kneeling-at-the-altar-of-amsterdams-art-chapel#ymeJQu5Tb8cZXb0T.99

"Dots": the Eames' quote as a key to play a game.

"Eventually everything connects..."

What designer wouldn’t love a game that quotes Charles Eames? "Dots" is a new digital game about connecting, with Tetris-like play that challenges you to connect dots to make them disappear. The more you can connect at once, the higher your score. (available for iPhone and Android).

Via visualnews.com
read all at: http://www.visualnews.com/2015/10/01/6-apps-to-keep-any-designer-entertained-inspired/

Nendo Designs Slick New Perfume Packaging For Kenzo

The monolithic bottles evoke totem poles and Charles and Ray Eames stool.

It wouldn't be reaching to say Nendo has the Midas touch—the prolific Japan-based studio has the power to turn everyday items like front doors, bookshelves, carry-on suitcases, and much more into design gold.
Nendo recently unveiled a new unisex perfume bottle created in collaboration with Kenzo, the French fashion label. The packaging and bottle have a Memphis-y, Ettore Sottsass vibe—and you could say that the bottle also nods to a Charles and Ray Eames stool—meant to evoke an international culture of creativity.
"Where previous generations have felt differences of nationality, language, and religion more acutely, the younger generation of today have comparatively fewer cultural divides to cross, enjoying a greater shared sense of identity through the global spread of online media and applications," Nendo writes on its website.
Made from purple glass, the fragrance bottle's silhouette is derived from totem poles. "This flexible and upcoming generation, with their mobile and vibrant lifestyles, are like a new ‘tribe’ in modern life, and this new unisex fragrance has been developed to symbolize their interconnectedness," Nendo continues.
Totem comes in three scents denoted by color changes to the geometric logo: Orange hits floral notes, Yellow is citrus based, and Blue is fruity.

Via Fastcodesign.com

Read all at: www.fastcodesign.com/3051654/wanted/nendo-designs-slick-new-perfume-packaging-for-kenzo#5

Now available again "The Story of Eames Furniture"

Now available again, this lavish publication tells the story of Eames furniture in ­unparalleled detail on 800 pages with more than 2,500 images.
In this unique publication, Marilyn and John Neuhart tell the story, to paraphrase Charles Eames himself, of how Eames furniture got to be the way it is. The Story of Eames Furniture is a biography —not of an individual person, but of arguably the most influential and important furniture brand of our time. Brimming with more than 2,500 images and insider information, this two-volume book in a slipcase sheds new light on the context in which the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames was created. It documents in unparalleled detail how the design process in the Eames Office developed as well as the significant roles played by specific designers and manufacturers.

Marilyn and John Neuhart, The Story of Eames Furniture, Gestalten, 2015

Available at nb-notabene bookshop, via Bellezia 12c, Turin (Italy)

Ikea’s New Chairs Knock Off All Of The Mid-Century Greats !

The swedish manufacturer borrows generously from the likes of Eames and Vitra.

Eames molded chairs are a timeless classic that’s experiencing a full-out renaissance. Find me one respectable startup that doesn’t have them surrounding the perimeter of a walnut conference table. But at $300 and up, it’s hard to resist the temptation of a shoddy, outsourced knockoff.
Now, Ikea—the king of cheap furniture—is offering a line of chairs that are clearly deeply inspired Eames and the other mid-century chair design gods. In fact, when you really deconstruct the new line, it’s like a Frankenstein collection of greatest hits, from the curvy seat of the Eames molded chair, to the legs and connective tissue of the Jasper Morrison Hal Tube(which was actually made in 2012), to the high arms of the Vico Magistretti Maui chair, to the cello back of the Arne Jacobson Ant Leg chair (technically 2005), to the wood veneer of Jacobson's Series 7 chair.
Ikea is offering the options to mix and match these pieces to create your own hybrid, starting at a mere $34 and peaking out at $60.
Of course, a lot has been lost in translation. While all of the original designs were also the products of mass manufacture, Ikea’s chairs simply look cheap. None has the almost impossible to define visual harmony at play in the original specimens. It’s as if you can see the literal corners that have been cut to shave fractions of pennies off the build to make a few extra bucks at scale.
But maybe the worse sting is that dorm rooms everywhere will soon approach the same design sensibility as your carefully manicured apartment.

Via fastcodesign.com

All photos by Ikea

21 Classic Eames Elephants Reimagined By 20 Contemporary Designers

Vitra will auction off the designs for charity.

Plywood is at the essence of Charles and Ray Eames's work. But they also extended the technical experiments into children's toys. The Molded Plywood Elephant, one such example, never went into production back then due to high fabrication costs.
But Swiss manufacturer Vitra started producing plastic replicas in 2007, and now, at the London Design Festival, it is auctioning off 21 of these elephants that are customized by 20 top designers of today. The proceeds will benefit Teddy's Wish, a charity that supports research into sudden infant death syndrome.
Reflecting the quirks of their designer, each elephant has its own unique traits. British designer Philippe Malouin did up his like a woolly mammoth; Swedish firm Claesson Koivisto Rune covered theirs in gray leather; Neri & Hu kitted out the animal with rockers and a saddle that holds accessories. Bids for each will start at about $460 (it's for a good cause!), and you can see a selection above:

 

Chairs Installations

(above) Hill St Bonfire by Design By Toko: a visual protest against replica furniture.
Aussie furniture stores commissioned creative agency Design By Toko to design a sculptural ‘Bonfire’ of furniture fakes. This installation was on display at Hill Street in Surry Hills as part of the recent Sydney Indesign. Do not fret – no real furniture were hurt in the process. Only the dirty, filthy, disgusting fakes. Hooray!

(below) Black Whole Conference by Michel de Broin.
This installation consists of a group of Eames chairs attached to each other at the legs to create a sphere. In this utopian architecture, each element ensures and shares in solidarity with the others, the stability of the whole. This spiky structure forms a kind of immune system, a geometry configured in order to protect itself from the outside world.

Source: www.yellowtrace.com.au/chair-installations/

Learning from Eameses: short tips by Bradford Shellhammer, Founder & CEO at Bezar

The Details Are Not The Details...

"Charles Eames, arguably the most important designer from the Mid-Century, famously once said “The details are not the details. They make the design.”
He was right.
When building a brand you need a myriad of things to come together to make magic. It’s calculated. Like baking. Like architecture.
You need a mission bigger than you are. At Bezar we’re aware we’re not stopping war nor curing cancer. But we are helping small businesses compete with big box retail giants and we’re defenders of the intellectual property rights of makers, designers, and artists. So, we’re doing good. That’s a detail.
You need a point of view. Retail’s lame, especially ecommerce. It’s stale. It’s calculated. And it’s lowest common denominator, focused on quick shipping and lowest prices. But style, curation, and the artistry of old-fashioned retailing (think of your favorite boutique, do you recall the same love for an online store?) are valuable and worthy of celebrating. And need to be coupled with best in class analytics and technology and operations. That’s a detail.
You need to build something the world needs. The world does not need another soulless online store. That’s the truth. Ecommerce companies desperately need to connect with consumer’s emotions the way social companies have. Instagram is emotionally addictive because it’s inspiring (you get to see the world through other’s eyes). Pinterest is emotionally addictive because it’s empowering (you get to collect your inspirations from around the world). Facebook is emotionally addictive because it’s connective (you get to see the world and likes of people you know). Is Amazon emotionally addictive? Not for me. But no one can get you books, Pampers, pencils, and the like faster and cheaper than Amazon. No one. And that’s awesome. The world does not need another Amazon. Sorry, Jet.
And you need to be obsessed with the details when courting consumers who already are overwhelmed with choices.
At Bezar we’re obsessed with the details. With the products we sell. With our own brand’s identity. With our customer’s experience. With our running a sustainable commerce brand. With our designers’ livelihoods. And with standing out and standing for something in the world.
And we’re just getting started".

Bradford Shellhammer via LinkedIn

Read all at: www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-bezar-takeaways-from-creating-brand-five-shellhammer