The Way Things Wink

 The ICA at UTC| Chattanooga, TN | 2021

Design has long championed practicality, efficiency, and clarity. Pragmatism has become naturalized to the point that it seems to be the only reasonable approach to design. Things around us work as they should: quickly and effectively. We rarely, if ever, take the time to acknowledge our relationship with these objects because they are designed to be invisible. They disappear. However, objects mediate human existence and define our perception of reality. Developing an approach to design that deviates from pragmatism and ventures into nonsense and absurdity allows me to leverage intuition, material experimentation, irony, and chance to inspect and reveal our relationships with the things around us.

HANDCRAFTED TARVA NIGHTSTAND FROM IKEA

What allows IKEA to maintain authorship over object which they do not fully realize? Is it the mechanized fabrication of the materials, the exchange of money for the materials, the brand and deals IKEA promotes, or the idea alone? I have created my own copy of one of IKEA’s designs while removing all other points of contact with the company. The handmade copy becomes in itself unique and common; a copy which seems more original than what it is mimicking.

Sk8 lamp

The relationship between routine and ritual can seem tenuous at times while at other times they share an almost synonymic quality. I decided to explore this relationship through something that personally resonants with me simultaneously as a routine and a ritual. Skateboarding provided me a lens to create an object which exists as a contradiction to the routine action of turning on a lamp, while creating a ritual which is guided by a mundane task rather than religion or spirituality. I used materials related to skateboarding in order to construct the lamp and  box such as steel, rubber, skateboard decks, and skate hardware.

SEESAW LOVE SEAT

Objects function as signs. When we see a love seat our brain codes it as a love seat first, relating it to all the other forms we understand as “love seat.” This allows us to move through a world of easily digestible facts. However, when we stop at this level we miss the aspects of objects which make them unique and valuable to us. I altered the functionality of my late grandfather’s loveseat in order to disrupt the objects recognition. The codes of a loveseat are still present. However rather than offering a place for to people to sit together with ease, the object challenges two people to balance in order to sit next to one another.

DIGITAL SKETCHBOOK

This sketchbook is the culmination of 100 days of drawings done using my laptops track pad with adobe illustrator’s paint brush tool. I printed and bound these digital drawings in the form of a traditional physical sketchbook. The digital sketchbook neither seems to be a book of prints or a true sketchbook. It exists in a state of tension between digital and physical spaces.