Futures Collective presented by Spence & Lyda

Futures Collective presented by Spence & Lyda

The exhibition features work from award-winning local designers Jon Goulder, Broached Commissions, Fiona Lynch Office, and Authentic Design Alliance, alongside acclaimed international designers Álvaro Catalán de Ocón and Lucy Kurrein, and more. Visitors will also find works by Australian digital printmaking artist Sophia Szilagyi, multidisciplinary artist and sculptor Greg Penn, and contemporary landscape artist Eduardo Santos, presented by Melbourne based art gallery Otomys. Taking over the heritage-listed mansion, the exhibition presents a series of unfolding experiences; each space features a curated body of work guided by the Melbourne Design Week theme, Design the World You Want.

In collaboration with Jon Goulder, Fiona Lyda and the Spence & Lyda team launch Innate 2.0 – a collection of furniture crafted from Tasmanian oak and blackwood, finely honed dark stone and black powder coated steel with punctuations of brass. The design language is inherently minimal and elegant, with a distinct lightness achieved through a lean use of materials and desirable proportions. These pieces appear throughout Villa Alba as various iterations of the same concept – a console at the entrance sets the tone for the exhibition; a side table highlights the brilliant circular drawer detail; and a desk anchors the collection.
Broached Commissions presents the second edition of Broached Recall – a collection of tables and monoliths in heritage timber veneers from Elton Group’s archive. Linear and geometric, the intricacies of these pieces are easily perceptible upon interaction; detachable, magnetic handles reveal hidden storage compartments, and interesting timber grains incite curiosity. The richness of these sculptural and functional pieces is amplified against the decorative architecture of Villa Alba. The same room features one of Álvaro Catalán de Ocón’s sustainably made rugs from his collection Plastic Rivers, produced in collaboration with ACdO and GAN Rugs. Hand-tufted and crafted without knots from recycled plastic debris, each rug depicts an aerial image of the planet’s most polluted rivers.

Futures Collective also sees Fiona Lynch Office launch its first capsule collection. Expanding on the studio’s commitment to sustainability, the pieces use raw building materials such as reclaimed timber, hand-worked aluminium, and slumped glass from offcuts, with a custom pigment splattered onto fabric reminiscent of artists’ drop sheets. Comprising low-set tables and stools as well as armchairs and a daybed, this collection is inspired by the office’s work on Ace Hotel in Sydney, and is presented alongside lighting by Volker Haug Studio. Upstairs, Marlo Lyda’s Remnants – a capsule collection of coffee and side tables conceived from stone offcuts and steel frames – is an elegant example of discarded materials with newfound purpose and aesthetic value. And Lucy Kurrein’s Bibendum modular sofa and Compagna lounge chair, which both launched at Milan’s Super Salone 2021, are strong additions.
As a culmination of important and thought-provoking design, Futures Collective is a compelling presentation of local and international work, strengthened by the aesthetic, historical and cultural value of the building in which it sits. Futures Collective will exhibit as part of Melbourne Design Week from March 17 – 26 at Villa Alba Museum in Kew.

KEW, VIC, AUSTRALIA
PHOTOGRAPHY
Sean Fennessy

WORDS
Millie Thwaites

written by : Millie Thwaites
7 Apr 2022
published in : thelocalproject.com.au

Futures Collective presented by Spence & Lyda

The exhibition features work from award-winning local designers Jon Goulder, Broached Commissions, Fiona Lynch Office, and Authentic Design Alliance, alongside acclaimed international designers Álvaro Catalán de Ocón and Lucy Kurrein, and more.

3 Months To Go Expo 2020 Dubai Connects Minds and Creates the Future

3 Months To Go Expo 2020 Dubai Connects Minds and Creates the Future

With 3 months to go until the opening of Expo 2020 Dubai, on October 1st, the organizing committee has released updated images highlighting ready and completed pavilions. With officially 191 participating nations, the expo is seeking to “explore the power of connections in shaping our world”. Showcasing architecture, culture, and inspiring innovations, the world expo has been, for the past 170 years, the leading platform to introduce great inventions and architectural revolutions, most of which shaped the world we live in today.

Under the theme of “connecting minds and creating the future”, Expo 2020 Dubai will run from 1 October 2021 until 31 March 2022, after being delayed for one year due to the worldwide coronavirus situation. Located south of Dubai, the world expo’s master plan designed by HOK is centered on Al Wasl Plaza, by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, the world’s largest unsupported dome at the intersection of the expo’s three thematic districts and their corresponding pavilions: the Sustainability Pavilion “Terra” by Grimshaw, the Mobility Pavilion “Alif” by Foster + Partners, and the Opportunity Pavilion “Mission Impossible” by AGi Architects. The Thematic Districts, which will house over 87 new permanent buildings and host the work of more than 136 participating countries have been created by Hopkins Architects.

Taking place for the first time in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, Expo 2020 Dubai will include, other than the main architectural attractions, country pavilions divided onto the Sustainability, Mobility and Opportunity districts; special pavilions such as the Women’s Pavilion by e.construct; partner pavilions and organization pavilions like the African Union Pavilion.

written by : Christele Harrouk
13 Jul 2021
published in : archdaily.com

Gallery og 3 Months To Go Expo 2020 Dubai Connects Minds and Creates the Future

Sub-Zero and Wolf launches experiential Sydney showroom

Sub-Zero and Wolf launches experiential Sydney showroom

Sub-Zero and Wolf has launched a new design hub and showroom in Sydney’s Surry Hills designed by Adele Bates.

Showing off the design possibilities of the Sub-Zero and Wolf range, the space is intended to inspire architects and designers, as well as consumers.

           “The location and the building itself were critical to the design of the showroom,” said Sub-Zero and Wolf’s Australian managing director, Andrew Mumford. “Heritage elements were so important to perfectly complement the heritage of the Sub-Zeroand Wolf story. Designer Adele Bates interpreted the brief so effectively, creating an inspirational space for consumers andthe design community that differentiates and highlights the diverse Sub-Zero and Wolf design styles.”

   The showroom is zoned into two distinct spaces. Upon entry, visitors are welcomed into an open-plan retail space housing the extensive range of Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances.

An inconspicuous fluted glass door to the rear of the showroom provides a portal to the demonstration kitchen and dining area. The darker tone of this inviting, functional space creates a soothing, sophisticated atmosphere and marks a distinct shift from the bright retail showroom.

    Brushed brass, timber and mirror give the space an identity more akin to restaurant and bar design. The dining area doubles as a meeting space for the showroom, with a custom designed long dining table and a concealed prep kitchen. The demonstration area is dominated by the extensive form of the kitchen island, overhung by custom rangehoods featuring bespoke brass metalwork.

written by :   ArchitectureAU Editorial
9 Mar 2021
published in : architectureau.com

Sub-Zero and Wolf launches experiential Sydney showroom

    Sub-Zero and Wolf has launched a new design hub and showroom in Sydney’s Surry Hills designed by Adele Bates.

sydney-showroom-(4)

Pace Gallery-Jean Dubuffet

Pace Gallery . Jean Dubuffet

    Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called “low art” and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l’art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.

    Jean Dubuffet rejected artistic traditions. He strove to create a unique visual language with which to portray the everyday world. One of the most important early theorists and collectors of “art brut,” Dubuffet was a major force in the recognition and appreciation of outsider art. Naive and unconventional visions of reality influenced the development of his own singularly personal style and imagery. He explored and experimented with many printmaking techniques throughout his career, most notably silkscreen and lithography.Dubuffet has been the subject of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, and his work is included in important public and private collections worldwide. His personal collection of outsider art was the foundation of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

    NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery is presenting Jean Dubuffet’s Le cirque (1970), a monumental sculpture occupying the entire first-floor gallery of Pace’s 540 West 25th Street location in New York, on view September 18 – October 24, 2020. Le cirque is a habitable environment that suggests an urban plaza, which Dubuffet first conceived and sculpted in 1970 as a model for future enlargement at architectural scale. Measuring thirty feet square and thirteen feet in height, Le cirque is one of the last remaining works from the late-1960s and early-1970s to be realized at heroic size. Marking a crucial moment in Dubuffet’s deeply influential oeuvre, it stands as a major achievement in the artist’s sculptural practice and heralds the final chapter in his celebrated Hourloupe cycle, which lasted from 1962 to 1974. This cycle, the longest and most prolific of Dubuffet’s career, began with drawings and paintings, to which Dubuffet added reliefs to expand their presence spatially and “give them life,” as the artist stated. This evolved further into painted and sculpted panels, which came together in ambitious sculptural and architectural installations.

    The original model for Le cirque was created shortly after Dubuffet’s second solo exhibition with Pace Gallery in New York in 1970, which debuted a body of new black and-white sculptures called Simulacres. Dubuffet’s inaugural exhibition with Pace had taken place in 1968, after the artist met the gallery’s founder Arne Glimcher for the first time in Paris in 1966 and began working with him the following year. A foundational figure in the gallery’s history, Dubuffet’s work has been the subject of more than 20 solo exhibitions at Pace since 1968 and has been featured in countless dual and group exhibitions.

published in : pacegallery.com

Pace Gallery . Jean Dubuffet

    Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called “low art” and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, and for the collection of works Collection de l’art brut that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.

Articolo Lighting’s Nicci Green

How One Designer Is Handling Australia’s Reopening

    Nicci Green is not new to global crisis. The designer founded Australian lighting maker Articolo Lighting when the Great Recession led to the demise of her previous glassware company, Bribe. “Pretty much overnight that business wasn’t relevant anymore” Green recalls. Standing at an empty Maison & Objet booth in 2010, “I held one vase on my hand upside down and another one on top of it and joked, ‘I don’t know—we could get into lighting.’” Today, Articolo is a global brand that operates showrooms in Melbourne and New York.

    This time around, when COVID-19 began to threaten small businesses, Green took a decidedly different tack. “We approached the coronavirus pandemic with a more positive perspective,” she says. Working with long time architect David Goss, Green prepared her local showroom for reopening after lockdown with projects that include a floor-to-ceiling installation comprising 90 glass spheres from Articolo’s Fizi product line. “It shows our ability to customize our lighting for larger scales and format,” Green says.

But the undertaking also inspired her to reflect more deeply on quarantine. “I thought, ‘What are we all going to be looking forward to?’ We will want to be together.” That thought led Green to start to seek out collaboration opportunities. Soon, Articolo began to commission new creative partners with gusto. The company produced a short film with Paris Thomson of SIRAP Motion Lab, and tapped illustrator Alex Watson to reimagine the lighting collections in a series of prints. Watson now works for Articolo one day per week.

    Now, some of these projects are being shared in Articolo’s Australian showrooms, as the country began reopening its economy in phases approximately a month before its American counterparts. Simultaneously, Green is finishing up a collaboration with digital media artist Yandell Walton that will transform her reopening into a spectacular event. Walton will amplify the Fizi installation’s presence by immersing visitors in motion graphics of bubbles. “When regulations allow us to have an event of 100 people, we’ll showcase this amazing digital art piece,” Green says. “COVID-19 gave us the quiet to explore this.”

The wider Melbourne community has used that time to similar ends. Interior designer Fiona Lynch launched an open-source platform for sustainable design called Future Archive during quarantine. And Green’s fellow designer Christopher Boots is welcoming clients to a new showroom that he created with interior designer Pascale Gomes-McNabb.

    Green, who is launching three new product collections this summer and hopes to expand her business to six showrooms worldwide by 2025, thinks her response to COVID-19 will inform her professional thinking for a long time. She feels particularly confident that Articolo’s future trade fair stands will more likely resemble a Walton-like environment than past booths, for one. But Green does not advise her American peers to necessarily parrot Melburnians as they navigate an eventual reopening. “It’s got to come from the heart,” she says. “If you try to orchestrate something just to capitalize on this moment, then you have a business proposition rather than an authentic expression.”

By David Sokol

published in :  articololighting.com

Articolo Lighting’s Nicci Green

Nicci Green is not new to global crisis. The designer founded Australian lighting maker Articolo Lighting when the Great Recession led to the demise of her previous glassware company, Bribe. “Pretty much overnight that business wasn’t relevant anymore,” Green recalls.Standing at an empty Maison & Objet booth in 2010, “I held one vase on my hand upside down and another one on top of it and joked, ‘I don’t know—we could get into lighting.’” Today, Articolo is a global brand that operates showrooms in Melbourne and New York.

Ibrahim Mahama

Ibrahim Mahama

    Ibrahim Mahama is a Ghanian artist. He often works with found objects, transforming them in his practice and giving them new meaning. Mahama is best known for his practice of draping buildings in old jute sacks, which he stitches together with a team of collaborators to create patchwork quilts. Of the practice, Mahama says, “I used jute sacks because for me the history of crisis and failure is absorbed into the material. Their history speaks of how global transactions and capitalist structures work. And because how their humbleness contrasts with the monumentality of the buildings they cover.” He grew up in a polygamous family, and once noted that his collaborative nature could be a result of this unique environment.

Born in Tamale, Ghana in 1987, Mahama received his MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, Ghana in 2013. He lives and works in Tamale. Mahama was the youngest artist featured in the first Ghana Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where he created a bunker-like space made out of the mesh used to smoke fish and filled it with references to Ghana’s history. Mahama has had multiple solo installations in Accra and Kumasi, as well as solo exhibitions in Dublin, Michigan, and at White Cube in London.

is an artist run project space, exhibition and research hub, cultural repository and artists’ residency. SCCA Tamale is an initiative of world-renowned Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama, as a contribution towards transforming the contemporary art scene in Ghana. The SCCA-Tamale team intends, with its diverse programming and research interests, to spotlight significant moments in Ghanaian and international art in a communal space. Affiliated to blaxTARLINES KUMASI, the Centre is operated by committed, dedicated and generous persons who produce critical discourse that will eventually be disseminated through exhibitions, publications and allied activities. SCCA-Tamale is dedicated to art and cultural practices which emerged in the 20th Century and inspire generations of artists and thinkers of the 21st Century and beyond.

published in : artnet.com

Ibrahim Mahama

 “I used jute sacks because for me the history of crisis and failure is absorbed into the material. Their history speaks of how global transactions and capitalist structures work. And because how their humbleness contrasts with the monumentality of the buildings they cover.”