Photo © Seth Browarnik/ World Red Eye
Among the many elegant individuals passing through the fair, a grid-clad tribe has been seen, weaving through the crowds over the course of the week. Dressed variously in neoprene skirts and tops, jumpsuits, leggings and draped frocks, they are varied forms united by a common pattern, humans apparently mid design in some digital mapping program.
Photo © Seth Browarnik/ World Red Eye
Seen in their natural environment – RO/LU’s grid-wallpapered booth – the garments (created for this installation by Various Projects) resemble environmental distortion, they are both of the background and not of it. Ranged in the space are furniture objects constructed from welded mesh – that grid again, but now in three dimensions. RO/LU’s Uncertain Surfaces series offers solid forms with the uncertain appearance of incomplete objects – furniture pieces with the potential to become something else, frames with multifarious potential. Seen square-on against the wallpaper, their regular interior forms become camouflage, and their outlines bleed into the background grid. They have the illusion of formal fluidity.
Photo © Seth Browarnik/ World Red Eye
The common pattern shared by person and object in RO/LU’s installation echoes a smaller scale molecular communality as well the sense of the resonant link between objects and individuals, where the context of one feeds into the understanding of the other. It’s a distillation of a core message of the fair itself – that objects are never merely functional but have a life and story of their own, and that those object personalities are enmeshed with those of the people with which they share space.
Photo © Seth Browarnik/ World Red Eye
By Hettie Judah
The post Design Curio: RO/LU with Various Projects for Patrick Parrish Gallery appeared first on Design Log.