For Design Miami: Los Angeles, The Future Perfect has curated a selection of our artists in a room of Paul Williams’ Holmby Hills estate, resulting in a memorable and unparalleled piece of visual music. Matching the levity and grace of the classical decor and ornamental blue with works of subtle magnitude and quiet importance, we have created a congruous and ambient harmony within the space.
Our composition finds its center in a new collection of mirrors from Bower Studios x Genesis Belanger, Eric Roinestad; Chris Wolston and Leena Similu; all of whom work within a milieu that is simultaneously figurative and abstract, allowing for the surrealist impulse to delicately enter a space from its periphery. Circling iconography and historical scope, the work of these artists may be viewed as something extracted from the very architecture that it occupies.
A series of three mirrors, created via a partnership between Bower Studios and Genesis Belanger is the latest edition of Bower’s evolving series of artist collaborations and are brilliantly declarative statements in acid-etched bronze. Featuring hands mystically emerging from behind curtains, the mirrors shift from obfuscation to clarity and present a deeply evocative image to the viewer.
Eric Roinestad has provided a new collection of works from his ongoing and renowned ceramics practice, which has become a highly acclaimed meditation on the culture and ecology of Southern California. Roinestad’s formal approach to mythology, iconography and the vastness of the present is something that has become a lexicon unto itself, allowing for the artist’s work to achieve a rare singularity reserved for the truly visionary. Additionally, he has provided a selection of introductory pieces from his upcoming exhibition “The Sunset Strip”, in which he appropriates and re-defines famous illustrations and nostalgic signage from Los Angeles’ Sunset Trip as an elevated ephemera that communicates the emotional history of an artist reckoning with his love of and place in the eponymous city.
We have brought other luminaries from our program of vital and contemporary artists and designers into the room as well, using the space to further elaborate on our vision of work that is crucial and relevant while maintaining a critical and astute understanding of historical tradition and lineage. Leena Similu’s sculptures, which reference her life as an artist and mother using representative and symbolic objects that approach a kind of iconographic portraiture converse with Chris Wolston’s work, which is replete with studied craft tradition and playful spontaneity, along with pieces from Jane Yang-D’Haene, whose ceramics are a response to conventional Korean craft, her own personal story and her professional history as an architect.
Other featured artists include JB Blunk, Isamu Noguchi, Chen Chen & Kai Williams, Cody Hoyt, Dan John Anderson, Floris Wubben, Ian Collings, John Hogan, Karl Zahn, Mark Pavlovits, Myungjin Kim, Olivia Cognet, Omer Arbel, Rachel Shillander, Reinaldo Sanguino, Seungjin Yang, Sho Ota, and Vikram Goyal.
In this special room we have drawn a constellation around contemporary design and its place in history, and examined the ways in which both the present and the past are similarly composed of individuals finding their place among architectures, landscapes, cityscapes and lineages.
The Future Perfect at Design Miami: Los Angeles will be on view through May 16-20, 2024. Inquire to attend.