From September 27 to November 23, 2014, the Gallery at REDCAT will present Small Museum for the American Metaphor, an exhibition curated by Belgian architect Kersten Geers in collaboration with the Gallery at REDCAT Director Ruth Estevez.

Small Museum for the American Metaphor is an exhibition which brings together European perspectives on the American West, and more specifically, the particularities embedded in the idealized fictions surrounding it. The visual argument here is that there is a certain architectonic “idea” that dwells on the celebration of Endlessness as mythicized in the American West. The metaphor is the base for an architecture that blurs the distinction between building and object, collapsing the different scales. It is an architecture that celebrates the fiction of the “wide open” and seeks to re-evaluate/reinterpret the world as a gigantic interior. In that context, a successful intervention is able to define hierarchies, carve out places, and make shared points of reference. The exhibition, much in the tradition of showcasing objects in a defined space, such as a cabinet, “collects”artworks, architectural models, drawings and other elements that consciously fade the distinction between object and representation.

The exhibition includes works from artists and designers such as John Baldessari, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Stefano Graziani, Rita McBride, Valérie Mannaerts, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Manfred Pernice, Bas Princen, Ed Ruscha, Ettore Sottsass, Michaël Van den Abeele, Richard Venlet, Pieter Vermeersch, Peter Wächtler and Christopher Williams, as well as models of past and present architectures of the “big box”.

Read full press release here.

Recommended Shows: Beyond Chicago EXPO
by ROBIN DLUZEN on SEPTEMBER 17, 2014

“Future Tropes”
September 5 – November 7, 2014
Volume Gallery
845 West Washington Blvd, 3rd Floor
What’s on view:A group show of furniture by artist/designers Tanya Aguiñiga, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Leon Ransmeier, RO/LU, and Anders Ruhwald.

Between 1919 and 1920, German architect Bruno Taut exchanged letters with fellow German expressionist architects about how to shape the architecture of the future. That correspondence is now the inspiration for “Future Tropes,” a show which has assigned six artists to create work that is both timeless and futuristic, resulting in some works that are typical, and some that are truly original. Tables, rugs, cabinets and group seating are all reexamined; many of the pieces, like Leon Ransmeier’s stainless steel, sculptural “gymnasium,” Action Object, or Jonathan Muecke’s multi-purpose, space-saving Blue Cabinet are minimal and sleek and in this way match our idea of a “futuristic” aesthetic might look like. Tanya Aguiñiga’s contributions stand out in their warmth and internalized approach; in Tierra, a series of tubes filled with soil from various locations of personal importance are woven loosely into a rug that is both elegant and luxurious in appearance, as well as modest and base in its materials. Inspired by Aguiñiga’s experiences with her infant child, Support is a soft, floor-bound dining room table made of movable denim building-blocks, filled with rice and beans. Changeable, practical (and somewhat edible), the piece is both universally functional and intensely personal.

Find full list here.

Luftwerk showcases a nightly light and water installation at Chicago’s Couch Place alley with video compositions which will be projected onto “screens” of water. Read more about it in this article from Archinect.

09.09.14 — BY MONICA KHEMSUROV
“Timeless” is probably the most overused — and abused — word in design in recent years, typically employed by designers in the context of sustainability in order to imply that a piece has such a classic look or function that its expected longevity can somehow justify its existence in a sea of wastefulness and overproduction. Future Tropes, a new group show that opened this past weekend at Chicago’s Volume Gallery, approaches the concept of timelessness from a very different angle, however: “The work should be slightly ahead of the world, slightly un-contemporary, setting the stage for future codes yet operating in a place that precedes our ability to apply language to those codes.” (—Jan Verwoert, as adjusted by RO/LU.) In other words, objects that are equally linked to our prehistoric past and our distant, utopian future. Volume curators Sam Vinz and Claire Warner proposed that brief to Leon Ransmeier, ROLU, Jonathan Muecke, Tanya Aguiñiga, Jonathan Olivares, and Anders Ruhwald, who exchanged ideas on the topic before each creating a custom piece responding to it. Click here to see the results.

The Dynamic Design Duo Behind RO/LU: The founders of RO/LU, Matt Olson and Mike Brady, blur the lines between art, furniture and contemporary design.

‘I want to create a chair that my mind wants to sit in, not that my body wants to sit in,’ is a mantra for Mike Brady and Matt Olson of RO/LU.

This month sees a trio of RO/LU exhibitions: A collaborative performance piece debuts at Lower East Side art destination Jack Hanley Gallery at the same time that two furniture shows open at Chicago’s Volume Gallery and Patrick Parrish’s brand-new New York gallery (formerly modernist mecca Mondo Cane). Full content here.

RO/LU seems to be on a roll these days! Hot on the heels of the launch of their new website, the multi-talented Minneapolis-based design firm is taking part in not one, not two, but three exhibitions across the US. Read full content here.

In Waves: Arp + RO/LU + Paul Clipson September 7 – October 5, 2014 Opening Reception Sunday, September 7th, 6-8pm Jack Hanley Gallery is very pleased to announce In Waves, a group show featuring the work of Arp, RO/LU, and Paul Clipson.

For additional information.

Surfaces On Which Your Setting and Sitting Will Be Uncertain is a group of sculptural furniture objects by RO/LU with matching clothing by Various Projects. The work will be on view as the inaugural show at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York from September 4th through October 4th. The opening will take place Thursday September 4th at 50 Lispenard Street from 6-9 pm.

RO/LU continues to explore “art history as a material” by starting with very literal information from existing works and reinventing through intuitive connections to others. A collage of the past and the present—Superstudio’s Quaderna line, environmental installations by Ettore Sottsass, Scott Burton and James Lee Byars’ utilization of man as a symbol object—along with intangible new ideas that emerge through action. The objects, made from welded wire mesh, seem to change when one moves in their presence, in some way becoming different with each step taken around them.

Extending ideas embraced and explored by the Mono-ha movement in late sixties Japan and current philosophers like Bruno Latour, RO/LU and Various Projects explore the “life of things”—the belief that objects, images, and ideas included—have their own agency and won’t simply sit still under someone’s watch, on someone else’s terms. In fact, what makes them compelling is precisely what animates them, what they want, and how they behave when they are set loose into the world. In other words, objects, images, and ideas have lives to live. Suddenly we are interested in getting closer to these objects, establishing a poetic proximity that will allow these things to teach us in ways no person could.

Various Projects’ four square dresses, track suits, bangles, scarves and
turbans—produced in the same grid pattern as RO/LU’s objects—act as a playful “meta-mirror” and encourage a sort of performative approach to our everyday interactions with the living world around us.

For additional information.

Anders Ruhwald: One Thing Follows Another (And You Make It Happen)

Opening reception: September 3rd, 6 – 8pm

In the exhibition Anders Ruhwald: One Thing Follows Another (And You Make It Happen), the artist, who is artist-in-residence and head of Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, explores form, materiality, and perception through a series of installations that compare and contrast one design rendered in three diverse media: ceramics, wood, and glass.

On view through Tuesday, September 30, 2014

For additional information.