The Living Room

A collaborative museum exhibition curated by Justine Ludwig for the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati. Featuring various site-specific installations from local artists “whose unique practices overlap with contemporary craft”…“these artists have forged their own paths by breaking new ground, each taking dynamic new approaches in redefining traditional processes and traditional spaces. They remix materials and content, inject whimsy and subversion into the aesthetic conversation, creating natural and unnatural tensions that draw the viewer in and beg for closer inspection.”*

Our work included a functional tessellated Styrofoam sofa, a CNC-carved solid walnut bear skin rug, a 16ft tall tree house, and a dyed slab white-oak coffee table with ram-pressed ceramic legs produced in collaboration with The Rookwood Pottery Company.

The bear skin rug was inspired by our collaborators, Future Retrieval. Borrowing from their collection of 3D-scanned objects, we enlarged and built upon a Boy Scout’s carving from the 1970s. We started from a raw scanned mesh file of the bear’s head and worked towards a proper surface model, welding the scanned carving with our newly generated surfaces, thereby forming the body. Once satisfied with the geometry, the form was split up into forty-five 3-Axis machining jobs, each in solid walnut. All of these parts were then assembled to create the final form. The bear skin rug can be displayed on the wall or floor.

The stryrofoam sofa explores both materiality and use scenarios. We expected the sofa to break apart over time from wear, crumbling with the impermanence of the show itself. The low slung coffee table and seating area transitioned into the “backyard,” where visitors could find an interactive tree house where they were encouraged to throw paper airplanes, fashioned from multi colored craft paper, to the ground. Planes were left in place for the length of the show.

Excerpts pulled from Justine Ludwig’s show copy.*