While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in the design lexicon that’s more often associated with brands many decades older. This standing is defined, in part, by being often imitated, yet maintaining a certain level of quality and integrity. HAY originals can always be told apart from those trying to knock it off.
For artist Laila Gohar, meals are all about “creating moments,” as she puts it, “and setting the stage for them to happen.” Gohar, who hosted at least one dinner party a week in her New York apartment before the pandemic, entertains guests with her delicious, engagingly absurdist handiwork, such as blocks of butter molded into the shapes of an eye, nose, ear, and mouth, or a Christmas tree–like tower of langoustines and pink roses. Each fantastical concoction radiates with a heartfelt desire to connect with her diners in profound ways. “I am guided—obsessed, really—with beauty,” Gohar says. “My mission on earth is to cultivate joy and happiness, and to channel a nearly overpowering empathy into my work. It’s about so much more than food.”
“What is the texture of scale? Can a surface be eliminated? Can space expand?” Viewers encounter these and other questions, which are printed on a wall, upon encountering the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition “Objects in Sculpture” (through Oct. 10), Minnesota-based designer Jonathan Muecke’s first solo presentation in a major museum. For Muecke, a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art who has worked at the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, objects are vessels through which to explore the connections between spaces, materials, and perception. Through his output—pared-down pieces in evocative forms and tactile mediums—he encourages viewers to think about how objects can shape the ways we interact with our surroundings.
Squares, with their even proportions and sharp corners, evoke a sense of honest, hard-edged rationality. The shape has deep connections with Kvadrat, the 54-year-old Danish textile company known for its forward-looking, often vibrant fabrics and artistic collaborations. The brand’s very name is a Danish word for the four-sided form, which, in the old days, before the advent of computers, covered the graph paper used to record textile patterns. The square literally lay at the core of its fabrics’ structure.
Twenty years ago, April Siler had a chance encounter with “grower Champagne”—wines made from grapes in the Champagne region of France that are harvested, processed, and bottled by the same estate that grew them. (The category stands apart from Champagne houses, such as Veuve Clicquot, Moët & Chandon, and Dom Pérignon, which typically blend together grapes grown by multiple growers from across the region.) Awed by grower Champagne’s fuller flavor and vibrant, fruity savor, the Melbourne-reared, Brooklyn-based food and beverage executive set out to learn more about the niche sector, and to cultivate a greater U.S. recognition for its production.
It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.
Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketing and temperatures dropping, I decided that a winter fireside with a handful of centennia-old ghost stories (cat in my lap, or reading aloud to a friend) might carry me away from the pandemic—from Brooklyn, 2020—to somewhere entirely distinct.
The history of bourbon is an ambery fog of competing local legends. Depending on what Kentucky county you’re in, you’ll get a different claim as to who invented it. Despite its murky origins, though, what has always remained clear is that bourbon is a quintessentially American spirit. (In fact, in order to legally be sold as bourbon in the United States, a whiskey must have been made in the country; purists argue bourbon must hail from Kentucky specifically.)
At first glance, the term “deaf sound artist” might seem an oxymoron. The Berlin-based, Korean-American artist Christine Sun Kim wants to uproot that assumption. Over the past decade, Kim has created a multidisciplinary body of work that investigates the complex, and often confrontational, relationship between Deaf culture and hearing culture. Her 2013 performance “Face Opera II,” for example, features an all-deaf cast but no signing, upending the expectations of hearing viewers. For her recent project “Captioning the City,” Kim installed large-scale descriptions of various noises across Manchester, England, urging viewers to reconsider how sound is experienced in an urban space. Across disciplines, Kim has sought to expand our understanding of both sound and communication, and to make visible the often overlooked labor that deaf people undertake to engage with the hearing.
