Joris Laarman's Bone Armchair Bone Rocker. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda, New York. Photo by Steve Benisty.
Joris Laarman Lab opens tonight at Friedman Benda in New York. The show features a new body of work from the young Dutch designer that highlights his research-, science-, and technology-based process. On view is a lamp made out of living cells, a table that captures the pattern in a flock of birds, and a fractal bookshelf. An interview with Laarman by David Sokol will be in Whitewall’s summer issue. We chatted with the designer days before the opening to talk about the show that will be open through April 10.
WHITEWALL: Why did you want to create a show that deviated from your typical gallery show layout?
JORIS LAARMAN: We show a world of objects, that’s the idea behind the show. I have two types of work: one is really experimental work that’s shown at the gallery and if possible sometimes we translate it into an industrial product for companies like Flos. The second type of work is research that we want to show in a gallery as an option for future formal languages for objects or furniture. For example, the Bone furniture that came out of our research on bone structures that became a whole body of work.
Another [work that we’ll show] based on research is the bioluminescent lamp. It’s an option in the future to grow objects or products, which is a new way of production and with it comes a whole new language of objects. If you can grow products in a lab you don’t need natural resources anymore to get the materials to make your object.
WW: What is your process like? Which comes first, the research or the object?
JL: It’s a bit of both, one leg in design and one leg in the laboratory. The lamp itself is really a basic lamp shape, so it reminds people of everyday objects, but adding the living cells to it is something experimental and far away from what people know. The combination of both is exciting and interesting objects.
WW: In the show at Friedman Benda is a table that captures the pattern in flock of birds. How do you get from a pattern in a flock of birds to a table?
JL: We project an animation of a flock of birds behind the table and at a certain point you will see the table in the animation. The file, the animation, cannot be used to make an object so we used the information in the animation to create a script where all the wings of the birds are connected to each other so [the table] can stand alone. Making it a coffee table is a really practical solution because it’s pretty small and at the same time it’s an object of everyday life. So you would recognize it as something you know but it’s a complex sculpture created out of computer animation.
WW: What are you hoping for visitors of the show to walk away with?
JL: I want to share all the options we have at the moment. As a designer, with all the opportunities we are getting, there is so much free information available to young artists, and it’s more of an inspirational show so that people can see what’s going to happen in the future.
Portrait by Joost van Brug.
