Patrick Parrish Gallery

For Design Curio 2014, Patrick Parrish Gallery presented an installation by the design studio RO/LU in collaboration with Various Projects. The booth walls are covered in black and white gridded fabric by Various Projects, designed to mimics the welded-steel cage of RO/LU's new series of objects, Uncertain Surfaces.

RO/LU's series consists of a dining table, four stools, a closed cabinet and two life size steel figures, standing and kneeling. During the opening, models and gallery attendants will sport the clothing in the same fabric by Various Projects in the booth and will circulate about the fair. RO/LU's project will be a true exploration of their inspiration behind the series, philosopher Bruno Latour's concept of 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 the design team's 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." A collage of the past and the present, the project also draws on the ideas behind Superstudio’s Quaderna line, environmental installations by Ettore Sottsass, Scott Burton and James Lee Byars’ utilization of man as a symbol object.