NeoCon 2023

 

In all the years I've been attending NeoCon at the Merchandise Mart, I've learned that change is the only constant. Exhibitors that seem to have a perennial presence stop showing up and new ones emerge to take their place. Companies merge or go out of business. And of course trends are always changing.

Change has been inevitable in the past few years. It's been interesting to see the changes that organizations have made juxtaposed with the areas in which they stubbornly remain the same. I am referring, once again, to the current trend I most despise: pretending that the pandemic is over and everything's "normal" again.

 

This is the way things are done nowadays, I suppose. No masks, just vibes. We are expected to live in a polite state of denial. I thought design was supposed to be about problem-solving, but how can you solve a problem when you pretend it doesn't exist? Anyway, that's a topic for another blog post. I wore both a mask and a face shield when I stopped by on Tuesday because of the approximate 99% masklessness of the crowds around me.

 

 

It was worth masking up and braving the crowds because I saw a lot of beautiful things. This year, my favorite new product was this concept from Sisyphus Industries.

 

You have to see this table in person to believe it. It's the perfect gift for someone who has everything. It would be a calming presence in a medical waiting room or a meditative focal point in a spa.

Akustus had my favorite booth this year. I love the way they took a mundane, utilitarian product like acoustic panels and made a bold statement with it.

Here are some other things that caught my eye:

 

Interior Design magazine's space

Camira and Luna Textiles

Andreu World

BNF Studio

Arrmet

elementAl samples from Swatchbox.com

Gold Leaf Design Group

SitOnIt Seating

F. Schumacher & Co.

Scandinavian Spaces

Fabricut

Kravet

Sanderson

Christian Lacroix in Osborne & Little Showroom

Scalamandré

The Bright Group

Samuel & Sons

Source International

Artistic Tile

deAurora

Ebanista

Sixinch

Falcon

Mayer Fabrics

KI

Furniturelab

Arcadia

Shaw Contract

CF Stinson

Ethnicraft

Steelcase

Designtex

Dauphin Group

RGS Furniture

Sekisui

Patcraft

Global Furniture Group

Wonderwall Studios

Slalom

ERG International

Krug

These were my favorite floral arrangements at NeoCon this year:

 

To see the rest of the photos that I took this year and full-size versions of the ones in this blog post, take a look at my Flickr album.

As usual, spending time immersed in interior design has made me eager to get started on some new projects, and I'm curious to see what changes next year's NeoCon show will bring.

My newest assemblage - "Make Something Real"

Make something real.

Those words came to me when I was considering what kinds of images I wanted to create to promote The Unforeseeable Future on social media. More than just an epiphany for that particular project, "make something real" has become this year's theme for me.

I have become disenchanted with the latest advances in technology. It seems like the notions of digital/virtual/artificial/augmented when it comes to images, intelligence, and reality itself have overtaken everything else. So far I'm not impressed with the metaverse, or NFTs, or A.I. "art." I need to get away from screens sometimes. I need to work with my hands. So what if it's messy.

Like its predecessors in this style, Make Something Real is the result of years of accumulation. An aluminum palette that probably dates back to 2019, paint skins, and paint that dried in various tubes and bottles when I was away from my studio in 2020 and 2021 all make up the entirety of this colorful assemblage. The support is a framed cradled wood board from the Artist and Craftsman Supply on Wabash that we lost in 2020.

I thought I hadn't made much art this year and was less productive than I was last year, and then I removed the blank wood boards that were laying on top of this piece and realized that it was almost done. I only had to add a few more pieces of dried paint.

In keeping with the title, I decided to use vintage ceramic titling letters to spell out "make something real" in some of my photos.

I think I may have come up with the title of my next book. We'll see.

Because of that, I've decided not to sell it yet. In the future it may be the star of a solo show.

Broken Bird

 

I joined before he did. 

Whenever I reflect on historical events that have happened since 2009, I find that my memories of where I was when I heard about them are tied not to physical locations (where were you when you heard about...) but to where I found out about them. That place is virtual. That place is inevitably Twitter. 

It was never perfect. It was deeply flawed, but Elon Musk's takeover has made it worse. Incidents of hate speech have increased sharply under his leadership. Consider this post I found in which the n-word appears over 50 times. 

 When I reported it, this was the official response:

It's disgusting to think that his new safety team has no problem with this. Disgusting but not surprising since the management thinks that finding a post like that offensive is a symptom of something he calls "the woke mind virus." I appreciate this commentary from a Black South African woman who called it like she saw it.

 

When he first took over the site, I said that I went to school with a bunch of Elon Musks, but that's not true. Those guys may have been racist and they may have been insufferable know-it-alls, but, unlike him, they actually knew something because they were actual geniuses.

 

He's just a rich man's son who got lucky. I suppose he sees himself as a merry prankster, a trickster archetype. I see him as an immature, insecure dork who deals in a literal, pedantic, sophomoric, bigoted edgelord humor that I despise. And he's not even tech-savvy enough to crop a screenshot.

As he continues to run Twitter into the ground like a suicidal airline pilot, the chaos he's manufactured has led to the rapid inversion of the meaning of a blue check mark next to a profile .

I am frustrated and disgusted that the imperfect site I had come to rely on for useful information has been rendered unstable and unsustainable by an over-privileged internet troll.

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