We’re always trying to process all this information, all these ideas and thoughts and stimuli—it’s too, much; we fail at it constantly. But what if the world presented itself to the eye and brain in ways that were more digestible, more like charts and graphs we read so easily? Ori Toor’s worlds are like that, dense, colorful images feeling like the world’s most beautiful infographics, emotion, form, idea crammed together in shapes that are fun and easy to parse.
Symbols of life and liberty clash with the iconography of death and decay in Kamil Burman’s work—not in a harsh way, but in a way that reflects the balance between creation and destruction that we see in nature.
Creeping forms suggest a broadening of functions in Yidan Zeng’s designs, in which bold impact and the forgiving spirit of nature lend themselves to an airy evolution of type.
It’s not polite to stare. But if you do, if you really, really look at someone hard, they’ll begin to change in front of your eyes. They might shrink away at first, they might feel uncomfortable, they might yell—but if you continue to look, if you keep staring no matter what, you’ll see them in their most concentrated form. Ella Esguerra has done the legwork for us, has looked deep, and has recorded all that was revealed in intense portraits that feel as if they’ve have all of the fluff boiled out of them.
The speed of the future is coupled with the elegance of the past in YAN YAN’s work—smooth, radiant, architectural forms curve into words with the brilliance of some far flung temple to the sun.
When we feel defeated, it is easy to retreat and to curl up in bed and to hide from the things assailing us. And it can be hard to find courage. Hayley Powers Thorton-Kennedy has a dose for us all, however, transmitting the courage to be bold in bright portraits with powerful messages.
Habit makes wondrous things quotidian. Merve Akyel shocks the scales from our eyes, subverting tunnel vision with amorphous matter that stokes the imagination, each piece seeming to shift and change as you look at it.
Nature makes things the best, and we do our best to create objects that work in their natural environments. The wise among us, like AmniosyA, turn to nature when it comes to creation, because it’s hard to top millions of years worth of evolution.
We find nature beautiful, but often fail to incorporate organic sensibilities in our design. It makes our spaces feel divorced from the environments from which we came. SOFTlab, however, injects the natural into the manmade by hybridizing the two: the colors and shapes of of nature meet the materials and spaces of man. Together, they bring a sort of peaceful harmony to wherever the lab’s pieces they are placed.
