Tuesday, August 31, 2010

RAWtation by Adi Zaffran Weisler





















Now that I am here in London, I intend to re-focus my posting, or rather, broaden my posting to include more contemporary art and design that I find compelling.  I love good pop music, but my passion is for contemporary design/art.  I would like for this blog to better reflect that.  Hopefully you'll dig it as well.

To start, here is the RAWtation collection from Israeli designer Adi Zaffran Weisler.  Weisler has created a series of tables and stools by combining sticks, twigs and tree branches with plastic molds.

Throughout the 20th century, modernist designers and architects sought to distance their work from the natural world through a conceptual (almost religious) dependence on the machine.  For the Italian Futurists, the motor car typified an ideal of beauty, while the dutch de Stijl designers and artists eliminated all decoration in the work, favoring a utilitarian machine aesthetic.  The mechanization of the modern world has continued unobstructed, and today our lives literally revolve around our computers.  I suspect a digitization of our lives will only deepen.

Weisler's combination of the "natural" and the "synthetic," therefore,  is a relevant expression and perhaps a reaction to the computer aided and photo-shopped world we live in today.  Not to mention, the pieces look very cool!