Hardcore Highlights

nik.mercer — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:00:08 -0700

Surfing the matrix of this year’s New York Design Week, its ad hoc thruways running a-bushel-and-a-peck through art galleries, fashion boutiques, cafes et al., is a bipolar-inducing experience. The highs and lows are often door-to-door; the boozing, however, remains romantically consistent.

Presently, one of the surefire gala centerpieces is New Finish Design’s HARDCORE exhibition organized by Design Forum Finland, which corrals some of the country’s guiding-lights alongside up-and-comers with distinctive and, more specifically, clear visions. Curated by world-renown designer Ilkka Suppanen, the exhibition may at first glance look like a homage to hodgepodge. Semi-disorienting translucence refracts from the Noa Bembibre-designed glass knives on anatomical display, and the same light is juggled by Janne Kyttänen’s Palm Chandelier, contoured to the stochastic foliage of palm trees. Design aficionados are encouraged to hang their coats on a pedestal of voluminously protruding “latva” (Finnish for a tree’s top branches), and then to try on multifunctional Fringe Necklaces, a new take on jewelry which can be worn as scarves or, if you’re feeling cheeky, tops.

Despite the funhouse aesthetic, what makes HARDCORE a breadwinner is precisely its very basis of tabula rasa: An attitude of unabashed fervor for the hyper-personal nature of Finnish design. Ambiguity, which of course can otherwise have its artistic virtues, is here thrown by the wayside, and in its place, a succinct vocabulary of design futurism comes to the fore. One of the featured projects, titled Touching, Tactile Surfaces, is a row of multimedia-crafted farm animals designed by Pentagon Design, each of whose skin, via the finish, provides character through forays of color and textures. Its concise idea is to stimulate our conversancy (our indecorum) with the natural world through the sense of touch. Another featured work, Mikko Paakkanen’s Medusa Chandelier, expands and contracts both autonomously as well as in response to heat, flirting with an anti-notion of light.