Surface Bent

Friends Artspace is delighted to open our fifth season with Surface Bent, an exhibition that celebrates collaboration, transmogrification, and the porous boundary between art and design.

This exhibition brings together the work of 12 artists: Annette Hur, C.S. Corbin, February James, India Sachi, Jamilla Okubo, John Brendan Guinan, John Rivas, Mahari Chabwera, Motohiro Takeda, Rafael Domenech, Sangmin Lee, and Tomas Vu.

Each artist was given a white cedar chair designed and constructed by Theju Nimmagadda, with a prompt to make it their own. In adorning and reimagining a utilitarian form, the artists challenge the supposed islands of fine and decorative arts. In some cases art gently bends towards function, in others, transformation is so total that the lineage of the original object is almost lost.