Exhibition & Museum Writing, No. ❺
April 16 – 21, 2024
Objects May Shift
Milan Design Week, SaloneSatellite A10
Written with 20 Participating Students; Edited and Reviewed by Jamie Marland, Anais Missakian, Pete Oyler
Curatorial Statement
Objects May Shift is a cross-disciplinary exhibition featuring work by students in seven disciplines—Ceramics, Furniture Design, Glass, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Interior Architecture, and Textiles—at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
This student-designed exhibition is a cross-pollination of ideas, materials and scales that investigate and interrogate our relationship to the domestic interior. Shifts in our climate, global politics and collective consciousness reconstruct our understanding of form, function and meaning. Our contemporary demands new approaches to materials, technologies and methods of making. For emerging artists and designers, this requires that we work collaboratively to imagine new possibilities from our unique disciplinary vantage points.
OBJECTS MAY SHIFT IS A PROMPT TO THINK IN NEW WAYS AND TO EVOLVE OUR PERCEPTIONS OF THE WORLD AROUND US.
As our world transforms, our creative outputs do too.
PRESS Statement and COURSE DESCRIPTION
Topics in Exhibition is an intensive studio course at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Variously a group critique, an idea accelerator, a collective curatorial experience, an expression of a single thematic idea in diverse media and a workshop in which to formally refine visual and material concepts, Topics in Exhibition offers students an opportunity to design and produce a multidisciplinary exhibition for the international stage.
Comprised of 20 students from seven distinct disciplines including Ceramics, Furniture Design, Glass, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Interior Architecture, and Textiles, the 2024 Topics in Exhibition course explores our ever-evolving relationship to—and experience of—the interior. Co-directed by Anais Missakian (Pevaroff-Cohn Family Endowed Chair in Textiles) and Pete Oyler (Associate Professor, Furniture Design), the resulting exhibition—Objects May Shift—is part of the 2024 Satellite Salone at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, Italy.
A prompt to recontextualize the ordinary and find surprise in the unexpected, Objects May Shift is a curious and critical exploration of how our world and the ways that we inhabit it are changing. From graphic design to art, furniture and textiles, the exhibition foregrounds creative flux and transgresses disciplinary tradition. A variable typeface is scaled to excess, skewed and outlined; an upholstered seat inflates to become a wall; a cabinet is made from a dresser; and a woven Jacquard tapestry pairs AI-generated imagery with images of wealth, hoarding and trash. The exhibition is as imaginative and optimistic as it is sobering.
OBJECTS MAY SHIFT IS A COLLABORATIVE PROPOSITION THAT ASKS US TO THINK BOLDLY, TO SEE MORE THAN WHAT MEETS THE EYE AND, PERHAPS MOST POIGNANTLY, TO CONSIDER WHAT MAY BE.
Ideas May Shift. Perspectives May Shift. Worlds May Shift. Futures May Shift