DESIGNING WOMEN IV:
EILEEN GRAY’S HOUSE FOR TWO SCULPTORS
May 15 - June 15, 2024
Over her career Eileen Gray designed nearly fifty works of architecture. Only three were ever realized.
Each holding a degree in architecture, Egg Collective’s three co-founders — Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis and Hillary Petrie — know firsthand that architecture is a male-dominated industry. However, while scouting potential photoshoot locations, they were struck by how few works of female-authored historic architecture are documented or exist in the present day. Designing Women IV: Eileen Gray’s House for Two Sculptors was born out of a desire to address this chasm. They wondered, what if, through modern technology, an unbuilt work of female-authored architecture could be realized and therefore lifted from obscurity? This line of questioning set them off on a journey through architectural archives and eventually into a conversation across time with the late Eileen Gray.
One of Eileen Gray’s architectural works that never made it past pencil on paper was the House for Two Sculptors. Upon her passing at the age of 98, the House for Two Sculptors lived on in Gray’s archive as a rarely published set of basic hand drawings. Conceived of in 1933, its clients, site and broader inspiration have been lost to history. Reading that the plan for the House for Two Sculptors was designed around an “egg-shaped” atelier, a seed was planted. After gaining permission to do so, Egg Collective’s co-founders set out on a years long journey of discovery, research and inspiration in order to digitally bring Eileen Gray’s original plans to life.
Aiming to exemplify ideas sketched out by Grey but never completed in her lifetime, the project entailed carefully retracing the marks left by Eileen’s hand, as well as the study of her aesthetic, ethos and legacy. Throughout the process, Egg Collective endeavored to stay true to the unmistakable creative language Eileen Gray developed over the course of her long career while also asserting the inspiration she had on subsequent generations of designers, themselves included.
Designing Women IV: Eileen Gray’s House for Two Sculptors documents this process and invites viewers to imagine what it would be like to inhabit the House for Two Sculptors had it been built via a series of photorealistic renderings, and an exhibition on view at the company’s Tribeca Gallery. The exhibition will open to the public on May 15th wherein vignettes inspired by both the House for Two Sculptors and Eileen Gray’s unmistakeable design language will be presented alongside designs by Egg Collective and artworks by two contemporary sculptors and friends: Taylor Kibby and Molly Haynes.
Visit the Designing Women Exhibition Website to Learn More
IMAGES TOP: Drawings by Eileen Gray, Design for a house for two sculptors: plan & elevations, 1933. © RIBA Library Drawings and Archive Collections
IMAGES MIDDLE: Renderings of the House for Two Sculptors, 2023 © Egg Collective
IMAGES BOTTOM: Photographs of the Exhibition Designing Women IV: Eileen Gray’s House for Two Sculptors, 2024 © Egg Collective
SNAKE EYES
May 15 - October 18, 2023
Egg Collective is pleased to announce Snake Eyes, an exhibition featuring works by Caroline Blackburn, Taylor Kibby, Casey McCafferty, Kiva Motnyk and Julian Watts. The exhibition forms a dialogue with the coinciding new collection of designs by Egg Collective, also titled Snake Eyes.
Objects often represent much more than what they are. Acting as emblems of power, vessels for memory, or markers of time, they serve as physical memoirs that bear witness to, and span, human history. “Thing Power”, a term coined by philosopher and political theorist Jane Bennett, captures this idea asking us to entertain the notion that we live in an enchanted world occupied by lively matter. Through her work, Bennet challenges the idea that the “stuff” surrounding us is inert. Instead, she argues that it has a will of its own.
The phrase, Snake Eyes, contains within it two powerful protective totems, each assigned specific importance throughout human history - the figure of a snake and the watchful gaze of the eye. Both shapes being two of the oldest and most widespread mythological symbols. Historically the snake symbolized fertility and the creative life force, signaling notions of rebirth and transformation. Depictions of the human eye have come to offer both protection and ward off danger. The idea that images, objects and symbols carry with them an energy imparted by nature, mysticism, the creator or the possessor, is the space Snake Eyes inhabits.
Snake Eyes explores the idea of the enchanted object by weaving together concepts, images, and symbols from Egg Collective’s own personal narrative and the personal narratives of the five included artists. New works by Kiva Motnyk and Taylor Kibby hint at notions of the body through the use of visual references to the protective nature of quilts and second skins. Caroline Blackburn’s ceramic vessels make physically tangible the artist’s movements and act as visual evidence of the alchemy of hand applied glazes interacting with the heat of the kiln. To achieve this, Blackburn molds, throws and scrapes each piece until arriving at an instinctual and intuitive state of completion. Casey McCafferty’s carved wood and stone pieces reference totems, abstracted human limbs, mythology and nature, calling the viewer to contemplate a more elemental understanding of material and form. The hidden natural world is itself abstracted and meticulously explored by artist, Julian Watts, in his refined hand carved sculptures made out of wood, referencing botanical forms, landscape and the relationship of the human form to nature.
HIROKO TAKEDA + JEFF MARTIN NEW WORKS
February 28 - April 14, 2023
Egg Collective is thrilled to announce the two person exhibition, Hiroko Takeda + Jeff Martin NEW WORKS. The exhibition features three new pieces by Takeda. Each work drawing on and expanding upon the quiet contemplative nature of her process, in which Takeda explores the sculptural possibilities of fiber. Two “Sarcophagus” works by Martin are also on view publicly for the first time. Crafted of hand made ceramics, wood and metal, Martin’s hanging wall mounted works, cosmically reference the adorned, sculptural burial coffins of ancient civilizations. Each piece containing a hidden storage chamber for valuables and secrets alike.
HIROKO TAKEDA (b. 1966, Japan)
Hiroko Takeda is a New York based artist born in Japan. She trained in the tradition of the Mingei Undou (Japanese Arts and Crafts Movement) and earned an MA in Constructed Textiles from the Royal College of Art in London. Takeda has exhibited in the US, Europe, Australia and Japan. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, by Surface Magazine and in the publication “Weaving: Contemporary Makers on the Loom” published by Ludion in 2018. For eight years, she was the senior designer at Jack Lenor Larsen Studio (Larsen was a long time associate of Anni Albers) prior to venturing out on her own. Takeda’s clients include Richard Meier, Victoria Hagan, Calvin Klein and Peter Marino, for whom she has created pieces for Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior. In 2019, she completed a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut.
Originally trained to prioritize utility and craft, Takeda's interests in weaving evolved to view the medium as a means for self expression focused on her conceptualization of the world. "The world I see—like the world of warp and weft—has rules and constraints that are supposed to be good for us, but disorder happens naturally and the other side of tension is fluidity.” Takeda seeks to explore, manipulate and push the limits of her materials to realize her vision, which must be laid out with mathematical precision before she begins working on her handloom, while simultaneously welcoming that which is unforeseen. Her goal being to produce a work that is greater than what she could have initially imagined and in which a correspondence is achieved between light and dark, surface and depth, bound and unbound.
JEFF MARTIN (b. 1984, Canada)
Jeff Martin lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. Originally known as a furniture designer, Martin’s works blur the line between art and design, functional form and sculpture. Working in ceramics, glass, bronze and stone, Martin seeks an ever expanding material vocabulary, allowing his practice to evolve and grow. An ever present attention to craft and the process of creating ties together Martin’s growing body of work, ranging from excavated glass vessels to ceramic sarcophagi.
Martin has exhibited internationally with shows at the Royal Ontario Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Gardiner Museum, Museum of Vancouver, Expo Chicago, Collective Design Fair, New York, and as part of 1000 Vases, Paris Design Week. He is a 2019 Artist in Residence at the Tacoma Museum of Glass. His work has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, Interior Design magazine, Elle Decor, Sweden and Casa Vogue, Brazil.
NICK FAGAN: TRANSUBSTANTIATION
November 28, 2022 - February 15, 2023
Egg Collective is please to announce the opening of Transubstantiation a solo exhibition of quilted tapestries by artist Nick Fagan.
The title refers to the spiritual process, through ritual, where wine and bread turn into the blood and body of Christ. Fagan, who was raised in a Catholic household, was intrigued by the notion that everyday objects and materials have the power to transform into something much greater.
Fagan initially became fascinated with moving blankets because they show the wear and tear of labor and the history of their use. When in use, the blankets touch every aspect of human use/life, interacting directly with the family history of the customer. They are used as ‘an assist,” a thing that protects and holds but is then put away; never the main object. The blankets are in essence a leftover; only ever having a utilitarian purpose and then forgotten.
Similar to Joseph Beuys’ idea of the charged object, Fagan believes that the process of using the blankets to wrap objects gives the fabric a “charge”. The residue of touch and use, including stains and rips, imbues the artworks with the energy of moments past. Household objects and furniture get from here to there, but often we forget there was a person involved. There is sweat and touch mediating between both the physical body of the porter and the blankets. Thinking back to the transubstantiation idea of the body and blood, the mover’s body is intertwined with the blankets through their labor, transforming a blanket into a palimpsest of use, time and care. For Fagan, the scale of the work is important. His intention is that the viewer feels encompassed, covered like the objects once moved. At this scale, the history of the fabric, a history of protection, becomes spiritual for the artist.
Nick Fagan earned a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in sculpture and an M.F.A. from Ohio State, also in sculpture. Fagan’s work often utilizes cast off textiles and pre-existing patterns, which he reworks into large scale wall pieces and free standing sculptures.He recently completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The Studios at Mass MoCa. His work has been exhibited by Massey Klein Gallery, The Hole, NYC., and at NADA NY and Future Fair with ADA Gallery.
DRAWINGS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN
September 1, 2022 - November 4, 2022
Egg Collective is proud to present, Drawings You’ve Never Seen. This unique exhibition, curated by Rodger Stevens, brings together the work of over thirty artists and designers from a diversity of disciplines. The work that typically emerges from their studios, however, will not be on view. This is a show of drawings – by individuals who make objects.
The demands of the market, the need for consistency, the quest for a clear and coherent voice, these are some of the forces exerted upon the body of work that an artist allows into the public realm. But behind the carefully crafted pieces and the curation of the cogent product lines, runs a perhaps more personal, more intimate, less polished pursuit, one that often takes the form of a simple drawing.
This exhibition seeks to offer a window onto that background, into those sketchbooks, through those scraps of paper, overlooking that table of maquettes and models.
It is the curator's own love of drawings, and his deep interest in the creators he selected, that motivated this show, along with his hope to offer these artists a stage upon which to share something different with their audience, something out of the ordinary, something free from the constraints of commerce and the pressures of the grand gesture. That is the thesis, and the artists will take it from there.
WORKS BY: Lindsey Adelman, Dana Barnes, Chen Chen and Kai Williams, Roman Delgado, Ben Erickson, Johanna Goodman, Hiroyuki Hamada, Steven Haulenbeek, Tyler Hays, Hilda Hellstrom, Damien Hoar de Galvan, Neal Hollinger, Cody Hoyt, Serban Ionescu, Nicolette Johnson, Doug Johnston, Pat Kim, Kieran Kinsella, Sigve Knutson, Jason Krugman, Christopher Kurtz, Eleanor Lakelin, Liam Lee, Carlos Matos ,Richard McGuire, Maria Moyer, Jeff Quinn ,Eric Roinestad, Rodger Stevens, Faye Toogood, Simone Bodmer Turner, Mariko Wada, Julian Watts, David Weeks, Chris Wolston, Ryosuke Yazaki and Maayan Zilberman.
IN ALL THINGS A TRACE
May 12, 2022 - August 12, 2022
Egg Collective is proud to present, In All Things a Trace, featuring works by Jane Yang D’Haene, Taylor Kibby, Nick Fagan, Motohiro Takeda and Arnout Visser. Whether drawn to the energy of heritage, alchemy, repetition, or use, each artist’s work explores the notion that objects are capable of resonating with traces of lives lived. In this way, the works operate as vestiges of what was as well as suggesting the creation of something new.
Ceramic artist, Jane D’Haene’s, minimalist vessels reference her heritage and traditional Korean pottery techniques. However, through D’Haene’s experimental approach to the finishing of her pieces and glazing techniques, each vessel is infused with a tension that unsettles the work from its heritage. Though each vessel is unique, repetition of specific forms is a hallmark of D’Haene’s work. From this repetition, a sense of familiarity develops and memories of shapes observed are reimagined and crystalized slightly askew. While D’Haene’s pieces reference collective cultural tradition, Taylor Kibby’s mesmerizing link based ceramic works are intensely focused on the repetition of specific personal moments, as if the artist is ruminating, fixated on singular intimate events. Titles like, “I can rage without losing you” 2022, create the impression that Kibby is infusing each link with the emotion of moments endured.
Nick Fagan’s large scale wall works, created from used moving blankets, cut and sewn back together, pop with forms that dance across the wall. Upon closer inspection these forms give way to material fields marked with the stains of labor. Fagan is specifically drawn to the metaphorical qualities of moving blankets. They are objects of utility used to wrap and protect belongings of human life during transition. Fagan believes that in the process of passing from hand to hand, object to object, the blankets become charged with the energy of the pieces, places and people they have been in contact with.
Motohiro Takeda and Arnout Visser blend a deep understanding of material and historic process with the magic of chemistry. Takeda’s cameraless photography relies upon direct exposure of objects and reflections onto the photographic paper. To create these works, Takeda transformed a room into a camera obscura, creating an upside down version of the world outside his window through a pinhole in the blinds. The artist followed the sun through the seasons creating a series of photograms aptly titled, Another Sun. Each unique photographic image, vibrates with the energy of the moment and marks the passage of time. Arnout Visser’s glass blown mushroom lamps rely on a humorous interpretation of the age old technique of glass blowing. Calling to mind both the principles of the Bauhaus and the material pleasures of Venetian glass. In this duality lies both the work’s connection to history and its link to the contemporary.
GRAY AREA
January 25, 2022 - March 25, 2022
Egg Collective is thrilled to announce the exhibition Gray Area, featuring works by nine contemporary artists whose work explores and blurs the line between art and design. Through material interrogation Kiva Motnyk, Ruth Charlotte Kneass, Luam Melake, Rachel Duvall, Jaye Kim, Malcolm Mobutu Smith, Jeff Martin, Hiroko Takeda, and Steven Haulenbeek question what defines and elevates objecthood.
Material lust, paired with a desire to subvert or expand upon a deep understanding of techniques often associated with craft or utilitarianism, drives the artists in Gray Area to create. Showcased are oversized vessels with wilted flowers that appear to have become part of the structure, a wall-mounted marigold sarcophagus that enshrines treasures or toothbrushes, quilted textiles hand-dyed with foraged plants that act like stained glass windows, cast and carved sand that takes the form of a light, and wall sized amulets that incorporate sewn in plastic, worn clothes and expired movie tickets.
In their varied approach to materiality, each exhibited artist links themself to a distinguished history of makers who have questioned previous generations’ boundaries regarding the definition of art, thus creating a historical bridge to artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Anni Albers, Alice Kagawa Parrot, Ruth Asawa and Stan Bitters.
DESIGNING WOMEN III: MOTHER
MAY 3, 2021 - MAY 29, 2021
Egg Collective is pleased to present Designing Women III: MOTHER, the third in a series of group exhibitions focused on highlighting women in art and design. Featuring the works of 28 contemporary and historical artists and designers, who also happen to be mothers, the Designing Women III: MOTHER exhibition seeks to foster a conversation about how women have achieved success, blazed trails, and furthered their craft over time.
To stand amongst the historical pieces included in Designing Women III: MOTHER offers a compelling look at the work and careers of the historical artists and designers, such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Zeisel and Imogen Cunningham, noting the struggles that appeared along their paths of motherhood/creator and their eventual critical success. Living legends like Faith Ringgold, Maria Pergay and Loretta Pettway Bennett all of whom produced works, both political and formal, bridging the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement, serve as present day luminaries. To look at the works of many of the contemporary artists and designers exhibited, is to view the output of those that are in the struggle presently, navigating the roles of mother and artist/designer during a global pandemic. Their paths are still unfolding. They are the lives in process, the bodies of work still undetermined. Each a link in the chain of trailblazers.
Egg Collective does not profit from the sales of works in this exhibition, instead proceeds directly benefit the artists, designers and participating galleries. To benefit mothers worldwide, Egg Collective has partnered with Every Mother Counts. Every Mother Counts’ mission is to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother, everywhere.
Visit the Designing Women Exhibition Website to Learn More
SUPPORT SYSTEMS
FEBRUARY 15, 2021 - MAY 3, 2021
Egg Collective is pleased to present Support Systems, a group exhibition featuring works by Steven Haulenbeek, Ben Medansky, Brian Thoreen, Vissio, Stephen Somple and Taylor Kibby.
Support Systems, presents the work of six artists/collaboratives; for all of whom, material understanding and experimentation is at the heart of their practice. Each artist has mastered and expanded the use of their medium of choice and utilizes that mastery as a method of support for the conceptual works they create. The pieces included in the exhibition demonstrate not only an intensive study of how material, form and concept come together but also the ability of the included artists to create boundary blurring works that echo truth, playfulness, melancholy, trauma and the presence of the human form.
While the exhibition formally coalesces around the framework that material provides for the creative impulse, Support Systems as a concept operates as a duality of sorts. It is a play on words for the specific need of support that both artists and society have felt so deeply during the pandemic.
AN UNBOUND CHAIN
SEPTEMBER 8, 2020 - FEBRUARY 15, 2021
Egg Collective is pleased to present An Unbound Chain, a group exhibition featuring works by Hiroko Takeda, Simone Bodmer Turner, Taylor Kibby and Ben Medansky.
A brain alive looks for openness; seeks freedom, identifies the break in the wall, the change in the rhythm, while simultaneously recognizing pattern and creating a set of organizing principals. DNA is our most basic organizing principal but scientists have discovered that even DNA can break free and become “unzipped" when bond force is applied, releasing the energy of an unbound chain. Hiroko Takeda, Simone Bodmer Turner, Taylor Kibby and Ben Medansky channel ideas of repetition, linkage and the strength of what begins as a coil but each allows for the artist alive to intervene, to seek the narrative that is complicated with ideas of the human heart; of touch, of imperfection and all the beauty that lies within the idiosyncrasies of balancing on the line between order and abandon.
SURFACE BREAK
February 4, 2020 - August 26, 2020
A veil should hint at what’s under it. The lips are a bow, the present a present. With a spool of thread, she’s Ariande in charge of a labyrinth. On a bivalve shell, she’s a goddess. Now a blurred bride on a bed. She is what you want her to be. -Mary Jo Bang from “The Doll Song” A Doll For Throwing
Egg Collective is pleased to present Surface Break, a group show featuring the work of Dan Boardman, Amanda Martinez and Cody Tumblin. All three of the artists in the show create work that questions the nature of “surface." The very existence of a surface, after all implies that there is something we are not seeing, something that exists underneath one’s view. Surfaces have long proposed to humanity the possibility of discovery, if willing to look. The surface of the ocean appears impenetrable from the shore but once broken another world is revealed. Dan Boardman, Amanda Martinez and Cody Tumblin leave just enough of a break to allow the viewer to contemplate the subtle references to culture, form, limitation, disguise and memory that exist within their given works.
TEMPORAL ARRANGEMENTS
OCTOBER 2, 2019 - JANUARY 31, 2020
Egg Collective is pleased to announce “Temporal Arrangements”, a group exhibition featuring the work of Rodger Stevens, Amy Kim Keeler, Jenna Westra, Simone Bodmer Turner and Jeff Martin. Temporal Arrangements examines the concept and question of how an artist imparts a sense of time to form and materials. When visual spaces are used as the indicators of a moment that occurred and disappeared, of speed or of patience, can the physical manifestation of time and form influence our politics or our perception of the body and governance? Can outline and void become communication when methodically arranged?
Whether the process is one of freezing a fleeting moment, calling attention to fears for the future, preserving a space destroyed, or using time and material to create a universal language that is also personal, these artists use the inherent properties of their chosen mediums to create works that probe notions of what we miss when we value expediency without awareness of process or consequence.
MATERIAL MATTERS
May 21 - August 23, 2019
Egg Collective is pleased to announce “Material Matters”, a group exhibition featuring works by Mimi Jung, Kristina Riska, Matthew King, Tealia Ellis Ritter and Stephen Somple.
Each artist in the exhibition uniquely pushes the materials they have selected to work with, while a reference to the artist’s body, or hand, in the making of the work, operates as a consistent thread amongst the five. Mimi Jung, Kristina Riska and Stephen Somple make fluid in appearance materials that naturally seek rigidity, revealing the impact of the body and the effect of form and void. Matthew King seeks minimalist precision while allowing for evidence of the hand made nature of his wall pieces and actively blurring boundaries between painting and sculpture. Tealia Ellis Ritter aims to influence perception through manual analog manipulation of the photographic negative, connecting the motion of the body to the final image.
DESIGNING WOMEN II: MASTERS, MAVERICKS, MAVENS
SPRING 2018
For NYCxDesign Week 2018, female-owned-&-led design studio Egg Collective is pleased to present "Designing Women II: Masters, Mavericks, Mavens". Conceived of as a conversation across both time and space, the second iteration of the “Designing Women” show builds upon the critical acclaim of 2017's inaugural show, and features an international roster of work from both contemporary and historical female voices. Co-curated with Lora Appleton, the founder of kinderMODERN and The Female Design Council, the selected works are intended to foster a conversation about how women have achieved success, blazed trails, and furthered their craft over time.
Works by: Bari Ziperstein, Cini Boeri, Egg Collective, Greta Magnusson Grossman, Heidi Abrahamson, Katie Stout, Kristin Victoria Barron, Leza Mcvey, Lilian Holm, Marta Palmieri, Mary Giles, Mimi Jung, Mira Nakashima, Nanna Ditzel, Natalie Weinberger, Nicola L, Rooms, Sabine Marcelis, Sonwai, and Winsome Brave
In partnership with: R & Company, The Future Perfect, Hostler Burrows, Etage Projects, Christina Grajales Gallery, Mark McDonald, and Lost City Arts
Visit the Design Women Exhibition Website to Learn More
DESIGNING WOMEN
SPRING 2017
