Jonathan Muecke OPEN OBJECTS at Volume Gallery

Opening 14 September ‘18

Open Objects is an ongoing and continuous exploration and approach to design encompassing the practice of Jonathan Muecke. Tracing a decade of work, these objects are the manifestation of his philosophical and practical approach to design. Open Objects create layers of exploration: between the objects within the group and within each individual object.

Unified around the concept of measure, the scale of the human body grounds this presentation. This refined group of Open Objects spans across the measurement of a human: from head to toe, reaching from fingertip to fingertip. The six-foot tall steel MLP, for instance, shines light upward and downward extending the reach of the scale. In contrast, the fiberglass LCS expands horizontally as it reaches only nine inches tall. The irregular hexagonal form is comprised of concave arches to complete the geometric expression. Complex in engineering yet simple in appearance, the LCS represents the obscure intricacy that emerges through experience with these objects.

The clean, simple lines and forms of the work take on a straightforward functional approach allowing space for the conceptual to emerge. Rather than focusing on visually complex forms, the objects distill the necessary elements such as density and opacity or structure and strength. With each piece primarily comprised of one single material this removes the complexities of combining materials and affords a freedom to explore scale, shape, and quality. No one principle defines this open exploration where each object carefully balances the qualities from material to measure, resulting in a body of work in which the overlap is noticed but often indecipherable.

Jonathan Muecke has developed his design practice through a continued lineage of exploration in his Open Objects. Emerging from his design studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, his intentional approach to design has garnered several awards and commissions including the architectural pavilion commission for Design Miami (2014) and the USA Knight Fellowship (2015). Prior to his career in design, Muecke earned a BArch from Iowa State University and worked in office of Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland. His works are in the collections of several museums including The Museum of Art and Design in New York City, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Center National des Arts Plastiques in Paris, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Montreal, and The Art Institute of Chicago