Next month, Nick Ozemba and Felicia Hung, the co-founders of Brooklyn-based design studio In Common With, plan to open Quarters, a store housed in a 19th-century TriBeCa loft. The 8,000-square-foot space is laid out like a well-appointed home: Guests enter through the library and can wander the great room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, bar and living room at their leisure. Everything inside — furniture, lighting, artwork, even the cabinet supplies — is available for purchase. Ozemba and Hung collaborated with several of their creative friends on the objects and decor that fill the space. They designed all the tiles with New York-based artist Shane Gabier, while a fresco depicting eels with earrings by painter Claudio Bonuglia adorns part of the bar and lounge, which will open for evening service starting this summer. The furniture on display is a mix of restored vintage pieces and new designs by Ozemba and Hung, some of which can be customized with images drawn by various tattoo artists. “We’ll be able to sit with people and play,” Ozemba says of the space’s potential to encourage conversation and inspire new work. “Retail shouldn’t be so serious. Take off your shoes and drink a glass of wine.” Quarters opens on May 13, shopquarters.com.
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Spiral sculptures made from recycled CDs
Throughout her career, New York-based artist Tara Donovan has explored the transformative potential of mass-produced materials, questioning whether they can transcend their origins. In a new exhibition at Pace Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood called “Stratagems,” Donovan presents 11 towering new works made entirely of CDs, most of which she scavenged and salvaged from eBay. “We live in an age that feels increasingly defined by cycles of ingenuity and obsolescence,” says Donovan. “The records of the human experience have moved from volumes of paper to the clouds in just my lifetime, and the CD is probably the last vestige of understanding data as an object.” He left the discs intact, strategically overlapping and attaching them to each other, resulting in structures that reach up to nine feet in height. They are meant to allude to the architecture of skyscrapers, an echo that is visible from the windows of the seventh floor where the show is located. On a sunny day, Donovan’s towers sometimes have a prismatic effect, casting rainbows of light across the floor. On May 4, during Frieze Week in New York, Donovan’s friend, choreographer Kim Brandt, will stage a six-dancer performance as part of the exhibition. Stratagems is available from May 3rd to June 15th, pacegallery.com.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s northernmost neighborhood, has long been a New York City bakery destination. There’s decades-long Polish standby Peter Pan, immortalized as Zendaya’s MJ’s part-time workplace in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), and Syrena Bakery, another Polish staple since 1993 that sells everything from bread and babka to tiramisù and holiday cookies. Several more bakery purveyors have opened in the past year, including Radio Bakery, led by pastry chef Kelly Mencin with a menu that focuses on what she calls New York’s “taste memories,” such as bacon, egg and cheese focaccia, sesame seed buns and Earl Gray breakfast rolls. In November, Taku Santo opened on Greenpoint Avenue, making decadent Japanese sandwiches served on house-made shokupan bread also sold by the loaf. In a red building on Norman Avenue, there is Pan Pan Vino Vino, a bakery and wine bar from the owners of Nura, an Indian-inspired restaurant a few blocks away. Designer and co-owner Nico Arze has decorated the pastry case with paintings of volcanoes in a nod to his native Chile. Inside, there are loaves of cumin rye bread — pastry chef Sam Short remembers her Polish grandmother making liver sandwiches — along with guava cream cheese Danishes made from croissants. And since February, the sea of coffee cups and candy bags at McGolrick Park has taken on a white and red hue — Paloma coffeehis signature colors — ever since the baker opened a bakery outpost on Nassau Avenue. Its single-origin beans are now complemented by innovative pastries (take the artichoke, olive and potato bear claw).
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A vase inspired by Alice Waters’ Home Kitchen
When Fanny Singer, author and founder of design brand Permanent Collection, was looking for a muse for her next homewares collection, she turned to her mother, pioneering California chef and seasonal champion of slow food Alice Waters. The pair had already teamed up to release Waters’ egg spoon, a hand-forged iron utensil for frying eggs over a hot flame. The newest piece of their collaboration, coinciding with Waters’ 80th birthday this month, is a supersize statement vase with wide, sweeping handles. The piece is inspired by an antique Italian urn that sits in a pleasantly cluttered corner of the kitchen of Waters’ Berkeley, California home, which she often fills with twigs. “I always connect flowers with her — making these beautiful creations with whatever she cuts from her garden or a friend’s cherry or plum tree,” says Singer. To recreate Waters’ beloved object, the duo turned to a local ceramist, Niki Shelley, who glazed the vessel a deep, earthy green. Waters says it’s the aspect of the amphora she loves most: “For me, it’s the color of nature and it pulls the greens of the garden into the kitchen.” $740, permanentcollection.com.
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An Artist’s Photographic Arrangements, on View in Chinatown, New York
Mexico-born, Vancouver-based artist Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez is preparing to hold “Survey,” his first New York solo show, on April 26 at David Peter Francis, a Chinatown gallery that opened in March. The show includes a new suite of giclée prints in which Rodriguez juxtaposes his photography with some of his own iPhone snapshots, making various compositions over grids, arcs and zigzag lines that resemble bar graphs, invoking a sense of scientific or taxonomic connection between images which is, in fact, unrelated. The body of work was born out of a frustration Rodriguez experienced while living and teaching in Chicago: When working on a video piece that required extensive archival research, the artist found some institutions’ regulations on the use of photography to be creatively stifling. As he says, “The images had to be connected to a specific narrative that the archive was trying to preserve, and there was no room for art.” Although Rodriguez still uses established archives, he more regularly sources images from encyclopedias, eBay and, occasionally, the sidewalk. (“The ones I’ve found on the street are surprisingly good,” he says.) In “Sleeping Boys I” (2024), Rodriguez juxtaposes an image of a person sleeping soundly and drenched in sunlight against a photograph of a sleeping carved in stone, while ‘Unmade Beds’ (2024) presents multiple views of crumpled sheets and lumpy pillows (one image is, in fact, a photograph of a photograph of a photograph). “Survey” is available from April 26th to June 1st, davidpeterfrancis.com.
When Simone Bodmer-Turner moved from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to a farmhouse in rural Massachusetts last spring, the 34-year-old ceramist suddenly found herself at a professional impasse. Separated from her bakery for the first time in her career, “I had no idea how I was going to work,” she recalls. Turning to a range of new materials, he gradually began to imagine a collection of purposeful pieces that best resembled the traditional New England setting. In a move away from the abstract, bulbous forms she once fashioned systematically in her Brooklyn studio, “Now it’s about function first,” she says, “and sculpture second.” Her latest works include a patinated bronze lamp that bears the texture of the original hand-molded clay model from which it was cast, while a simple wooden side table—similar to one she encountered at a local Shaker museum—is offset with whimsical, surrealist-inspired feet and one urushi lacquer finish by artist Yuko Gunji, a former neighbor and frequent collaborator of Bodmer-Turner. The pieces will be featured in the upcoming exhibition “A Year Without a Kiln” at the Emma Scully Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side. Versions of the larger pieces of furniture, along with a handful of decorative items — from fireplace irons to a silk screen designed to hide an air conditioning unit — are now available for purchase in the hope that they will become heirlooms. The artist moved into her new home with the intention of staying there forever, which, she says, “really gave birth to a desire for timelessness.” “A Year Without a Kiln” will run from May 2nd to June 22nd. emmascullygallery.com.
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