someparts x a83

someparts x a83 features an original line of reconfigurable furniture and small architecture designed by stock-a-studio for a83’s storefront gallery space on Grand Street in Soho. The furniture is accompanied by and in support of viewing a selection of prints from a83's archive.

Detroit-based Laida Aguirre of stock-a-studio continues their investigation of industrial readymades and flexible assemblies with a new installation of the ongoing someparts project. someparts x a83 breaks new ground in the designer’s practice by utilizing a kit of generic components sourced from the global logistics market – aluminum poles, steel panels, straps, foam, and moving blankets – to form unique furniture pieces and small-scale architecture. The work explores temporary assembly tactics and provisionality as novel strategies for living. Each piece’s component parts may be unfastened and reconfigured at will.

The work explores a DIY ethos of imaginative reassembly and creative worldmaking by bringing familiar elements into unexpected combinations. Each piece is the unscripted result of a play between generic components and specific eccentricities of assembly. Individual pieces – which include tables, chairs, lounges, among others – exhibit local, modular symmetries and surprising connections. Nylon straps form quasi-Baroque curlicues while zinc-plated nuts and bolts mark out staccatos of jointery in an almost ornamental mode.

The reusable kit anticipates its own afterlife. Flexibility is a virtue that helps someparts objects avoid the trash heap; the component parts of pieces that are no longer useful can always be repurposed. someparts is a net zero system that produces no waste. Assemblies may always be rebuilt and recirculated in new contexts indefinitely. Like a giant Erector® set, someparts is what you make it. At a83, someparts is an infrastructure for immersive aesthetic experience. stock-a-studio’s new designs are complemented by a selection of archival prints by architects Diller + Scofidio and Thom Mayne, and artists Charles Ross, Allan D’Arcangelo, and Ian Hornak. An original soundscape by composer Ash Fure sets the tone.

Ash Fure's score is no mere background. Tingling and tactile, it is full-body music – in the making, and in the listening. Fure's intimate, sensuous work studies how sound is made and perceived. Objects and bodies are terrain for exploration, as instruments and audiences alike; in any performance, if you can call it that, the environment is the ensemble. And often in surprising ways: The subtle modulation of breath is shot through a megaphone, or a subwoofer is pushed to profound extremes. In the process, Fure amplifies the seemingly imperceptible, rendering it viscerally unavoidable.