The first New York edition of Collectible, an annual contemporary design fair founded in Brussels six years ago, opened on Wednesday during what always feels like the city’s cultural “back-to-school” moment, with fashion week, art fairs, openings, and other events all colliding on the calendar. The Belgian import’s debut stateside fair, which closes today, featured one-off and limited edition work from dozens of galleries, designers, studios, and collectives spread out over two raw floors at 161 Water Street, a corporate office building in the Financial District that has become an improbably located hub for creative businesses. The show included sections organized by the Female Design Council, architecture-focused nonprofit The World Around, and several other curators and organizations, which gave it a feeling of many connected environments. The fair was also heavy on emerging designers and featured galleries from far-flung parts of the world. The whole show had a sense of playfulness and energy.
Dwell dispatched our Creative Director, Suzanne LaGasa, and photographer Ben DeHaan to take it all in and report back on the best things they saw. “I loved work with unexpected colors, big gestures, sharp points, and lots of rubber, metal, and delicate glass,” says LaGasa, “as well as the push and pull between surrealist goth clubhouse aesthetics and unapologetically colorful sculpture. It was as if Niki de Saint Phalle and Dracula lived together.”
Here are their picks.
Lighting by Farrah Sit, Steffany Trần, who calls her studio Vy Voi, and Rich Aybar, whose rubber lighting columns will be featured in Dwell’s upcoming emerging designers issue.
Behind a chainmail curtain, Studio S II presented a wide range of sublimely unsettling works, including a Giger-esque chair and hairy pendant lights—a trend we’re seeing a lot of right now.
Dwell 24 alum Clara Jorisch and fellow Montréaler Jérémie St-Onge who collaborate under the name “Maison de Verre” showed a series of glass tables and vessels.
Anonymous European design collective Genos showed a group of shiny works including the “How Dare You” chair, made from buffed aluminum and what looks like a leather bed cushion slumped over the backrest.
Yes. Those are pool noodles. They’re part of a bench called “Lazy Swim” by Austrian duo Laura Dominici and Basil Schu, which was included in a section of the fair dedicated to outdoor furniture.
Caroline Rennequin makes paintings, sculpture, design objects, and many other things. At Collectible she showed a series of colorful furnishings.
Canadians Diane Champagnat-Becker and Muriel Bentolila, who go by Fusion F, partnered with Julia Arvelo and Florence Barnabé of Atelier Fomenta to show a collection of lighting and glass pieces.
These little fabric and silicon puffballs by designer Ariel André’s Studio GOLEM can be stuck together on any flat surface to create a buoyantly comfy lounging landscape. He has used them to make everything from chairs to a conversation pit as large as a queen size bed.
Mexico’s Leonardo Garza showed a bench made from metal sitting surfaces sliding effortlessly across a bed of ball bearings.
New York gallery Otras Formas showed a set of chairs by Baltimore-based Dwell 24 alum Malcolm Majer, but his pitchers and vessels—set on a geometric table made from cherry, mahogany, and walnut by Toronto’s Kate Duncan—stole the show.
A table lamp by Brooklyn designer James Deiter also made an appearance in Otras Formas’s very strong booth.
On the right, a chair by London designer Daniel Widrig, shows the influence of his former employer Zaha Hadid. It shared space in Room 57 Gallery’s booth with a floor lamp by Georgia B. Smith and Brecht Wright Gander featuring “bulbs” that are actually silicon sacks that inflate and deflate as if they’re breathing.
An example of the current hairy lighting trend, a floor lamp by Paris designer Céline Salomon, stood next to a table by Milan-based Daniel Kolodziejczak topped by a striking slab of onyx.
Through a construction site, up a set of red-carpeted stairs, and another elevator ride away, the Collectible fair is the latest cultural project staged at 161 Water Street, an otherwise typical office building being reinvented as a hub for creative businesses.
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