The Australian Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert brought all homegrown talent and a heavy 'down under' influence.
A new addition to the slate of galleries at Design Miami touched down this year hailing from Australia. The Sydney-based Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert assembled an all-homegrown team for its stateside fair debut. They were issued the challenge: “Respond to the sea, the land, or the sky of Australia,” said the gallery’s namesake founder who was overseeing the booth yesterday.
The results were as captivating as they were unconventional, with pieces that pushed the boundaries of design while carrying cultural and ecological meaning. The results were impressively leftfield. But there was much more to these objects than mere design swerves. The outre forms shouldn’t overshadow from the depth imbued in many of these pieces. The bizarrely compelling emu cabinet, composed of the fowl’s actual plumage and avocado-like eggs, caused a lot of fair chatter.
The Perth-based designer David Tate worked on the Eganu cabinet for 18 months. Each feather has to be meticulously washed and ironed. The piece is a reflection of his growing up in the Pinjarrega Nature Reserve. “We’d go out in the bush and run into an emu,” Tate said, who was steadily fielding questions next to his cabinet of curiosities. “They were just part of my natural surroundings.” Tate also made a more staid, three-legged zoomorphic wooden stool based upon the kangaroo.
His gallery mate, the Melbourne-based Damien Wright used the eons as one of his mediums, profoundly. His piece 2:22pm 2/2/22 Mono-block, might just look like a hurricane has chucked a plastic outdoor chair into a log. But that isn’t just an ordinary stump. Radio carbon dating finds that the material is from the end of the last ice age. It is 10,000 years old (the carbon dating certificate is displayed nearby). “The wood is no longer timber nor a fossil, the artist explained in a statement. “If undisturbed for 50 million years, it becomes oil, the material required to make polypropylene.”
Dan-Cuthbert added, “If this keeps breaking down, it turns into the oil that’s needed to make these plastic chairs. It’s a piece of sculpture, but it’s functional. This is the second piece the artist has made. The first was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria.” That chair is telling you some deep truths. Wright uses similar material but less of a monolithic picnic vibe for his glacially refined stools and consoles.
Design Miami runs through Dec. 10. The fair is at Convention Center Drive & 19th Street, Miami Beach, Florida.
