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It may be cliché nowadays to state that something exists at the intersection of art and design, but take one look at the repertoire of New York City–based Ian Stell and this descriptor may be the first one on your lips, too. Trained in painting by the Art Institute of Chicago and in furniture design by RISD, he creates pieces mostly in the form of furnishings that are visually intriguing and sometimes cheeky while simultaneously provoking the user to engage with or manipulate them.
Sinam side table
Austrian Loop tete-a-tete
Consider his Pantograph series in which tables and seating present what appear to be slatted geographies. With a little curiosity or exploration, the user discovers that he can pull and expand each maplewood piece to morph its shape.
Lattice table
“I lived and worked in small, oddly shaped spaces in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn for years, and the challenges of maximizing function within limited confines was always on my mind,” explains the designer. “With time, I began to think of designing folding furniture less as fulfilling a binary program and more as a kind of choreography to be enacted both by the user and the object itself.”
Sidewinder side table
Stell achieved these transforming pieces (which were exhibited by Patrick Parrish Gallery at NYCxDesign 2016) and continues to build on the series by implementing a hinged system reminiscent of the pantograph structure — hence the name — found on extending wall mirrors and in old-fashioned safety and security gates.
Big Pivot table
Staying on the theme of choreography, some of his designs encourage the user to walk around the pieces not just to view how their forms change, but also to encounter hidden messages. Newdrift bench, for instance, is a wood-framed piece with a laser-cut leather latticework stretched over the sides to form a seat. But view it from one short side, and you can make out the words “BLOW ACROSS”; then, stand back from the long side and read “IF I LET GO WILL I MAKE EASTWARD OR DRIFT ON TO SHORE.”
Newdrift bench
Similarly, CMC table and We Wait tapestry/rug display hidden messages when viewed from each of their sides. The former is constructed of cherry wood with a graphite epoxy inlay that simply looks like an abstract line graphic moving in two directions, while the latter is handwoven of wool yarn.
CMC table
We Wait tapestry
Stell isn’t afraid to apply his ideas of choreography on larger-scale elements. His Diagint is a pair of crisscrossing “folding” staircases that was installed on the banks of Berlin’s Spree River last summer. The staircases share one common tread at the point where they cross and below that point all treads are fixed; the upper five treads form a single pivoting unit on each staircase, resembling a cellar door of sorts into which a walker can pass through and under.
Diagint
While the work was engineered to support the weight of three adults on each upper portion, he stresses, “Diagint is by no means intended to be employed as a primary means of egress and would never meet any building code as such.”
The stairs may never pass muster to be installed as is in a building, but it does illustrate some intriguing, provocative ideas — which is the point. Stell says, “I see my work as posing more questions than providing new answers. I want to make modest, unique gestures or juxtapositions and see what life, if any, they take on for themselves.”
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