28 Nov. 2011
ROLU 4 OMMU
ROLU is an art and design studio based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
OMMU is an art and design bookstore/distributor based in Athens, Greece.
ROLU 4 OMMU is four pieces of furniture, two large modular adaptable chairs, Chair 1 and Chair 2, as well as A Desk and A Desk Chair, that are part of a new design ROLU made for OMMU’s store in Athens. Also produced in this project was a bookshelf that is based on a work by the artist Seth Price and a ladder. Price’s essay Décor Holes came to be an important part of our thinking as these pieces started to emerge. The writing discusses, in part, the “sample” as it exists in modern music and questions it raises about ownership. We started to ask ourselves “When does something… become something else?” We wanted the work we produced for this project to have a theoretical basis that pointed towards language. We also wanted to think about motion. We like to use the term “sitting as seeing” to describe a philosophical ghost we are chasing. The forms of these pieces are, in a sense, like “visual samples.” They are based on shapes found in drawings the choreographer Trisha Brown made in the early seventies. These drawings contain a sense of motion and it’s easy to see their visual connection to dance but, they also look like typography… like a written language we don’t quite recognize. And so we ask ourselves: When does a dance become a drawing? When does a drawing become a chair? Can a chair act as a kind of choreographer? Maybe we’ll never know but we love how they turned out and hope you do too!
A two sided poster designed by Benjamin Critton for the release of ROLU 4 OMMU is available to download and print here. The posters were originally available as part of MISS READ at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
A book about ROLU’s work designed by Benjamin Critton will be published by OMMU in 2012.