High Life


Have you ever been at a party that achieved liftoff? Got better and better, late into the night? Now, can you imagine that feeling distilled into physical form? Here are three objects that meet that heady description. Jonathan Trayte’s Desert Riser — a title that calls the Burning Man festival to mind — has a sizzle of blue neon racing up its middle, surrounded by a clutch of flocked proboscises. It’s having a blast all on its own.  
Jaime Hayon’s coffee table (from his Hymy collection — the word means “smile” in Finnish) has a trippy pattern on its top that would fit perfectly on an acid tab; he has rendered it in marble marquetry, through a collaboration with artisans in the Veneto region of Italy. 
Then there is Tom Sachs’ bar stool, which fairly cries out for a Tom Sachs bar to be placed around it. Like everything he makes, it is an emissary from his studio, which has been nicely described (in GW Magazine, of all places) as looking like “NASA's workshop on a tight budget.” The bar stool carries with it the anarcho-pragmatic atmosphere that Sachs effortlessly generates around him. Design can be many things — a problem solving discipline, a search for new aesthetics, a way to serve basic needs. These three highly stimulating works show that it can also be an intoxicant.


DNA is a collaborative essay project, intertwining three gallery programs into a single, generative presentation.