From their Brooklyn studio, the copartners of Chiaozza dream up fantastical, nature-inspired works— small and large, artistic and functional—that delight and awe
the wonder factory
In 2011, less than a year after they met at Chinatown karaoke bar Winnie’s and started dating, Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza had a career-defining experience: Chiao, an architect and alum of 2x4 and OMA, was working on a tiny scale model of a treehouse, and asked Frezza, a fine artist, to help her fill it with foliage. Together, they fashioned a miniature garden full of wild, neon-colored paper plants (which eventually inspired a life-size version at Wave Hill garden in the Bronx). The project helped them realize they worked well together, so they decided to cofound a studio, smushing their last names together to christen it Chiaozza. Since then, they’ve had a daughter as well as expanded their Brooklyn-based practice to encompass rugs for IKEA, window displays for Hermès, and a stucco forest at Coachella, the latter around the same time they produced Zen Garden, their 5-yearlong installation at Industry City in Sunset Park. Recently, they completed a second outdoor exhibition at Industry City, were commissioned by Google to create pieces for the company’s Pier 57 campus in Chelsea, and released a set of wall hooks with fellow Brooklyn brand Areaware (with another functional object in the works). Yet all their creations are still inspired by plants, or, more accurately, a brightly colored fantasy version of the natural world, as filtered through their especially fertile imaginations. “Physical reality is not the only reality,” Chiao says. “There’s also the internal emotional landscape. Our work is a quest to visualize that.” We sat down with her and Frezza to learn more. Chiaozza cofounders Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao in their Bushwick, Brooklyn, studio resting on unpainted recycled paper pulp sculptures for Scumble Lumps, their second longterm public installation currently on view at Industry City in Sunset Park, with their 10 wooden wall works, also unpainted, for Google’s Pier 57 office in Chelsea behind them.
c r e at i v e voices
JOE KRAMM
OCT.22
INTERIOR DESIGN
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