COARSE SAMUEL ROSS
Enigma Machine: Samuel Ross Encodes the Now
by Glenn AdamsonIn 2016 Dr. Samuel Ross made a small sculpture possessed of nominal functionality: an incense burner. It ignited something, alright. Alongside his established métier of fashion, propagated through his brand A-COLD-WALL*, Ross began to make and circulate usable objects, and today – seven years later – this aspect of his practice is on fire. Even as his star has risen in the fine art firmament, thanks to the acuity of his abstract sculptures, and more recently, paintings, even as he has become a more and more consequential voice in fashion, he has, in parallel, applied his blazing intelligence to the discipline of furniture.
The present exhibition constitutes his most consequential intervention into the field yet. One of their most striking features of the six works on view – straightforwardly acknowledged in the collective title, COARSE – is their jagged, post-industrial materiality. Searingly intense in their conception and execution, they have also been subjected to deconstructive processes. The resulting rough-and-tumble affect recalls that first incense burner, which was made of concrete that was intentionally poorly mixed, giving it the quality of an eroded monument. It’s a theme Ross has been exploring ever since. In 2017, in collaboration with Jobe Burns, he released a series called Concrete Objects. Angular and assertive, they were “specific” in the Donald Judd sense of the term, while also glancing at (and off) British brutalist architecture – so heroic when it was first conceived, but already decaying by the time Ross was growing up among those buildings.
He also materialized this aesthetic in his fashion, which is often post-apocalyptic in appearance: garments exploding outward from the body like shrapnel, trainers pocked and pitted like salvage from a bombsite. Yet this connotation of violence is balanced by an equally evident sense of care in making – a combination of qualities that one normally encounters only in the domain of the relic, a charged category of object that traverses low and high, secular and religious culture. Ross is dexterously triangulating between it all. He alludes to the pervasive cliché of “distressed” clothing, but cross-fades that vocabulary with the midcult genre of cyberpunk, as well the more esoteric discourse of avant garde designers and architects like Gaetano Pesce, Ron Arad, and Arata Isozaki all of whom responded to the utopian heroism of previous generations with ironic gestures of pre-ruination.
Ross has no interest in extending the postmodern endgame, though – he knows that’s all played out. Instead he embraces erosion as a creative force, treating it as simply as one iterative turn within a greater cycle. The apt metaphor here is not collapse (though as earlier works attest, like his TRAUMA CHAIR of 2020, the arc of failed imperialism and its attendant asymmetries are important conceptual geometries in his work), but rather the generative principles of religion and nature, in which death and life continually produce one another, and hence, meaning itself.
Look deeply into the works here, past the initial impression engendered by their concrete, OSB plywood, and powder-coated steel, and you see this spiritual organicism everywhere. Hewn stone – the material of sculpture rather than product design – is an important presence. Ross has treated some of his surfaces with turmeric, the ancient “golden spice,” and others with milk and honey, that Biblical leitmotif of nurturance. It is salient that he grew up in the church, and even pursued theology briefly before entering his career in design; but his work transcends the confines of any organized religion. He speaks of communing with a “wider sentience,” a holistic understanding in which various intelligences are all intermingled: mineral, organic, and industrial.
To this list we can also, perhaps, add the virtual: a critical condition for Ross’s work, as with any designer of his generation. He thinks deeply about the potent new forms of immateriality that have arrived into culture, and how they compare with older ideas of transcendence. Back in 2021, Ross wrote of his own work as situated at “the crossroads and thresholds of the analogue age and the lossless, democratic age of information access.” This position is cued in an unusually explicit way in one work here, titled FIRE OPENS STONE, through the inscription of numerical codes along its chamfered lengths. A tribute to Ross’s former mentor Virgil Abloh – who often deployed text and numerals on his work – the motif also operates on other registers. It’s clearly akin to a bar code, that ubiquitous instrument of social and economic tracking. Could it, perhaps, be interpreted as a sly, selfreferential allusion to the furniture’s own commodity status?
Probably so, but more importantly, the digits denote the work’s inhabitation in the digital at large. FIRE OPENS STONE began its life as one of a raft of Ross’s handmade drawings – a fundamental aspect of his practice – and then made its way into physical form via rendering software. This is standard operating procedure in contemporary design, but to an unusual degree, Ross manages to signal every station along the transit. Even when you are standing right in front of the finished piece, you can feel the open-endedness of its inception, while the numbers seem to track its brief passage though the virtual. Thus it arrives like an emissary from a space of infinite possibility: like everything Ross makes, it is both foreboding and thrilling, slightly ahead, something we need to catch up to.
Futurity has been a part of industrial design since its very beginnings, in the 1920s, when the novel idiom of streamlining was developed to telegraph the idea of forward progress. A century on, Ross is carrying on the tradition, but with a big difference. The works in COARSE do have a slight inflection toward science fiction –Blade Runner and its progeny – but are equally rooted in shapes that humans were making thousands of years ago. One of the things Ross aims to erode is the very idea of a “formal timeline.” As he says, that simply isn’t how temporality works in everyday life: “Whether it’s back and forth, or everything happening all at once, it’s interesting to play with this dynamism and rhythm of what is new versus old; what is recognizable now versus what was then… you start congealing these elements which shouldn’t exist together, but do exist within lived experience.”
In this connection, it seems important that Ross’s bench-like forms are all engineered a bit differently. Each gets from one end to the other in its own fashion. In ANAESTHESIA I, the top arches across two identical blocks. In SLAB, also nearly symmetrical, two masses are penetrated by a cylindrical core. BORDER, a work in scorched wenge (a tropical hardwood), is more irregular in plan; it touches down lightly, spread across six dainty feet. By contrast, BIRTH AT DAWN, very compressed, is comprised simply of a curved piece abutting a vertical slab. Of the many metaphors that collide in these works, this simple fact of diversity is perhaps the most significant. Each piece travels along its individual vector, finding its unique solution.
Ross, then, makes no pretense to having cracked the code of the now. On the contrary, the supreme clarity of his work allows us to feel, really feel, just how complex, layered, multivalent, and – yes – enigmatic an object must be, if it’s to express its own time. His exploration of this dynamic is unmatched; his work marks nothing less than a new maturity, a new sophistication, in design. What Ross is making is, indeed, a bridge to the future. But having crossed over, we’ll each of us need to go our own way, on to the ever-elusive horizon.
ANAESTHESIA I, 2022
Glass fiber reinforced concrete, OSB, fired OSB, aluminum, stainless steel, Abidjan clay, turmeric, acrylic, acrylic lacquer, polyurethane
30 x 68 x 22 inches
76 x 173 x 56 cm
Edition of 8
ANAESTHESIA II, 2022
Glass fiber reinforced concrete, fired OSB, stainless steel, turmeric, acrylic, acrylic lacquer, polyurethane
39.5 x 70.75 x 18.75 inches
100 x 180 x 47.5 cm
Edition of 8
BIRTH AT DAWN, 2022
Nero Africa granite, glass fiber reinforced concrete, fired OSB, fired honey and milk patina, painted steel, polyurethane
16.5 x 17 x 17.5 inches
42 x 43 x 44.5 cm
Edition of 8
BORDER, 2022
Fired wenge, planished aluminum, powder-coated steel, melamine
lacquer
14.25 x 74.75 x 30 inches
36 x 190 x 76 cm
Edition of 8
FIRE OPENS STONE, 2022
Nero Africa granite, glass fiber reinforced concrete, fired OSB, fired honey and milk patina, painted steel, polyurethane
18 x 73.75 x 19.75 inches
46 x 187 x 50 cm
Edition of 8
SLAB, 2022
Verde Marina granite, painted steel
18.5 x 88.5 x 22.75 inches
47 x 225 x 58 cm
Edition of 8
Sketches, 2022
Sketches, 2022
Sketches, 2022
Sketches, 2022
Sketches, 2022
What Holds Us in Abeyance
by Seph RodneyLooking at Samuel Ross’s furniture artworks, bits of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, the English-language oratorio composed in 1741, come wafting to my consciousness — specifically the aria “Every valley shall be exalted,” with its confluence of opposites. Its text (adapted from the Book of Isaiah) reads: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.” Yet, as I replay the music in my head, I realize that the language within the composition gives me rather the wrong tongs by which to grasp Ross’s work. Unlike the prophet’s messianic vision of transformation and redemption — which is inextricably bound up with a coercive, eschatological view of the future — Ross does not dissolve stark differences through stark opposition. In the series of works presented for COARSE, Friedman Benda’s second solo presentation of designer, artist, and creative director Dr. Samuel Ross, it’s not the case that the lowly is raised up, and the lofty is demolished. Instead, Ross brings together contrasting production methods, materials, traditions, histories, and holds them in abeyance, in irresolution.
These conflations, and the resistance of this work to an obliging dissolution of difference, is evident even in Ross’s terminology. To call something a “furniture artwork” is to subtly defy one of my foundational understandings of art: It’s supposed to be non-utilitarian, an occasion, an opportunity to consider and explore ideas that travel beyond the mire of our daily, corporeal reality. On the other hand, furniture is generally fashioned to meet our basic physical needs: to take the weight of our bodies when we are tired, unable, or unwilling to vigilantly maintain the responsibility of a certain posture. Chairs holds us above the ground when we no longer can or care to employ our own resources to stand. Tables keep things that are useful to us organized on a level plane, within easy reach. These realms of human making, furniture and art, typically address different parts of us — the intellectual and spiritual versus the material; the rarefied aesthetic versus the labored manual — and in doing so, suggest that we are right in separating out these aspects of ourselves in these ways.
But perhaps we aren’t.
In the designs themselves, even if viewers are unfamiliar with the formal dialects, it is fairly apparent that Ross is conflating forms that are not typically brought together in the same object, in most cases, even the same room. In a recent conversation, he talked about bringing together a “Gold Coast West African language in terms of forms, concaves, and convexes, and the softer subtler edges, the lack of 90-degree rigid angles,” with “modernist architectural forms.”
I can see his desire manifested in BIRTH AT DAWN, an object consisting of Nero Africa granite, reinforced concrete, fired oriented strand board, honey and milk patina, painted steel, and polyurethane. In essence in looks like a stool, one half, the concrete side, cut and measured at precise angles, with a rectangular, steel-framed handhold carved into the middle, as if to say, “grasp me here; pick me up and take me where you will. I can be a tool of use to you.” The other side consists of more-or-less raw granite, colored red on the inside of its arc and pocked and stippled with the colors and textures of its origins in the viscera of the earth. This side looks like the object was hewn with hammer and chisel from a larger structure. It suggests a kind of vulnerability, as if it had just survived the brute force applied in the process of excision. Ross says that he has created “the meeting of these two vernaculars and voices,” that is, the vernacular language of West Africa, butting up against the forms of brutalist modernist design. BIRTH AT DAWN has a flat surface where the granite has been milled and polished to a level and accommodating seat. I am sure I can rest myself on it, that it will bear my weight. But I’ve been taught that I should not sit on the art (or even touch it). So, what do I do with this?
I imagine Ross might say that the invitation his work holds out is a recognition that lived experience almost always denies a facile and simplistic utopianism, that it is a convergence of contradictions. Thus, he brings the contemporary head-to-head with that which reads as ancient, the intuitive with the planned, the colloquial with the standards and measurements of empire. The crooked remains crooked and the rough places do not abandon their character. The strategy Ross employs to keep these objects suspended between these two aspects of making is to use the aesthetic and architectural pidgins of brutalism and minimalism.
I can see the application of this tactic in Ross’s SLAB, made of Verde Marina granite and painted steel. SLAB makes a bench of two roughly hewn, inverted pyramid forms connected by a round, painted, perfectly straight steel beam polished to a mirror finish that has cored the two blocks of granite. (The visual reference here with the use of the synthetic green is to public spaces in the UK that tend to feature this kind of industrial form, so the work attempts to carve an intimate interlude out of disadvantaged conditions.) There is in SLAB a lack of decorative flourish and a plain, even crude appearance that, like BIRTH AT DAWN and the other pieces in COARSE, evoke a sere and resolute austerity.
This operation of combining the crooked and the straight doesn’t yield objects that are comfortable. I imagine that if I were to take my ease with a friend on SLAB, rather than feeling coddled, it would not take long to feel the unyielding granite material press back against my flesh, making me intimately aware of my own fragility. And yet this is somehow right.
I am drawn to the sense of promise in Handel’s Messiah, the assurance that one day I will have resolution, and better still, this resolution will be universal: Every valley will be exalted. This comforts me. But my own lived experience is different. I wander among the coarse and unrefined, smooth and highly polished representations of the histories and traditions I’ve inherited and find those pieces of harsh, implacable beauty that I can sit with — that which holds me up a little bit above the ground.
Sketch, 2022
