Home – the physical kind trailed by the words “goods,” “wares,” “and Garden Magazine” – is a gallery. A semi-subconsciously expressive space mediated by taste and trend, a home houses personal collections. Women & Their Work’s latest exhibition “Form Works” showcases objects destined for such a collection.
Featuring 22 artisans and artists, the show celebrates a new generation of heirlooms. Designed in and for the modern age, the works are characterized by artful utility, limited ornamentation, and pastiches of design movements.
Seated on a shelf just above eye level, glassblowing studio Tak Tak’s carnival-striped vases and face-adorned cups welcome gallery visitors with simplified whimsy. The business, headed by Risa Recio, creates tableware and vases in candyfloss colors, often embellished with clean-lined smiley faces. Tak Tak’s creations are recognizable across differing forms, reveling in a millennial love of Scandinavian shapes in Polly Pocket gloss. Their cohesion feels indicative of a distinct creative vision and a contemporary savviness for brand identity – appealing to decorators with grownup production values and youthful aesthetics. Ceramic vases by Verónica Ortuño and clown collar candleholders by MASS Gallery’s Tanya Zal live harmoniously within the glassmakers’ polished psychedelic world.
Urbs Studio’s Famiglia line plays with a similar concept of custom-feeling heterogeneity. Each chair in the collection’s family meal-inspired dining set – staged in several places on the gallery floor – takes up a different formulation of essential building blocks, which the studio coyly relates to familial resemblance. Partial arms and half-hollow backs create seating arrangements that embrace tight corners and large gatherings. The patchwork set is reminiscent of De Stijl furnishings’ playfully angular construction, yet incorporates curvilinear midcentury modern forms, all dressed in postmodernist, pastel-adapted jewel tones.
The largest furnishing items in the show, two wardrobes set along the same wall, demonstrate a divergence in modern tastes. Playing with the IKEA-made minimalist style that constitutes the futurist side of postmodern design, Abby Hassell’s Circle Wardrobe is an exercise in essentialism and imagination. The maple-veneered plywood, assembled in thin Nordic lines, is punctuated by circular cutouts, at once functioning like handles and offering viewers a peek into its barren interior. Hassell’s design is recognizably contemporary, though it resists trend-marking colors.
Emiko Woodworks’ stately Chestnut Wardrobe has a more complicated relationship to the past. Its doors, stained with a dewy finish, open like beetle wings to reveal interior drawers made of darker ebony. Topped with a pane of glass and tucked beneath a hanging rod, these drawers were clearly crafted with specific use in mind. The exterior hardware, made of understated brass, is incorporated so seamlessly into the design that it’s almost hidden, insinuating a furtive relationship between the wardrobe and its owner. The heft of the wood and the inclusion of a chest of drawers within give the wardrobe the feel of an antique tailored to contemporary expectations, designed to withstand generations of trends with minimal aesthetic wear and tear.
Questions of antiquity and use also arise in the stone creations displayed in “Form Works.” Yasmeen Arkadan’s expertly handled marble vases and side tables ooze elegantly into supple folds, as if issued from an icing bag. Arkadan’s ability to transcend stone’s unyielding construction evokes the same kind of marvel as famous figurative statues of yore, yet created for utility rather than past decorative storytelling.
Catty-corner, Meghan Shogan’s Cloud Mirrors draw viewers into a centuries-old geological story. Carved from the same Texas blue marble, two clouds drift across circular mirrors – one smooth-surfaced with sediment swirls, the other carved fluff-like. The differing stone treatment also tells a stylistic story, implicating contemporary tastes for rough-hewn, unadulterated natural elements in home objects. The clouds partially obscure the mirrors, drawing them into a gray area between use and decoration.
Ceramicist and woodworker Berkeley Beauchot folds many of these ideas into her tile-topped table. Employing a combination of ancient and modern claybuilding, glazing, and firing techniques, Beauchot handmade each tile, texturizing them with geometric and natural patterns. The resulting piece encapsulates the desire for playfulness, longevity, and contemporization that characterizes many of the modern creative heirlooms on display in “Form Works.” Rife with artistic expression and personal taste, these items have a clear future in curated homes.
“Form Works”
Women & Their Work
Through August 28
This article appears in July 25 • 2025.