In Chelsea, Queer Designers Build a Cinematic World of Play and Possibility
With futuristic sets and subversive objects, the second edition of “Design Dysphoria” champions playful, boundary-breaking artists and makers
Last year, amid the sea of satellite exhibitions that popped up around town during the annual NYCxDesign festival, one show offered a unique proposition. Situated within a concrete-clad Brooklyn warehouse was a medley of eccentric furniture, textile works, glass objects, and fine art made by queer talents like Yolande Milan Batteau, Zander Schlacter, and Jeremy Martin. Arranged in an apartment-like setting, “Design Dysphoria” intended to carve out space for vanguard creatives, especially women, non-binary, and trans artists who have committed their practice to crossing disciplines and blurring boundaries in thrilling new ways.
“We often think about the energy of the work versus the category it resides in,” says artist and Sticky Glass founder Grace Whiteside, who curated the show with textile artist Liz Collins and design firm Studio S II co-founders Erica Sellers and Jeremy Silberberg. “This allows for many different kinds of artists, works, and objects to coexist in one space in really exciting and unexpected ways, which to me is the essence of queer design.”
“Design Dysphoria” recently returned for a second edition, titled “Give Them the Fantasy,” this time transforming the Chelsea, Manhattan, gallery of the cannabis dispensary Gotham into a moody sequence of futuristic vignettes evocative of sci-fi sets or video games. Each scene, explains Sellers and Silberberg, “reveals a new atmosphere or emotional state.” Velvet curtains, mirrored surfaces, and saturated palettes evoke the moodiness of David Lynch’s noir mystery Blue Velvet or the clubby cult classic Liquid Sky, which inspired a wall coverings collaboration with Collins and Flavor Paper that conjures a psychedelic backdrop.
Dwelling within are oddities and one-offs by 23 cross-disciplinary artists, many of whom participated in the first iteration. Francheska Alcántara draped brown paper bags like jewelry over tufted violet cushions that crawl up walls, evoking the plush upholstered furniture often found at beauty salons and spas in the Bronx. A patch of hand-sculpted glass mushrooms by Deborah Czeresko reframes the material’s fluidity as a conduit for considering how queer culture, like natural ecosystems, germinates and grows. Dried amaranths sprout from bodice-shaped glass vessels by Studio S II. And nearby, giant appendage-like wooden forms by Savannah Knoop rock back and forth, their punches of blood red pairing curiously with a nocturnal photograph of a neighborhood gay bar’s velvet curtain captured by Joseph Liatela.
The results are immersive, unashamedly strange, and pure fun—a spirit that becomes contagious as one ventures further in. The show’s core theme of play becomes method and message. The artists were encouraged to toy with and transcend accepted rules of function and aesthetics, resulting in delightfully experimental pieces that revel in their own weirdness and ultimately uplift their neighbors. “Play is essential to queer design. It allows us to imagine and build worlds beyond the constraints of dominant culture,” explain Sellers and Silberberg. “Understanding and dissecting play is how we experiment with identity, aesthetics, and intimacy.” Simply put, it’s where possibility thrives.
Beyond the gallery walls, the project also includes a limited-edition product line sold exclusively at Gotham following a sneak preview during the Shelter design fair in May. The homewares—a needlepoint kit by Collins, a droopy glass ashtray by StickyGlass, and salt and pepper mills in aluminum and patinated brass by Studio S II—carry the show’s same subversive energy but translated into everyday objects. “The textures feel tactile and seductive, the colors reference queerness, and the forms are a little strange, sci-fi, and glamorous,” Sellers and Silberberg continue. “There’s a sensuality to it all, but also a sense of humor.”
That, and defiance. “The more boundaries and preconceived ideas we hold onto regarding what should exist, be sold, and be exhibited in what space,” Whiteside says, “the less progressive and inclusive these environments tend to be.” But checkbox approaches to representation don’t push the envelope, either, says Whiteside. “Just because everyone on a lineup is queer doesn’t necessarily make a show interesting or progressive. How are the works interacting with each other? What is the overall narrative of the environment? How are we pushing back collectively? What is important?” The answer, at Gotham and in hopefully many “Design Dysphoria” shows to come, is wonderfully open-ended.
“Design Dysphoria: Give Them the Fantasy” will be on view at Gotham (146 10th Ave, New York) until August 1.