 Welcome to Cooper Hewitt. Welcome to our evening disenyo. I'm so pleased to have Fernando Mastrangelo here as our feature designer. And this is disenyo is a series that highlights the achievements of Latino designers working in the United States, launched in 2014. We are grateful to have the support of the Latino Initiatives Pool and the Smithsonian Latino Center who have helped us continue what is truly a special program, not just because we have Fernando here, but because it's a two-day event, really. He comes, he does a public program, but tomorrow he'll also be doing a hands-on workshop. So for those of you who got your spot, good for you. Make sure to get a lot of tips. It's sold out. But what makes the disenyo series really important, I think, is that it's free. So it's an ability for you to get to know us, get to know a designer, and hopefully come back. I also want to thank our Cooper Hewitt team, Susanna Brown, Ruth Starr, Maeve Kudrow, who, in too many ways, contributed to making this program happen. And I also want to thank Chris Gadry from Fernando Studio, who signed up Fernando for this talk without telling him. Well, Fernando was on a motorcycle trip. And before he could say thanks, but no thanks, Christina. When I joined Cooper Hewitt earlier this year, I spent some months getting acquainted with the collection, but also thinking about contemporary designers that I wanted the museum to engage with. And Fernando was actually one of the first designers I did a studio visit with. And for anyone who's done a studio visit, especially with someone that you don't know and you've never met before, it can be a bit like a first date. You're both trying to put the best foot forward. You want to make a good impression. You're trying to figure out if you're going to be in step with each other. Certainly, as a curator, I want to understand the heart of the designer's practice. And so that means that I want to dig deep. And I want to push for thoughtful and critical discussion. And I asked Fernando a lot of hard questions that day. And we touched on a lot of topics that dealt with process, intention, creativity, inspiration. I'm not sure if he was expecting all of that for me. That afternoon, it was a July afternoon. I remember it was like 105 degrees. So we're sweating. And we're also trying to have thoughtful conversation. So it was tough, but you persevered. And I think that that really is a marker of how important it is in the field of contemporary design that for us to grow and develop, we need to ask our peers and ourselves difficult questions. And sometimes we don't know the answer at that moment. But we shouldn't shy away from moving past these neatly packaged and sometimes superficial responses. Instead, we should consider our work in all of its complicated, messy, and sometimes contradictory qualities. And I'm grateful for Fernando for really taking that on. And certainly, that conversation has led to so many other conversations that we've been having for a long time now. So I hope to touch on some of those things today. And I want to begin with a question that I posed to you while we were preparing for this talk, which I think really speaks to the core of who you are in your practice. And I said, so are you going to eventually start making decorative objects like platters and bookends and vases? And you said, absolutely not. Just like that. Absolutely not. It's completely against the way I work, my practice. And then you pulled out a box of slides. And you started showing me some of your really early MFA work. And so why don't you talk a little bit about those early years as an MFA student? OK. Anyway, thank you. That was awesome. And thanks, guys, for coming. So this is funny, too, because I had to go back and look at all these images again. And it's been kind of an interesting journey, down memory lane. But anyway, this is actually my graduate studio at VCU at Virginia Commonwealth. And so the reason I don't think about making small objects, it just never has occurred to me. It's not part of how I think about the world. It's not part of how I think about making sculpture or design at this point. So as an undergrad, I was making large scale objects. So I'm going to think about this question in two parts, actually. So one about the sculptures. So anyway, this is my graduate studio at VCU. What I did is I built a installation space, basically a gallery inside of my studio space so that I could have my own little exhibitions and do these exercises. And I wanted to work large scale. So when you're a graduate student, you don't have a lot of time, you don't have a lot of exhibitions. You probably do one at the end of each year. But I wanted to push myself to work larger scale, get through ideas. And so, yeah, I built this thing called Studio 13. And every six weeks or so, I would rotate the exhibition. And these are some of the results of that. This was my first year. Also, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, who I was as an artist. And then something very radical happened in the middle of my graduate in the summer, going into my second year. And so I started making, OK, essentially, if the question is really about scale, like, look, I like large scale. That's just the way I think. It's only getting bigger as I get older. And it's just, I found that it's a major problem usually scale. People don't know how to use scale very well. It's something that oftentimes when I see a lot of young artists work, I think, oh, it's a scale issue. It's a scale issue. And so I wanted to make objects that you were confronted by, that you felt that your body was interacting with. So all that stuff was important to me. And then as you start to think about scale, it becomes you just sort of get it more. And so anyway, in this radical shift, I started making these figurative objects, moving away from abstraction and early influences where Matthew Barney, Charles Ray, so anyway. Takashi Murakami, I was seeing all those things. So one of the funny things about this now is that the color palette. It's like this very pastel-y sort of thing. And it was all conceptual at that time. I had ideas about why all this was going on. So anyway, as one of the other pieces for my graduate thesis show was this Overman piece. And it's a sculpture. It's a half-man, half-airplane. And he's sort of doing a back dive. And he's got these house that have these propellers on them. And he has a machine gun on the other side. And he's floating over this landscape. So I was thinking at the time about, well, I was thinking about narrative, really. And I was thinking about philosophy and narrative and all sorts of ideas about Nietzsche and things like this. So this is what was sort of coming out at that time. So again, this was my thesis piece. And then this is when I moved to New York. And following your MFA programming, when you move to New York, you get a job as a studio assistant to Matthew Barney. And you've shared on many occasions that working with Barney not only influenced your work, but has since also influenced the way you run your studio. But for anyone who has seen Matthew Barney's work, I mean, it's obviously a very strong aesthetic, a very specific visual language, which you've also admitted that in some ways permeated your own work. So what lessons did you learn from working with Barney? And how did you work from calling from his language to creating your own vocabulary? So that's a good question. So look, early on, I believe that artists, designers, isn't going to sound really harsh, but I really feel like you shouldn't have a lot of ideas at the beginning. Ideas are kind of tricky because it means that you have to actually have some really clear thoughts. And so why I'm saying that is because, anyway, this work was all about ideas. It was all about figuration and all this weird stuff. And that's what Matthew Barney's work was about. Your work. I was sort of making a replica of what Barney had sort of done. Wait, let's hold on. So you're talking about your work in the beginning was figurative. But why it relates to Matthew Barney? OK. So anyway, so as I was sort of looking at his work, working with him, he sort of digs pretty deep into the mythology of his own work. So a figure has many, many layers. So I was sort of working that way as well. I was like, the figure has to mean something. The way it's sculpted has to mean something. It was all about everything having a layer of meaning. And so this is actually my first studio in New York, my loft that I lived in. And I converted it into a studio. And so I was making extraordinarily narrative heavy sort of conceptual work in a lot of ways. And that was something that Matthew, you know, this is Matthew Barney's work. And these are some of the pieces that I made at the studio. They're extremely layered. Everything is symbolic. Everything for him, each material that he used was symbolic. And so that just permeated my being. And it got to the point where I think about it as like, as a young artist, you should just copy other people for a long time. Just copy. And you know, recently this, I'm not going to get into it, but I just believe that you should sort of look at other people's work until you sort of find yourself. And I was finding myself as I was working for Matthew. And I went to Brazil. And so this piece over here on the left is called De La Malamina. And he asked me to go to Brazil and make a mold of that tree. It was 26 foot Ficus tree. And so I went down there. In the meantime, I was learning capoeira, which is a Brazilian martial art. Just because I had done martial arts as a kid and I was in Brazil, it's the martial art they do. So anyway, and building on the narrative of how I made work, like thinking about things. So I then came back to New York after that Brazilian trip and I had my first solo exhibition. And the first solo is basically the piece called Alicia and it's a 27 foot sculpture. And the landscape is made of sugar because in Brazil the capoeira started from the slaves working in the sugarcane fields. So I wanted to relate that to this piece. And so there's this woman turning into a scorpion because in capoeira you imitate the animals basically as part of the art. So you turn into a scorpion and you sting someone. And she's being pulled into this abyss which is based on this Nietzsche quote of being the rope between man and over man strung over the abyss. And so this is a black oil pool that this creature guy, demon guy, who has M16s coming out of his body, is trying to pull this scorpion woman into. And so that was going on in the front room and in the back room I had a capoeira team come and I created a ring made of sugar so that the dancers would, or the fighters would sort of break up the sugar and sort of annihilate the idea of being a slave and being sort of overcoming their masters. Anyway, this is all metaphor. And again, this was deeply rooted in Matthew's sort of way of thinking that every single layer had to be considered, the materials, this and that. So this is why I was doing this. And then, and I really believe, like look, he comes from the thinking of Joseph Boyce. And I was getting very artsy, but he comes from the line of Joseph Boyce. Matthew then arrives on the scene and then so I wanted to sort of carry on this tradition. So, let me see that. So anyway, so I did this, this was 2006. This was two years after I arrived in New York after my MFA. This was finally also the moment where I was able to become a full-time artist. This piece sold, thank goodness. And I went to a collection in Texas which allowed me to then just work in the studio. And I think for about another year I carried on sort of making narrative work but I was experimenting with materials. The sugar landscape in the one I just showed you, the big one, that started to deteriorate. So I started, so the collector calls like, hey, you know, the sugar is deteriorating. So out of utility, I had to figure out a way to bind the sugar or something with resin to create longevity, which was like the aha moment. And part of making this sculpture, in fact, Kumite, which is called Kumite, he's made of sugar and coffee. And it was sort of my first, you know, I was trying to perfect casting the material itself. And the little figure is sort of representing Brazil here. And Brazil, their main export is sugarcane and coffee. So he's made of those materials. So again, it's this deep level of everything making conceptual sense. So this was 2007. And at this point, once I had made the sugar cast, once I had perfected casting sugar, that was it. I went to the grocery store and I just started buying every sort of dry aggregate I could get my hands on. So beans, tapioca pearls, I mean everything that could be cast. And at this time, I felt like I was kind of lost in terms of what I wanted to say as an artist. I felt very embedded into like the sort of Matthew Barney narrative. And I moved into a new studio and I wanted to sort of think about my roots, my sort of past. I had lived in Mexico growing up. So there was a bunch of, this was 2008, 2007 moving into 2008. And at the time, there was a lot of talk about ethanol becoming the new gasoline. I don't know if you guys remember this part, but yeah, it was big in the news. And so anyway, the US went into Mexico and bought up a bunch of cornfields and started destroying the pure corn in Mexico. So having been from, you know, lived in Mexico, I felt that was kind of not a great thing to do. So I wanted to make a sculpture about it. And so I resculpted the Aztec calendar and here it is in the studio in process. This is just clay and wood. And then up there is actually in the casting process. So I decided to make the Aztec calendar out of corn. And it was sort of a nice lineage from what I had done before. But the difference was this, I felt like it was finally the moment where I had arrived onto my own thing, my own language, separating myself from Matthew conceptually, but still holding on a little bit to, you know, my path, you know, I had sort of found myself in a weird way, this 2008. And so this piece was, it was kind of a seminal piece for me. This is the end result also because the Brookham Museum bought it and I was about 28 years old at the time and it was just a very important moment in my life and career. And so, yeah, the whole thing's cast out of corn and each symbol has been changed to discuss the issues around corn farming. So, you know, you'll see like a Coca-Cola bottle which uses corn and spark plugs, tires, you won't believe the amount of stuff that has corn in it. And maybe talk a little bit about the process of making something like this because it was really painstaking. Oh my God, well, yeah, so at the time, I didn't have a huge staff. It was just me and my first assistant boy who was in here helping me make this piece. But I had a deadline and I had to make the piece in four months which now seems like a long time but at the time it was really tricky to get it done. So, I mean, I was living in the studio seven days. I mean, I don't remember leaving. I remember I didn't shower for a good seven or eight days. I was just working on this piece. It was crazy. So, but obviously, you know, turned out pretty good and it's funny. Not a lot of people know this but, so right here you see this little symbol. That's actually Matthew's symbol of, he does this track that then has this thing stuck across it, right, and he talks about the flow of things. Anyway, what I did was I took the symbol and then I sort of started peeling the center part out. You see this is sort of folding out. That was me trying to say like my moving on beyond Barney. And then on the other side, which a lot of people think is just because I wear a hat but it's not, it's this hat, it's Joseph Boyce. So, you have my two sort of forefathers there. Anyway, so that's what, so anyway, so something really nice happened. I realized like I can make work about my past in a way that, and touch on being Latino or touching on issues that, you know, made it feel personal. And so I started this piece called, and this is great because the average is back here. This is why we were waiting for the museum to take it. So it was still in the shop. But anyway, I started this piece called Felix and this is really where things really took a turn because this took 18 months, a lot of money. I was working with the gallery at the time from Brazil and I ended up sculpting this figure here, taking the figure, taking the mold down to Brazil and ended up casting the piece out of cocaine. And the field of mirrors below is actually in the shape of Columbia and he's standing near Bogota, sort of facing south where the fields are, the cocoa fields are. And so this was a nice transition from making avarice, the piece before, the corn piece, to then addressing issues going on in Latin America. So again, the U.S. was coming into Columbia, wiping out their fields. I know they're cocoa fields, which is producing cocaine, whatever. But ultimately what I was thinking about was the peasant farmers. Honestly, all these people with families, people who no one thought about them, you know what I mean? They lose their way of life in a lot of ways and they've been farming cocoa for, since the Inca Empire, or before the Inca Empire. So I wanted to make statements, you know? And I wanted to use materials as the anchor for those ideas. And so, you know, you got this glorified peasant farmer cast out of coke, standing on a field of mirrors, which is, you know, a little tongue in cheek a little bit, you know, the mirrors part. So anyway, that got a lot of press. And that piece got, you know, the New York Post wrote about it, got me in trouble with the DEA for a little while. I got you in big trouble. Yeah, yeah. And then I decided to, I was like, yeah. So under the heat of that, I decided to leave New York for a little while. And I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my next project. And thank goodness I had this amazing collector who decided to fund my next project. Meanwhile, the sculpture, the cocaine sculpture was not being able to be sold, okay, for obvious reasons. So anyway, he decided to fund my next project. And so I went to LA and I got involved with the MS-13 gang, which is an El Salvadorian gang that's based in Los Angeles. There are 30,000 or 40,000 members now. And I got interested in them because that year they were put on the same list as Al-Qaeda as a terrorist group. And I was like, how is this gang in LA considered a terrorist group? So anyway, it piqued my interest. And obviously I was looking for kind of Latino-centric sort of ideas to discuss in the work. So I decided to make some sculptures about their tattoos because these guys tattoo their faces all the way down their body and they tell these narratives through the tattoos. And so I took their tattoos and I sculpted them in relief in clay. And then these are cast out of human ash. They're made out of just bone fragments and ash. So the white part is what the sort of more bone aggregate. And this was a very sort of powerful thing. I spent a year making this project. I dug pretty deep. I got to meet the gang members, spent a lot of time with them. And this was sort of the result. These two, which are harder to understand this photo, but they're actually, they're cast out of gunpowder. And again, they were about MS-13 sort of, about violence and the way they think about religion because they're extremely violent people, but they pray all the time. They wear crucifixes and things like that. And not a lot of people know this either about this piece right here, the Jesus piece. But this is a normal statue of Jesus and he's pointing to his heart. And MS-13, they have a gang sign. It's like this, this MS-13 sign. So he's actually, I changed his hand position to be a gang sign to his heart. So it was, again, it was keeping in this way of everything being symbolic and using again materials that are, you know, why make a sculpture about violence or about life and death and not use a material that maybe speaks about life and death. And Ash, human Ash, actually possesses both of those things simultaneously, life and death at the same time. It's really interesting. How did you acquire human Ash? So I, we, it was crazy. I didn't, it was not easy. So I call, I had an intern actually doing this. She called about 500 crematoriums throughout the United States. And we finally got one guy in Michigan where the laws are pretty lenient about human Ash, believe it or not. And so we started getting boxes just sent to the studio. Ash from the 1930s, 40s, people that we knew would never be collected again by their family members. So that's how I did that. And then the gunpowder, which is it was also illegal to have shipped. I got it from Arkansas and we just fudged some paperwork and got it sent. It's crazy. So you should get a gunpowder. There's a lot of gunpowder. Hey. We are in a Smithsonian institution. Oh yeah. Right, right, right. Reminder. So anyway, I like to think about this as this moment sort of is where things, things switched, you know. I had been making this work that's very intense, very political. And I didn't feel like the audience was there, to be honest with you. The pieces were selling, I was making a living in all that stuff, but I mean audience, I mean people actually caring about the subject matter. You know what I mean? Like I felt like I had risked a lot to make the Felix, the cocaine sculpture. And then it's kind of like, then what? You know, I spent a year and a half kind of trying to get out of trouble and nobody really cared beyond that. You know what I mean? It was weird. So same kind of thing with MS, with this MS work. You make these bold statements about where do they go? There's like empty ears, especially in the art world, in the art world. Right? People are looking to just buy something, they don't really get it, they're not really thinking about it too deep. Anyway, so I felt a little frustrated with that, to be honest. So this is 2010 or 11, and basically I was in LA, I hated LA. So I wanted to move, I was like I want to go back to New York and I kind of did. So, hey. But you did one more project before. Not in LA. I moved, I was like 32, I went back, I had to move in with my parents for a brief moment, this was so crazy. And then, but I met somebody kind of crucial. During right at the end of my stay at LA, I met Sean Fanning, who was the founder of Napster. If you guys remember Napster, and he sort of, he had coded Napster so we became very close friends very quickly. And about a month after leaving Los Angeles, he invited me to come up to San Francisco where he's based and to work on a project. And it was kind of a lifeline to be honest with you because at the time, economy was not good, art was not selling as much. Like, I had made these very difficult pieces to sell. You can't ship these because they're bombs, basically. And the human ash pieces, we had, we had some people just like, rejected all, you know, they were not psyched. And we showed it at the Armory and they, people were, some of them were repulsed. So it was hard work to sell in a lot of ways. So, anyway, it was a pretty massive shift. But, so Fanning invites me to San Francisco. I get involved in the tech world, what's going on with tech at the time. And I decided to make a sculpture that's basically a massive iPhone. It's name is Al One, artificial life one. And what it is here is that, so it's Al, as you approach the sculpture, it starts to recognize that people are in its scope. And he'll start taking photos, he'll start posting them up onto this crucifix in the back here. There's a number displayed, so you could text message Al and he'll reply to you privately while you're seeing all the text messages come up on this area here, like right here. And then he had a YouTube page, he had a Twitter, he had a Facebook, he had Instagram, and basically he was using all of these to build his following. Keep in mind, this is 2012. I feel like it was a little bit ahead of its time. So, I mean, ultimately I knew because hanging out with these guys in San Francisco, all they're thinking about is product, product, product. How are we gonna make people addicted to our app? So I wanted to say that this is where things are going. And the reason I named him Al One, if you put the word together, it's alone. And essentially I started to feel like as we got deeper and deeper into these social media things and just pushing our ego and our following and want more and more followers and what it means. So I wanted to sort of make a dark sculpture about it. Was this new religion or something like that? So this is funny, this sculpture, I spent a lot of time making this piece. And because of the tech and all that, we finally got the coding all right and my career switched gears right at the end of this project and it never has seen the light of day, which is crazy. So it's the only piece of my history that's never been shown. Well, let's get to the next one because I think that this next slide really speaks to your transition to being a furniture designer. Talk a little bit about this commission and how you then start making actual objects. Okay, so in San Francisco, Parker, I mean, I'm sorry, Fanning introduces me to Sean Parker. They co-founded Napster together. Parker, young, billionaire, very, he's cool guy, whatever, yeah. Anyway, he bought this house in the West Village. I don't even remember how to say this, but it's fine, nobody. And because we have become friends to the process, he really, really was a fan of my work and he bought this amazing house and was like, I want a masterpiece. And I was like, okay, so we started on this, basically almost two-year commission venture and this is when I had to kind of get serious again about making art. I had to get a studio, I had been transitioning from LA slowly coming back to New York and then once this landed, I really got my stuff together and formed a studio, got assistance again. I feel like I was kind of back, you know? So anyway, this is a, I call it the spiral, it's a salt spiral. The top piece is made all out of cast salt and then the bottom is the negative shape of that impressed into the wall. So we had to build a 40-foot false wall so we could insert this bottom piece and mount that top piece. And here you could see that we were there about six months with the scaffolding, trying to put this thing together. What it did do was it started to completely push me away from narrative, okay? And I was able to sort of use abstraction as a way to describe narrative, in other words. So this is a vortex, right? It's a spiral, it's a vortex. So I took these very simple sort of solowit-style geometries and just twisted it in the computer. And I wanted to use technology because Parker is, you know, he's a technology guy. I wanted to use technology as a basis for making the work. So the conceptual ideas of the pieces started to go more deeper into abstraction while still telling a story. And so that's sort of the basis of a lot of my work, essentially, and especially now. So after I finished this, I had an interior designer approach me about making a piece for a showroom. He had seen some of the previous work and thought, oh, you know, could you make me a bar, basically? And use salt as the material. And so I was like, yeah, sure. I didn't really think too much of it, but pretty easy. And so I started making furniture pieces. So one of the first pieces I made was this drum, this pink one, this guy. That's why the photo's also so, you're hating this photo, aren't you? Yeah, this photo, so. But anyway, what it did was it allowed me to just focus on the materials. So my struggle with people actually caring about the content of the work evaporated. I was like, you know what? I'm not gonna fight that fight. I'm not gonna try to get people interested in coca farming and into what's going on with gangs. They can watch the news for that. And I decided to allow the materials to sort of become the focus of where I would go in the future, yeah. So this is made out of pink salt. This is silica. This is made of sand. This is made of cement. And I started a company basically, a furniture company and a furniture line. And we started fusing it with the studio, with the sculpture studio. And so at the time, we're still making wall works. We call it their paintings. They're made of sand and salt and things like that. We're working with that, but this is when the furniture started to sort of emerge. And it was weird because I spent a long time, 10 years making a living as a sculptor. I felt like I was on doing really well. I got this big commission. It was a lot of money. It was great. So I never thought that I would, never thought about making furniture really. And when I felt so comfortable doing it, I was like, wow, there's something really here. And it allowed me to just explore the materials. Yeah, why don't you show a few slides of some of this early work? So launched the company in May of 2014 at Sight Unseen, which is a fair here in New York. And I don't know what happened. It was like an explosion happened. Just, I swear, it was crazy. People really got interested in the work very quickly. We were able to sort of build a company around it pretty fast. Meanwhile, trying to just make pieces, keep up with production and come up with new innovative stuff. And so one of the first commissions, which was phenomenal, was Stella McCartney. And she had asked us to do her store, basically, in Palo Alto. And so she sort of chose some of the early, this was a version of the early console. This is gray salt and cement. I thought of them as like geodes. And I thought about, by the way, things start to shift a little more towards nature in my thinking and using the materials to really explore that. And so started making drawings about furniture, thinking about how we could cast them, what they would be made out of, what they might look like. So these are some of the early pieces. The planters, the copper BB, this is copper BBs. So I was really just playing all those years of having made the sculptures and thinking about, oh, these materials are really cool, like what else could they, you know, but I couldn't use, let's say copper BBs. I didn't really have a sculpture to make copper BBs out of. But once it becomes furniture, it's all open, you know what I mean? Because what do copper BBs mean? They're attached to BB guns, blah, blah, blah. But I couldn't really tie them into a narrative before. So this sort of freed me up. I'm like, great, let's use copper BBs. That'll be amazing. So it kind of, it really opened up a lot for me and the studio. And in the last few years, we've really moved through a lot of language. I'm a person that cannot, you know, I need to be working on new stuff all the time. So this is one of the most more recent collections of the furniture. It's called the Ghost Series and it's all made out of cement. Cement became a utilitarian material that, look, because when I was making sculpture, I didn't have to be, you didn't have to put anything on it, you know, it didn't matter. But now as furniture, I had to kind of think a little bit more of utility. And I had been using cement to make molds into, in the studio, cement was always around. So I was like, well, let's start using that as our utilitarian material. And now it's, well, it's become this. This is the most experimental that we've sort of gotten with it, trying to push the limits of what we could do with cement. I want to circle back to what you just alluded to, which is exploring materials and exploring nature and landscape and a few weeks ago, I sent Fernando some questions or some ideas for questions of topics that we can discuss. And I said, you know, I really look at your work and I think of you as sort of this modern day, 19th century traveler artist. And I want to make that connection. And it's like silence. Like, I didn't receive a response. And then we met and he was like, yeah, I read that. And I don't really know what you mean by that. And then I started to say, you know, I look at your work and you're also very active on social media. You post a lot of pictures. You talk a lot about, Nate, you post a lot of pictures. You talk a lot about landscape. Landscape obviously inspires you. You see it very much in your work, especially these limited edition projects that you do. And so I showed you a book of Frederick Edwin Church Landscapes from Latin America. Frederick Church was a 19th century landscape painter. Cooper Hewitt actually has one of the largest collections of his sketches, which he made all throughout his travels. He traveled widely throughout his lifetime. And these sketches really served as his inspiration for going back to the studio and creating these formal landscape paintings. And I feel like for you, you sort of work in a very similar way. You have source images that you get from online. And here's just like a few examples, but then you have your own travels. You travel a lot. And that is also reflected in your work. So what sort of became this kind of esoteric comparison kind of got his going in this like super geeky way. Like, oh, someone who was so contemporary, so much about the 21st century has this tie to this traditional landscape body of work. Yeah, you know, I didn't think about it only because, okay, this is what was basically going on behind the scenes was as I started sort of getting rid of content in a way, like, okay, reading myself of like heavy content. Just personally, I wanted to have more peace in my life. I wanted to use materials in a way that was just about beauty. So this, and the only way that I felt connected to that or where I felt inspired by that to bring things back to the studio was by traveling. And, you know, being in landscapes, thinking about, you know, this was something that I didn't do much early on. But once I did it, I felt so connected to that idea that it sort of feels like that was a new phase in my life. And it has to do with finding harmony and peace and being connected to the things that you make in a way that's just more real. So yeah, so I started, you know, these are some of my personal ones. This is from an airplane. And so all this language, you see this here, like, this is what I think about. This is the stuff I shoot and photograph and I think, okay, like how can we make that in the studio? You know, look at the, this is the photo in Tulum. I have a house in Tulum. And I'm just inspired by the sort of colors, the palette, the sand, this is Big Sur up here. These look like some of my early rock sculpture things that, you know, some of the furniture pieces. So anyway, yeah, it's become the only way to make work at this point for me. In 2015, went to Perito Moreno, which is in Patagonia with my best, well, with Boyd. And then you can see, you know, this piece is perfectly translated into this then table. And so, you know, it was a way to sort of abstract, it's like, you know, like church's paintings, they become these, you know, abstractions of his thoughts afterwards. And so this is essentially how we work. You know, I make these drawings and then have these reference photos and try to create these landscapes, these abstract landscapes now through furniture. And this piece is made of sand and powdered glass. And so it was the best material that we could find to sort of emulate what was going on with some of the glaciers. And then, of course, as I started to travel, started to see some of the terrible things that are going on with the landscape. You know, so my political side, the stuff I still, because I still burn with a little bit of, you know, politics and me and- A little bit? Yeah, a little bit a lot. So the thing is, so, but landscape was a way to, what was going on with landscape felt like, really relevant. Like I can maybe talk about climate change for the rest of my life. Because the things that are inspiring to me we are, they're slowly going away. Glaciers are melting. Okay, the sea is rising. There's all these issues and I'm just making work about it. And it seems like an infinite amount of stuff for me to make work about. So, and this is the thing. The work should be a reminder of the beauty, but it also should be a warning in a way. And so I think if you can do both, you're not hitting someone over the head with the politics of what you're trying to say. You're engaging them with the beauty. And then if they want to think about what it actually means, they can. So I had sort of found a solution from, you know, hitting you over the head with corn farming politics to being able to discuss things in a much more abstract language that allows you access to the ideas without hitting you over the head with it. So, so I take a lot of, you know, source image, I hadn't shown anybody this, maybe at the studio, you guys know that, but sorry. So this is a piece of sand or whatever that I really just love the form. And then I came back to the shop and I was like, let's make that, but let's make it into a glacier or an iceberg, you know, so it looks like it's melting or something like this. So this is how this is how I work. I go out, I shoot photographs, I think about it. And then just make things like this. So this is the drift collection. This was done right after Patagonia. So after leaving this trip, I came back and we immediately started doing this. So this is why you're seeing the colors, the ombre that's coming out because I felt like that's, you know, part of what we were seeing down in Patagonia. So there's a sofa and a bench. This is made out of sand, velvet and cement and sand. And so this is all hand sculpted molded cast. It also started to allow me to really, you know, sort of push the boundaries of making, which was something I've always been interested in. I feel like the scale question comes back to my ambition period. I just want to be challenged as an artist, as a maker. So let's make things that are bigger, harder, more complex, more interesting, you know? So that's how it keeps the studio kind of fresh. And so this is a recent piece called Faw. I think that's an interesting way though to go to the next slide. Next slide. No, no, no, forward, forward. And talk about this series because what I find really interesting about Escape is that there's, you know, you create these molds and you're building up these layers and there's a bit of improvisation in it. And also a lot of sort of luck because you don't know what the work, I mean, he's smiling at me like it's not that much luck. No, no, I don't. But you don't know what it's gonna look like. You know, you have an idea and you hope you execute it and you hope that when, you know, you take the piece out of the mold, it's exactly how you sort of thought it would be or maybe not in a good way or maybe in a not so good way. Yes. No, the thing is, is like, look, as you, okay, you learn as a maker to let go of things little by little, okay? And whatever I want the piece to be, it doesn't really matter. Like, let's allow, so I set up the parameters for the piece, essentially, right? I say, okay, well, we're gonna, this is the size of the thing. This is the reference photo from the landscape and then now we're going, I draw on the mold sort of decide how the landscape's gonna go and then we pack, then we start packing material into it. And you're right, yeah. At the end, there's days that we pull the molds on and we're like, well, that's kind of interesting and maybe kind of not. But also I've learned that, you know, when I first saw this table, I didn't love it. I was like, man, we didn't, the studio, we didn't love it. We were like, eh, I don't know. But it's grown on me because it's sort of, it's taught me why it's good in a weird way. So now I allow for that to happen a lot. So I set up the parameters and if the thing evolves beyond what I could have made it, great. That means it's bigger than you, you know what I mean? If you control everything, it sort of restricts the nature of what can happen. So with Escape, yeah, basically I shot a bunch of photographs and took some reference photographs and came back to the studio and we started making these basically landscape paintings in the shape of furniture. And this is a coffee table and a side table made of silica and crushed glass, powdered glass. And so these materials really allow to describe, you know, we hand-dye every single color, every single layer that's packed down. We, you know, there is chance, but we really, we try to make it look like a landscape so it actually speaks of that too. And then made this bench and this bookcase, this kind of sale. You know, this series is, I really love this series, you know, I only made a few pieces so far, but it's something that's very, it has summarized how, you know, between travel and what it means to make landscape and the materials and pushing form, these really are sort of, you know, pretty happy with these. So. So let's get to your most recent collaboration, which are, it's a departure from furniture making. It's carpets with Edward Fields. Actually, when I visited you this summer, you had the carpets all on the walls. And when I came in, I was like, whoa, so these are all inspired by landscape. And what's interesting about these carpets as well is that they have a lot of texture and relief to it. So it's almost like a topographic, it gives you a topographic feel where you really feel like you get the essence of what that landscape feels and looks like. But it also has like a painterly quality. And you confess to me that you're sort of a frustrated painter. And he's always actually telling me like, oh, maybe I can make that into painting. And I'm always like, why? Why don't you just make it into a furniture piece? But in many ways, I think that this was a really interesting way for you to sort of indulge in that feeling and that longing to create landscape painting, but through carpet design. Yeah, it was a very, look, as soon as I got the opportunity, there was no hesitation. I was like, yes, let's make some rugs. That'd be awesome. And they asked me to think about the approach that I wanted to take. And of course, I immediately started going into my books, referencing landscapes that I thought about, but I also really saw this one in particular as an opportunity to make the point about climate change and about things going on. So all the pieces either touch on that or touch on some of the language that's already going on in the work, like sand paintings. So this piece right here is based on some of my sand paintings, but they're topographical views, you know? This here is ice breaking and all the textures and stuff that we did on the inside. We chose every single fiber, basically, every color. So I hadn't thought, you know, I wouldn't approach carbon making in any other way. This was like, let's make big paintings. Let's think about how landscape can influence. Look, essentially I've learned that I don't really like to make a lot of decisions about pieces. I like to allow the landscapes and the things that I'm inspired by make all the decisions and then I'll kind of fudge them into shapes and forms and things like that. So, you know, this photo came from a canyon that was photographed and this came from glaciers at the side of a mountain, of a glacier, melting. So it was also a way to describe, by the way, these are eight foot by 10 foot, so they're these massive pieces. So they have a lot of impact when you see them in person. So it's called Salimard. This is based on paintings, but I wanted to make a collection. Collections call reverence and it's about respecting the beauty and the landscape that we currently have. So that's what these are about. This is one of the 10,000 years, silent waters. So this is based on some Turkish salt pools which ended up becoming a painting. So this is the first time I went from carpet to actually making a painting in reverse. Usually it works like I'll make something and then we'll end up making it into something else. So, next. Yeah, so anyway. Well, let's talk about this project, which is your newest project, but it's actually not so new. It's a return to a project that you did 10 years ago about coal. And this is actually a project that I'm most interested to see how you resolve. Talk a little bit about like this and then how you see it now. Okay, so at the time, my close friend, 2008 when I was making Averis, the big calendar. So Boyd here is from Kentucky and this is his father, Don. And Don is a coal miner. He's been working in the coal mines for 40 years. So Boyd and I went on this long motorcycle trip which has now become part of what I do as part of inspiration. We usually go together and we, so we did Patagonia together this summer we did one. So anyway, we ended up in Kentucky and his father took us to the coal mines to see what was going on. Of course, like coal is just a dry aggregate essentially, right? It's like sand, like anything else. And when we saw it, it made perfect sense that we needed to bring some back to the studio. And so Boyd and I brought one ton of coal back from Kentucky and then we ended up crushing it ourselves using this crazy machine here and taking photos of us like kind of coal mining and sifting it down. And we made a mold of this tree because they'd knocked down tree, a ton of trees to do coal mining. So we wanted to sort of reference that. And then it ends up looking like a black, you know something that's been burned or something like this, but it's actually cast coal. And it was, you know, at the time, 10 years ago, coal mining was, you know, getting some traction in the news, but it wasn't as much as it is today. And so that was 2008. Boyd and I decided this year, you know, 10 year anniversary of our, of this. And so here we are 10 years older and doing the same sort of thing. So Don, he retired this year and Boyd and I decided to go on this motorcycle journey with him and continue this coal project because now coal, obviously, is in the news quite a bit. It's a big, it's a big issue. So I wanted to sort of resurrect that. And now that we actually have a platform, okay, because 10 years ago it could have shown the piece but this work really needs to be talked about, shown, thought about because it's a big issue. And so I wanna be able to use the platform, Boyd has had some success in the world. And so we wanna use this as a way to sort of discuss the delicate balance between what coal mining actually provides and what it, and the effect it is gonna have. But talk about a little bit of, I mean, this is sort of a multi-layered project. I mean, obviously you had, you know, these photographs and you documented the trip but it's gonna be much more than just this. So it's definitely, so it's three acts. This is the basic way that we're looking at the project. And I'm collaborating with Boyd on this entire thing. And Don, his father will be part of a documentary that we're sort of, it's short documentary, but a documentary sort of telling the entire narrative. So essentially, this is act one, we went on the road trip. We got the stories of Don's life and through those stories, we're sort of developing a narrative now. And what I'm gonna do is act two, we're gonna bring coal to the studio and we're gonna make furniture pieces out of coal, using the machinery that's used in coal mining. So shovels, a bulldozer. And we're gonna just pile piles of this stuff and mix the resin into it and start to create things almost as like a performance piece. We're gonna sort of give ourselves a certain amount of time to do those things, do them together in the studio and sort of work through the ideas. And then of course, act three is to show the work, exhibit it, show the photograph from 10 years ago and the photographs of today, show a video, show photography that we've done over the course of this time and then of course show the pieces and then be able to discuss the narrative of what's going on with coal mining in the United States right now. So that's kind of where we are, that's what this project is about. So we're out of time. We're out of time. Well, we're not out of time, but we're out of time. A little bit out of time. We wanna make time for the audience to ask questions. And I think that maybe as the audience asks questions, we can sort of touch on what's happening today. I think you, I'll just lay this as a feeler for people who wanna ask questions, but Fernando has really created a self-sustaining studio for himself and a practice. He collaborates, as he likes to say, with galleries and other producers, but it's really you. It's really you, it's the FMS studio and you guide everything, you push everything, you guys sell, you show. We'll talk a little bit about even you sort of stepping out of your role as a designer and being a curator and helping to mentor other young designers and promoting their work as well. So, super intro. I don't think about FMS now as mine, by the way. It's definitely become, this is, it's much bigger than just me. I'm definitely pushing the ideas and the design forward, but it's really, this is a much larger sort of thing. And that's partially why I've treated the studio as I have because there's a lot of lives involved now. And so that's important to me that FMS represents more than just me. A responsibility that you have to your team to make sure that you produce and that you sell and that you're successful and that in turn they are successful. Precisely. And give them opportunities to also be successful through their own work or just as a creative in this weird town, where it's really hard today to survive. So that's the studio currently, as it is. And what Christina's talking about is I recently did a show called In Good Company and it's basically a platform for young artists and designers to show in my studio space, but we opened it up to the public and we had a great response and it's actually becoming more significant than just one exhibition. It's something I wanna keep doing and keep promoting. So addition number two is hopefully coming in May of 2018. And you know, it's because I didn't have the platform, okay, and Matthew didn't like push my work and you know, so I never loved that about the art and design or art world really. So this is something I'm really passionate about. And it's sort of a full circle, no, from Studio 13 where you were creating your own space and exhibiting your work. But I don't wanna get too much into that because we gotta give the audience their chance. So any questions? Don't be shy. My question was how big were the pieces that you had made with the human ash? Yeah, you know, they were seven foot by four foot and essentially it was also a weight and logistical issue why I chose that particular size. So, but yeah, that was why. I was also, I didn't have staff. I had like one or two people helping me so it was difficult to lift. There were like logistical reasons around making that size. But I wanted it to be enough where you were confronted by the thing. I mean, as a bay, you know, understanding in front of a seven foot object is still kind of big. So I wanted to have that impact on you. Yeah. And my second question is, the piece that was made from cocaine, where's the piece now? I mean, I just, I mean, like I'm following the story and I'm like, but where is it? So, you know, you know, listen, I can't talk about that. I can't talk about that. I can't talk about that. Okay, not a problem. Thank you. Check check. Was it difficult for you being a heavily figurative sculptor before to kind of transition into a very non-figurative work? Or is that still trying to, do you still feel compelled to do that kind of work? I don't feel compelled to do it today. And what's interesting about that is that my undergraduate work was extremely abstract. It was just abstract sculpture, large scale abstractions. So I actually left the world of abstraction too figurative. And it was really just a rebellion against where I went to school. VCU is a very non-figure based sort of, so and I got into the school and they thought of me as an abstract sculptor and I didn't want that. I was like, you know what? No, so I radically shifted and it didn't actually go really well for me towards my second year in grad school. People did not like this work. It was well made. So everyone had to give me credit because I was really nicely made. But it's like nobody was interested in figuration really, especially at VCU. And so I feel like I went back to my original state of being. Yeah, so those rebellion years were just a few, you know. Yeah, but I don't feel compelled to make figurative sculpture today. Hi, sorry. Obviously you're very passionate and have a lot of political views and stuff, but now that you're working or not exclusively, but you're working with furniture and probably a lot of interior designers and crazy clients, how does it affect you as an artist when other designers try to curate your creation? It doesn't happen that often. I have a very, you know, I will walk away from something that I don't believe is, you know, like I just don't. Look, take the language. Look, part of making the furniture line, not the limited to distance stuff, but the drums, the consoles, the sort of stuff that is easily modifiable, that I'm allowing people to play with. You know, like here's the structure for the design. It's cement exterior, aggregate interior. Okay, I don't really care about how that structure is if they want to use crushed glass or they want to use salt, great. It's within the design structures. When they try to break out of the design structure, that I'll usually, we'll just, I'll be like, no. You know, I'll just reject it 100%. Yeah, so, and you know what, it's earned, it's allowed, they respect it, you know, and that's been my approach. We just say, no. So, and I will continue to, you know, and we've probably lost some projects because of that perhaps, but I just feel like, you know, I just don't want to see, you know, this is what people don't realize. Like, I'm, we're, I am, we are constantly thinking about every component, every, the thickness of something, the curvature of something, nothing is done just randomly. So, when somebody comes and says, oh, can we tweak this? It ruins the design. I know the thickness of something. You know, like when I'll render something, if it's four, four and a half inch, or you know, four and three eighths, it's four and three eighths for a particular reason because I think I want you to experience the thing at four and three eighths. You know what I mean? It might be easier to make it at five or at three, four and three quarter, whatever, or somebody might think to design it that way, but it doesn't mean that it's elegant, you know? You have to, so, I get really nervous around people trying to tweak the scale of things and stuff, so. Yeah. But I, you know, I love it. I love working with interior designers and I think it's broadened what I do in a lot of ways. You know? Yes. So, Fernando, did Memphis or art and design or any of the great furniture designers of the 20th century, did they have any influence on you? You know, I knew nothing about furniture three and a half years ago. Nothing. Nothing. So, no, I still don't, I look at furniture now just to be educated, especially because I am talking to a lot of sort of, you know, people extremely educated in furniture, but no. And I think that honestly that that's, I'm gonna keep it that way because I don't wanna feel influenced, you know? I don't wanna feel like, you know, I just don't wanna feel limited by what other people have made, you know? I've set up a language for the work. That's how I think about it today. It's language and we modify the language based on what the piece needs to be, but I look and respect a lot of contemporaries, you know? But yeah. I think actually that's an interesting question because we talked about modern Brazilian furniture. You know, we had a long conversation about how perfect those forms are, how the great modernist Brazilian designers, furniture designers, they just perfected these chairs and these tables to a way that you look at it and you're just so, you're compelled to wanna copy. And you said to me, he's like, I don't look at this. I can't look at this because if I look at it for too long, I just wanna make it. I just wanna copy and I don't wanna do that. Yeah, I mean. And it's hard because as people who are surrounded by these things all the time, things that you see, they infiltrate your mind. And sometimes it's difficult to differentiate what is an influence and what is a copy and what is your own original idea. Right. Yeah, I imagine it's like every experience that we have, as you fall in love with something, you, okay, so I basically started falling in love with furniture. So I started digging into its history to learn about it and but maintaining that I have to keep some distance to that, okay? I'm not trained as a designer, I didn't study it. So I'm just trying to love it for its thing separate from me as a maker, as a maker of furniture at this point. So I love discovering mid-century design and being like, wow, this is amazing. Imagine like I feel like a kid again in terms of how I felt about art when I first saw a Matthew Barney sculpture or whoever, Salvador Dali painting when I was really young. So I'm getting that again, but it doesn't affect my work. So I think we have time for one more question. So we have a gentleman here. Hi, this might be a little in the weeds, technically, but so to get like a not a resiny surface, you're making a really dry mix with your aggregate, right? So how do you ensure that your stuff is structurally, the structural integrity is solid? Well, it's been over a decade of perfecting the formulas. We know the difference between what one ounce of resin and how it'll affect and change the outcome of the piece. So it's been dialed in pretty hardcore. And I just also, once you start making furniture, you have to elevate your fabrication, right? Because there's gonna be more wear and tear on the object, with sculpture, it wouldn't be that. So it's been a journey to try to make these things sustainable in some way. And they're also natural materials. They do weird stuff, man. The salt sweats with humidity, it changes. It's weird, but we've learned to sort of adapt to that over time, yeah. So, but the formulas where we keep them close, you know what I mean? Like, yeah. I get a lot of people on Facebook asking me about formulas, about how this is done and whatnot. And listen, it's not rocket science, but it's definitely something that we fine-tuned, you know? So, and that is the point that you don't see any resin. When you look at the piece, you're just seeing raw sand. It's like, you don't understand how it's sticking together. So that's important. Do we have to wrap up? Susanna is telling us, one more question. One more question? Curious about how that, the type of work you do with the rug, what are you representing to, I assume, weavers, I don't know how carpet's made. You know, it's a good question, because they were like, you know, a lot of people ask me, they're like, oh, you're doing rugs? What are they gonna be made out of? And I was like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, I gotta be made out of fibers and stuff, you know, like. Um, you know what I mean? Because they just inherently thought I'd be making rugs out of some weird material, I guess, but they were just, when I was thinking about them, I was actually thinking in wool and in silk. I was thinking about how those things would reflect, and Ben and we tried to learn as much as we could about what each of those things would do, what wool and delicate silk look like next to each other, and what that would, so really, I just dug into the thing the way I dig into sand, for example, different grains and powdered glass, and it's an investigation into what the thing is, and then trying to exploit it for its beauty, and so it felt very natural to say, okay, well, now we're looking at little pom-poms of different color and different, just felt supernatural the way we look at sand and salt and stuff, so it was a very, very natural transition. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, guys.