Design | Deviant Artifacts: The Work of Radical Craft

As you can see from our posts each week, CFile has it bad for ceramics utilized in architecture. And now we’re smitten with Los Angeles-based studio Radical Craft, who brought its conceptual architecture ideas into a gallery setting with Deviant Artifacts.

With Deviant Artifacts the studio sees a bridge between traditional and modern understandings of the word “artifact.” The studio states that in archeology “artifact” is a word which embodies the intentions of individual creators as well as historical cultures. If you were to excavate a piece of jewelry from a Chinese tomb dating back to the Ming Dynasty, that artifact would be both a reflection of the artist who crafted it and the era in which that artist worked.

A modern definition of the word, however, makes us think of digital “compression artifacts,” such as when a JPEG photograph becomes lossy, causing the picture to look blocky, warped and distorted. Compression artifacts can be like nails on a chalkboard to a web designer, but those among us who don’t mind a little chaos can recognize interesting patterns within the attenuated image. Radical Craft suggests they were working with both ideas when creating hand-crafted ceramic casts of objects that were focused design, but could stray into new forms or ideas. The studio used digitally fabricated plaster molds and ambiguously scaled models which they state “offer material resistance to the idealized geometries and desires of proposals operating at the scales of architecture and urbanism.” Radical writes:

“The technical challenges of producing an architectural ‘model’ in ceramics offer unexpected potential design considerations for the larger architectural proposal itself. Radical Craft consciously works to develop this form of parallel practice, oscillating between the immediate materiality of the artifact and the speculative mode of the architectural project. A consistent reinterpretation of the artifact is key in coaxing an interaction between these two aspects of scale and practice.”

Founded by Joshua G. Stein in 2005, Radical Craft is a Los Angeles-based studio that through public art projects, installations and speculative proposals seeks to reconfigure urban and material patterns through a focus on the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary technology.

Bill Rodgers is a Contributing Editor at CFile.

Above image: Joshua G. Stein/ Radical Craft, a piece from the Tectonic Horizons series, which was included in Radical’s Deviant Artifacts show at the WEDGE Gallery in Woodbury University in 2013. Photograph by Jason Kwong.

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