MILAN — A quiet respite from Design Week’s sensory stimuli, Japanese design studio Nendo’s Invisible Outlines sanctuary-like exhibition presented a white cut-out mountainscape and meditative jellyfish vases at the Jil Sander showroom.
The exhibition explored blurring the contours the mind unconsciously infers when presented with familiar objects, thus enhancing and elevating the object, Nendo’s website states.
This also means that objects with obscure outlines cannot always be identified as objects, and conversely if outlines are visible, that information which is not visible can be subconsciously supplemented.
Nendo’s entire exhibition stretched across seven rooms, largely with an all-white color scheme and meditative soundscape, Dezeen writes.
’80 Sheets of Mountains’ featured mountain-like partitions using outlines with cut and elongated sheet material. The work debuted in Stockholm several years ago, Nendo founder Oki Sato told Dezeen.
“Each mountain is made of a single sheet of Forex. By cutting them out and stretching them open, it becomes like a mountain.”
Another room held the mesmerizing ceramic-inpsired Jellyfish Vases — 30 ultra-thin transparent silicon vases in myriad shapes. The vases were displayed submerged in a fish tank, where they gently undulated like jellyfish, Dezeen writes.
The Jellyfish Vases are made from ultrathin transparent silicon, which has been dyed twice to make it look like it is just a silhouette when submerged in its water-filled display…The strength and direction of the water’s current will change, so that the vases undulate gently along the bottom of the tank like slowly moving jellyfish.
The vases were featured with interspersed flowers, Nendo told the publication.
“The design was to redefine the conventional roles of flower, water and vase by making the water inconspicuous, with an ensemble of both flowers and vases floating inside the filled water, as opposed to simply showing off flowers in a water-filled vase.”
In addition to the ’80 Sheets of Mountians’ and ‘Jellyfish Vases,’ the exhibition included the following: ‘Border Table’ which presented a fragmented contour of rooms; ‘Trace Collection,’ which captured traces of movement, ‘Un-printed Material;’ a piece portraying various forms and expressions of paper through outline; and ‘Objectextile’ a collaborative project with Jil Sander, where contours of 3D objects are retrieved and turned into textile.
Nendo’s exhibition is gorgeous. You’ll want to read Dezeen’s entire write-up.
Photographs by: Takumi Ota
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