Design | Miles Spadone: Bringing Action to Minimal Design

Miles Spadone is a Portland, Maine-based designer, creating reductive objects that embody a captured tension. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Maine College of Art in 2013 where he explored prototyping and production techniques in ceramic and, more recently, gypsum and plastic. Spadone makes functional and sculptural forms related to modern design trends.

Above Image: Ceramic work by Miles Spadone.

“I am interested in the essence of a form through a process of reduction. Void of decoration, the surface of my work is expressed like skin over ribs, where rigid meets languid. My work strives to suspend an emerging moment of transformation, the moment when impression and inflation clash. Like the instant before an object rips through taut plastic, water sheds off your hand, or bone protrudes through elastic skin, my work captures a tactile image of materials moving in opposition.”

Spadone reduces the visual information to a state reminiscent of modern-minimal product design. These designs often conceal a specific or expansive technology, like the iPhone, through the absence of a visually described function. This reductive design strategy, opposite of when a telephone “looked like a telephone,” makes its potential seem limitless. Spadone’s work plays on this modern day assumption that the form is concealing a function, which sparks a never satisfied, but forever intriguing, curiosity.

The work transcends the soullessness of cold minimal design, though, with a tension in the forms implying, strength, intention, and consciousness. Some of Spadone’s work, like his plastic tile compositions, appear as if something is either pushing out from the inside or retreating back into the form. Although the artist’s hand has been eliminated from the pieces through production processes, his mind is still present in the playful forms and conscious compositional choices.

Justin Crowe is Writer-at-Large for CFile.

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