In many ways, it is obvious that furniture could be a direct expression of human thoughts and feelings. There is its closeness to the human body and its place at the heart of our domestic, social and political lives, both of which make furniture design a fertile medium for exploring the complexities of embodied experience.
Imagine that you’re sent to a pristine rainforest to carry out a wildlife census. Every time you see an animal, you snap a photo. Your digital camera will track the total number of shots, but you’re only interested in the number of unique animals — all the ones that you haven’t counted already. What’s the best way to get that number? “The obvious solution requires remembering every animal you’ve seen so far and comparing each new animal to the list,” said Lance Fortnow, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But there are cleverer ways to proceed, he added, because if you have thousands of entries, the obvious approach is far from easy.
In bringing us to this world through Manod's eyes, Whale Fall provides a stark reckoning with what it means to be seen from the outside, both as a person and as a people, and a singular, penetrating portrait of a young woman torn between individual yearning and communal responsibilities.
Rothfeld’s collection is a powerful meditation on this core human predicament: that what counts as the highest value in the “public” economic, legal, and political spheres—equality and predictability—counts for nothing or next to nothing once we pass into the parallel “private” spheres of art, sex, and love. All Things Are Too Small is an exuberant, moving, and ultimately persuasive argument for giving desire, whether in love or in art, its due. That is, for taking the risk that desire might, indeed, un-do us, and that this undoing might be worth the price.