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Young designers pop up at L.A.'s Geffen Contemporary

Exit Through The Pop-Up

Young designers pop up at L.A.'s Geffen Contemporary

Los Angeles–based design consultancy THIS X THAT has unveiled their new Store Pop-Up, a temporary installation of design objects created by a collection of emerging designers that includes Besler & Sons, Bureau Spectacular, and Welcome Companions taking place at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles.

The pop-up shop features “limited-edition objects for home and garden that offer imaginative solutions for everyday life,” according to a press release. The diverse collection of objects includes decorative lamps, paperweights, and even garden gnomes, among others. The display brings together five practices in total, with New York City–based New Affiliates and Syracuse, New York–based Architecture Office rounding out the group.

THIS X THAT’s new pop-up at the Geffen Contemporary in L.A. highlights the work of the city’s young designers. (Injinash Unshin)

For the store display, Besler & Sons designed a trio of informal mobile kiosks that hold the various objects. The Wabi-sabi look of the display—which is dubbed “Trusses on Trucks” by the designers—is derived from “an interest in the iconicity of vernacular built forms, particularly residential house frames, trusses, and the sloped roof itself,” according to a press release. Made from stacked and butt-jointed sheets of plywood, the displays are held together with industrial tension straps and are made to be assembled and disassembled quickly.

In terms of the objects on display Besler & Sons also contributed a series of oversized paperweights made out of pink, white, and blue terrazzo. Bureau Spectacular made two contributions to the store, with principal Jimenez Lai designing a blue neon lamp drawn to resemble a scribble and principal Joanna Grant creating a flexible, tube-shaped body pillow. Lai’s lamp was recently added to the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Describing the so-called “snuggle,” Grant said, “It can function as a pillow or an outrageously large scarf,” adding that she envisioned an object with “inexact tendencies” that could “conform to different orientations of the body and take on different readings.”

Items for sale include a squiggly light by Jimenez Lai and a body pillow by Joanna Grant, both of Bureau Spectacular. (Injinash Unshin)

Welcome Companions designed a series of leather charms designed to be affixed to handbag handles and tote bag straps. The charms are shaped like over-easy eggs, slices of toast, popsicles, and pills, among other shapes and represent part of the office’s efforts to “inject a sense of play, suspense, and narrative” into everyday objects.

New Affiliates brings a similar playfulness to their work, here manifested as a series of  brightly-colored “garden gnomes,” “quasi-functional ornamental objects” designed by the office as flat-packed objects meant to fit anywhere.

For the shop, Architecture Office created runs of bespoke wallpaper “designed, cut, and printed in Upstate New York” and inspired by Los Angeles’s sunrises. The wallpaper comes as a vinyl film that can be applied multiple times over smooth surfaces and is meant to be “put up by anyone anywhere to jazz up a monotonous wall with a graphic sparkle and a splash of color.”

The works will be on display—and for sale—at the museum gallery through March 19, 2018.

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