The line that separates art and design is a gradient.
If you’ve asked yourself this question, you’re a part of the collective unconscious imagined by Sebastian Errazuriz
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The Chilean designer — and on of our newest collab — creates pieces that take object functionality to the extreme, playing with new forms of imagining and consuming art.
A duck becomes a lamp. A coffin, a chest. Sculptures become plastic dreams.
“The line that separates art and design is a gradient.”
12 Shoes for 12 Lovers, a collection Sebastian designed together with Melissa, is all of that. Functional art. Shoes that are design pieces. Works to be displayed on a shelf, or to wear in the momentum of a Saturday night.
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It’s the result of the Chilean’s design-art (or art-design?) How exactly? He personally explains it to us.
After all, is art design or design art?
Decades ago art and design were separate entities. An artist would dedicate himself exclusively to art, a designer to design. Today, most of the community is bilingual. They speak both languages. Most people understand art and design as correlated disciplines, and as a creator you can use elements of the arts to make a product.
And how does this play into practice in your works?
Most of the work I do is basicaly an invitation for the audience to look again at something in a way they never seen it before. So for example, if you think of "Look Again Door", it has two views in it. Now people when they first see the two viewers they look at it and don't quite understand. And the point is that we've been closing one eye for centuries and it doesn't make sense. Why should we close one eye to look through a viewer? A second viewer, it invites the public to open up the other eye and look right through it. That very small metaphor of this invitation to the public to look again at our surroundings is a key component of all of the work I do.
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What is the role of an artist/designer?
An artist or a designer in the end of the day is a little bit like a comedian. The comedian is normally extremelly funny because he presents you this situation that we all already know in a incredible eloquent way. In such a simple manner, that ilustrates what we havent been able to completely see. And when we see it through his eyes is suddenly funny. It really creates this reaction in us were we identify with a situation and cannot but laugh. As a visual artist or designer when you get people to look again at a situation known and passed by through during the day, when he sees something that was always there...that triggers something and that connects. That's very beatiful for me because I get to connect whith my audience, connect to the user.
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And how is that connection given to 12 Shoes for 12 Lovers?
So what's the function of a shoe? At first, naturally, a shoe isolates us from the cold hard floor. Secondly the shoe becomes an aesthetical fashion statement, saying who we are, what kind of urban tribe we belong to and whats our particular style. The shoe can also have other added components... it could have a sentimental component that's maybe related to your childhood, or maybe related to an emotional relationship we had. Or is reaching out to people and implying certain characteristics about my personality that is trying to connets with others.
