Temple of Manufacturing presents COMPANY’s long-term project: SECRETS. Traveling to remote sites around the world to learn crafting processes unique to particular industries and places, the duo (comprised of Aamu Song and Johan Olin) has collaborated over the last decade with a variety of communities to rethink the very processes and knowledge embedded in these places. Applying this knowledge to new and unexpected designs, COMPANY’s work creates an intersection between the mastery of traditional technique and the invention of a new, poetic, and personal material and object-specific vocabulary.

 

For the installation at Storefront, COMPANY presents its own Temple of Manufacturing, an installa­tion that reflects the feeling of sacredness that the duo encountered while visiting spaces of pro­duction all over the world. Raw materials, drawings, objects, designs, and process documents are presented alongside a series of frescoes painted in situ that narrate some of the journeys, topics, and works that structure their research.

 

Temple of Manufacturing presents objects conceived and produced as composite figures from COMPANY’s own design methods and their trips to Japan, Russia, Finland, Estonia, and the Amish communities of Pennsylvania. Part an artist’s travel log, part a sanctuary for the maker’s masters, and somewhere between an archive, an exhibition, and a store (the ultimate temple of contempo­rary capitalism) the installation reflects upon “the aura of the work of art” (in this case, the design object), and the hidden processes of design research as related to manual versus mechanized pro­duction.

 

“Designed by COMPANY,” “Made by COMPANY,” “Manufactured by COMPANY,” “Made with COMPANY,” and “Product of COMPANY,” the objects presented in this exhibition are built with love and shared with everyone, maintaining the playfulness that the Eames brought to the world of making, with an eye toward the ethics of production and global design culture.

 

This is available every day until August 7.