Erik Benjamins

19 March 2024

  1. After-Dinner Walk
  2. Alex Reed’s Home Work
  3. Ben Sanders is Drawing at the Dinner Table
  4. Bookends & Good Hugging
  5. Bookshelves & Hard Optimism
  6. Bottega Louie
  7. Built In at the Neutra VDL House
  8. Building Block
  9. Butts of Florence
  10. Confessions of an Anonymous Recipe
  11. Crying Into the Breadbox
  12. Disintegrating Smeller
  13. Eric Payne
  14. Forgetting the Words
  15. Free Smells
  16. Happiness for Art21 Magazine
  17. Running of the Interns
  18. Schindler Centennial for Cereal Magazine
  19. Self-squaring and Double Acting
  20. Sitting Suite for Seed
  21. To Sit is to Time Travel
  22. The Spongiologist’s Mantra
  23. Use All Five
  24. Wood Fire Chicken for Lucky Peach
  25. Young Joon Kwak’s ‘The Cave’
  26. Show All

Bookshelves & Hard Optimism 2016

A commissioned essay for Norma (2016).

Norma, an LA-based studio for ‘objects, moveables and spaces,’ was headed to New York City to present their first design object: a modular, flat-pack bookshelf. I was tasked with writing a short, poetic essay that would introduce the studio to attendees at Sight Unseen Offsite, a popular fair that annually coincided with New York Design Week. Anchoring the contents of a beautifully designed sales document, this accessible and slightly unconventional ‘anti-bio bio’ communicated the studio’s central focus: seeking delight within a practice of good living.

“Collaborating with EB is a consistent pleasure. Norma has had the great fortune of working with Erik and his words across several commercial and curatorial pursuits since 2016. Erik brings simultaneous gravity and levity to topics that might otherwise be relegated to the mundane (ex. a sales document for a modular shelving system); and extracts unlikely poetry from seemingly inanimate objects (ex. an essay for a catalog of contemporary bookends), nearly anthropomorphizing his subjects here in ways that somehow feel novel and familiar at the same time.”
— Benjamin Critton & Heidi Korsavong, Co-founders

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