Sebastian Errazuriz, Artist

chilean-born, new york-based designer sebastian errazuriz has created a sculptural door for the chilean art gallery 'departamento 21'
(apartment 21), located in a residential apartment building in santiago. until now, the gallery has always stood behind an unmarked door
with no indicators to announce the presence of the art space. departamento 21's director commissioned errazuriz to re-design the entry door
of the gallery as its own unique art form.

sebastian errazuriz tells designboom:
'while attempting to come up with a concept I tried to resist 'designing a door.' I didn’t want to create a door that was sculptural or pictorial;
I wanted the door to hopefully continue to blend with the rest of the building and maintain its apparent anonymity as just another a normal apartment.
nevertheless I also wished to leave a small clue that would invite the passerby to stop, look twice, and maybe suspect that things where different.

it occurred to me that we have used door viewers for a couple hundred years… we have been stupidly squinting and closing our eyes for all this time;
why not have two viewers instead? we have had binoculars for even longer. the two viewers are placed inverted inside the door, thus allowing people
outside to approach the door and look inside the apartment and see the current exhibition, which remains illuminated even when the gallery is closed'.

it is through the piece that the artist presents a digestible paradigm turned upside down. he invites the viewer to reexamine a consistent facet of reality
that had previously been 'hidden in plain sight'. -source is design boom.  link here. 

Marcel Duchamp, Artist

"Étant donnés (in English: Given) is Duchamp's last major work. It was produced in secrecy over a number of years after the Second World War, from 1946 to 1966, and, after Duchamp's death in 1968, was permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Étant donnés may therefore be considered to be Duchamp's artistic testament, his conclusion to art. The old wooden door of the work, the immediate 'facade' of Étant donnés, meets the onlooker in a small room behind the large, well light exhibition room, where the rest of the Duchamp works are found. The small room is a kind of 'appendix' to the large room. It does not lead anywhere and, at first glance, only contains the door, behind which the rest of the work is installed. When you enter the small room and look to the left, there is a stucco wall that stretches from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. In the center of this stucco wall there is a large, arched brick doorway that forms a frame around the old wooden door. It is obvious that the door cannot be opened, but in the middle of the door, at eye-level, there are two small peepholes." -source is Marcel Duchamp - Étant donnés: The Deconstructed Painting by Pia Høy, translated by John Irons.  Link here. 


"“Marcel, Marcel, I love you like Hell, Marcel.” So ran a mash note written to Marcel Duchamp in 1923 by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, one of the scores of women, and many men, for whom Duchamp was a personal fixation, erotic, aesthetic or otherwise." - source is NY Times, Holland Cotter, 2009.  Link here to read more. 

"Untitled (Erotic Object)," circa 1950s

Almost every surviving scrap of physical material related to "Étant Donnés" has been gathered, all evidence of Duchamp's fascination with craft and the naturalistic effects it could achieve: flesh that was smooth but not slick; skin that looked warm but not too flushed. - NY Times, link here

Photo: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp

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"Untitled (Left Arm)," 1959

The nude in "Étant Donnés" is largely pieced together from casts of the voluptuous figure of the sculptor Maria Martins, with whom Duchamp had an intense affair from 1946 to 1951. -NY Times, link here

Photo: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp

Will Corwin, Artist

"You’re strolling along 37th St by 8th Avenue–maybe you just got out of work, maybe you’re paying a visit to the Empire State Building–when you happen upon a tiny, whited-out storefront under the name Chashama. You don’t think much of it, a new store is probably opening, or maybe a new cafe. But something is amiss. You notice that the glass is not entirely concealed, that there are minuscule holes in the paint that allow you, upon pressing your eye to the glass, to peek into the store. Intrigued, you look into the peepholes one by one. The peepholes reveal fractions of a model city, though whether it’s brand new or already destroyed, you cannot tell." -source is Abes Penny. Link here.

Bora Kim, Artist

Link here to read artist statement.

Mark Shetabi, Artist

"Mark Shetabi’s work at Jeff Bailey Gallery was Mark Shetabi’s work, mostly paintings of grisaille empty, oppressive spaces filled with longing–longing for contact, for understanding, for a place on this planet to call one’s own (Roberta’s post here). I especially enjoyed Sculpture, a painting of a gas station, one of Shetabi’s repeating subjects–the other gas station in this exhibit is the actual sculpture itself–The Rapture.

Of course a gas station is a fine symbol of our relationship with Iran and the entire Middle East. It’s not a place for comfort, but it’s an icon for materialism and power. That such a homely place, a sort of hell on earth, can be the sought-after Holy Grail is astonishing.

In the Rapture, Shetabi also adds bunker-like toilets and office behind the fueling area, and beneath, another bunker behind a peephole. This bunker has bottles of water as well as a bed. There’s liquid gold and liquid gold. There’s real survival and economic survival." source link is here.