Sandwiches

Above, for your endlessly looping gif pleasure, is our contribution to this year's Design After Dark, the annual fundraising extravaganza for the architecture, design, and graphics department of the Denver Art Museum. And below is the 100-ish-word description we slapped on it for the event, though without proof in the form of an actual perfectly pressed sandwich you'll just have to take our 100-ish words for it. Or just wait until we throw the first of what will surely be an annual Apotluckalypse® parties, which we'll do as soon as we can find an Apocalypso band to provide the music.

Sure, the whole Mayan thing was a bust, but no doubt the End is still nigh. Whether the cause is biblical or climatic or nuclear or just an asteroid screaming from the sky, it’s bound to be toastingly hot. But hell, why not put a little potluck in the apocalypse and treat it like an Apotluckalypse®? And with this Apotluckalypanini Press® you'll be the hit of the party. This kit includes a panini press with stainless steel and brass cooking elements plus a coal-fired heating chimney and accompanying tools. Just scoop up a little smoldering rubble and the toasty melted deliciousness is just minutes away!

So the old one among us got a little older recently and to mark the occasion his way-too-good-for-him girlfriend drove his sorry ass to Aspen to see Tom Sachs's new show at Baldwin Gallery. The show's down now so this is really just an obnoxious "We saw a great show that you missed, suckers!" post and you're forgiven for thinking that getting older doesn't make you any more gracious or kind. Anyway, above are a couple shots of the installation and more follow after the jump.

Well isn't that swell. First we lucked into the Design Lab show and now we've got two more pieces in the Denver Art Museum's permanent collection (to keep our MDF Roadrunner chair company in storage after What Is Modern? comes down in March of 2013). DAM associate curator of architecture, design and graphics Darrin Alfred acquired both a proper, Design Lab edition in the colors above at left and the one-and-only first working prototype above at right. Hot damn.

Alas, the DAM show is down, Design Lab is no more. But on the upside we've got the pieces back and we've started dragging them into the photo studio for some proper pictures. Here, then, are the first pin-up ready shots of one version of our new chair, Chairy Khalenian, or CK side chair for short. It's named after someone we know, sort of, as are all of the new pieces in the new line we're developing. So, if you are that person and you happen to be reading this, we hope you don't mind. Really, it's meant to be flattering, with a little Pee-wee's Playhouse thrown in just for fun.

People have been asking us, pretty much non-stop, "What the hell have those Tillman morons been up to?" On most days we just shrug and wave vaguely off into the distance. But not today. Today, we discover, they've been hard at work on a radical breakthrough in human-canine understanding: a device that when placed underwater with a dog is able to record said dog's thoughts. That's right, with the Tillmans' Below-Agua-Recorder-K9 (BARK-9) device, we discover that for Cinder, the world's finest shop dog, it's all Killer Mike all the time. (The video evidence is here.) No doubt, she a money-hungry wolf, and she down to eat the rich. So if you see her on the street do not try to pet her and please, for your own good, never look her in the eye.

Somehow, and don't ask us how, we managed to land a show at the Denver Art Museum and somehow (again, we're not sure) we pulled together a new body of work that we happen to really like. Sure, there's some strangeness in there and some bits that'll change before we launch the pieces as Products, but that's all good and to be expected. Mostly, we're just thrilled. The show opened last Friday, July 27 and it runs through September 2. We have to say, the whole process of dealing with the DAM staff, top to bottom, was nothing but smooth and easy and it's a great gift, sincerely, to be part of the show. We throw up a fair bit of snark on this blog because we're children, really, but occasionally we're just transparently happy doing what we love every day. Jeez, get us a tissue already. More later, for now we're just gonna go hug it out.

This shit is bona fide. On the wall outside the Martin McCormick gallery on the second floor in the Hamilton building of the Denver Art Museum, in type larger than our swelling heads: DOUBLEBUTTER. We're just gonna take a brief moment and enjoy it. A damn nice thing if we do say so ourselves. The show officially opened last Friday, July 27th, and somehow we managed to avoid embarrassing ourselves. A small miracle to be sure.

We'd show an animation for this bit—machining holes in the aluminum clusters or hubs for our new base system—but it's a tough thing to photograph. First, the process is obscured behind a smudgy piece of acrylic. Second, it's messy as all hell with the relentless spray of cutting lubricant. And third, it's a subtle process that's nevertheless full of sound and fury (to see what we mean, you can watch a video the guys running the CNC milling machine made by clicking here). Regardless, the result is extremely precise and quite lovely, we think. Here are a bunch of the larger clusters and a solo shot of the smaller cluster before the holes for the second facet have been cut. We suspect that these may signify nothing to those of you who have no idea what the end product will look like but that may be part of the point.