Aaron Blendowski & Sue Ravitz

Superhouse is proud to present a two-person show of new and recent work by sculptor and industrial designer Aaron Blendowski and artist Sue Ravitz. The pairing of these two artists juxtaposes traditional domestic forms – the chair, the mirror, the rug – and methods – wood turning, crochet – with vibrant, and at times challenging, color combinations. Each artist chose six pieces to pair with the other’s work.

“Isolated from Function brings together furniture, lighting and textiles by two artists with extraordinary senses of color,” says Stephen Markos, Superhouse founder. “The works on display are detached from the domestic space, situated in the glass cube-like vitrine creating an otherworldly environment that blends historical crafts with futuristic aesthetics.”

Sue Ravitz’s six pieces showcase the breadth of her fiber art, which stems from her early exposure to handicrafts growing up in the Midwest. Her hand-dyed, braided wool rug forms the focal point of the exhibition. While braided rugs have been a staple of American domestic crafts for centuries, Ravitz contemporised the palette for her Isolated from Function centerpiece. Plaits of earthy greens and browns alternate in the rug with neon yellows and pinks creating a kaleidoscopic effect.

In addition to the central rug, Ravitz selected works that use traditional handicrafts, but with subversive twists. Her silk needlepoint panel triptych, for example, employs a pattern that resembles television static, if the black and white pixels were replaced by the full color spectrum. Rounding off her presentation are a vibrant chain stitch sampler and a richly colored and patterned crochet wool blanket, reminding viewers of her prowess with natural fibers. Ravitz understands how her pieces are activated by furniture:

“I feel fortunate to be showing my work alongside a really talented furniture artist,” says Ravitz. “Aaron’s work has a similar feel as mine; they work together. I love how each object recontextualizes the others.”

Aaron Blendowski chose a selection of furniture and lighting works to complement Ravitz’s textiles. Situated around the central rug sit a pair of chairs with wood spindles, recalling the Windsor style, another early domestic archetype. The chairs, part of Blendowski’s NEO, or Near Earth Objects, series are transformed from their historical roots, however. The gently, and playfully, reimagined forms have been adjusted to meet a new aesthetic, a window into the sculptor’s vision for a cosmic future that retains semblances of our past.

Accompanying his NEO series chairs, Blendowski installed furniture pieces from his Voyager body of work. Traditional forms, such as a wall mirror, floor lamp and sconce, are rendered at a monumental scale. The exquisite attention to surface on all of the pieces, with built up layers of color and texture, look as though they could be extraterrestrial landscapes. The larger scale of Blendowski’s pieces contrasts with the tiny interconnected threads of Ravitz’s work:

“When I saw Sue’s work, I was immediately drawn into the use of color paired with the scale of the individual threads and the boundaries she created with it,” remarks Blendowski. “I think our use of color and surface are really closely related, despite the varying media.”

Aaron Blendowski received a BFA from College for Creative Studies and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. At his studio in Detroit’s Eastern Market, he produces work that ranges from functional sculpture and furniture to two-dimensional graphics. The growth and diversity of his city informs larger existential questions raised in his work. Blendowski utilizes his training as a sculptor and an industrial designer to experiment with materials, sometimes focusing on their purity and sometimes transforming them as far as he can from their original state. Blendowski has shown work with Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), In Good Company (Brooklyn, NY), Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI) and Superhouse (New York, NY). His work has been featured in numerous publications, including Damn, Design Milk, Document Journal, Elle Decor Italia, Interior Design, Paper, Sight Unseen and The Design Edit. Blendowski lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.

Sue Ravitz grew up a small-town girl, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For generations, the women in her family did crafts. While she began doing handicrafts at an early age, she was never exposed to “fine art.” She continued her practice while raising her family in Chicago, Illinois. When her children left home, she began to explore color more seriously. She spent hours every day knitting small blocks of patterns, spreading them out on the floor, and considering how they related to each other. During this time, she and her husband actively collected art, primarily reductive, monochrome paintings – all surface and color. After moving to New York, New York in 2006, Ravitz began making rugs. She continues to braid, hook, crochet, and stitch, but her focus remains primarily on color interaction, no matter the medium. Ravitz had a solo presentation of her rugs and paintings at Mondo Cane Gallery (New York, NY) – now Patrick Parrish – and showed her needlework in a group exhibition at Minus Space (Brooklyn, NY). From 2020 – 2021, Ravitz curated, and then published, Painting on Porch, a series and book of paintings paired with her furniture collection and installed on the porch of her Connecticut farmhouse. Ravitz also directs and curates the program at 57W57ARTS. The artist lives and works in Wilton, Connecticut.