DUMBO SQUID by Micah Heimlich

About the Item

DESERT BURL SERIES (“DUMBO SQUID”) NATURAL LIGHT Bronze-cast desert burl, fluorite, polished agate stones, LED lights, cloth-covered cord, 2019-20, 11.5 x 5 x 5 in. Micah Heimlich is a versatile artist and designer whose Furbishure collections further demonstrate his California Surrealist sensibilities. Heimlich uses naturally sourced materials to create unique and thoughtful pieces that combine the functional with the fantastic, resulting in far-flung product designs such as furniture, fittings, and fine art. Heimlich’s uncanny looking assemblages can even be described as “art sponges,” with whimsical surfaces that belie their deep subterranean sources from art, architecture, and design. While some Furbishure collections feature minerals such as mica and gemstones, others, like the recent “Oumuamua” series, incorporate organic remains such as sea sponges and desert burls. Heimlich makes colored metal casts of these found objects and then combines them to form lamps, standing “shadow pieces,” and other novelties. The resulting formal hybrids oscillate between fine art and Gebrauchskunst, on the one hand, and Baroque architecture and Bernard Palissy’s decorated grottos and ceramic dishes on the other. As with another of Heimlich’s recent collections, the “Sea Sponge Series,” these new “Oumuamua” pieces chime with the traditional Wunderkammer, which, like the Opificio Delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy, is dedicated to the curiosities and rarities of the natural world. For “Oumuamua,” Heimlich’s multistoried sources include Yves Klein’s Blue Sponge paintings and objects, Jean Dubuffet’s impish sponge figures like Le danseur, and Piero Manzoni’s Lines of Infinite Length traced by an ink-soaked sponge. Furthermore, by extending these tracings to the Dutch designer Marcel Wanders’s “Kaleido of Life” and other organically intertwined works, such as his 1997 “Sponge Vase,” Heimlich exposes the traditional lines separating art from artifice to be chimerical and historically invalid. As literal art “sponges,” the “Oumuamua” reveal themselves to have absorbed -- and to be shot entirely through with -- those rich veins of intersecting practices. Heimlich’s otherworldly “Oumuamua” pieces are both elegant and mesmerizingly eccentric. Inspired by the interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017, they even serve as astral projections. The resulting Denkbilder (or “thought-forms”) act as metaphorical lighthouses illuminating the pathbreakers of contemporary art, such as Franz West and Louise Bourgeois, while internally reflecting on modern design’s chamber of curiosities. In addition, Heimlich’s creations showcase the beauty and complexity of the natural world in a genuinely inventive manner, making everyday life in the built environment even more precious and evocative. Paul Foss

Creator:

Micah Heimlich (Designer),Furbishure by unHeim (Workshop/Studio)

Dimensions:

Height: 5 in (12.7 cm)Width: 5 in (12.7 cm)Depth: 11.5 in (29.21 cm)

Power Source:

Hardwired

Voltage:

110-150v

Materials and Techniques:

Bronze,Precious Stone,Hand-Crafted

Place of Origin:

United States