Latest news with #Autopsy
New York Times
05-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Let's Hear It for the Ladies Who Lathe
It often starts with a box. These utilitarian objects are expressions of a woodworker's technical rigor and style. But for Wendy Maruyama, who earned a master's degree in furniture design from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1980, boxes were also political statements. Early in her career, she created boxes awash in vivid color, perched atop 4-foot-tall stands with spiked handles on their lids. Auction sites frequently describe these pieces as 'modesty boxes,' but they started out with a specific use: to hold an 18-pack of tampons. 'I loved the idea of gender-specific furniture — making something that men could not possibly grasp or experience,' Ms. Maruyama, 73, recently said in an email interview. One of the few women in the American studio furniture movement, a cohort that combined fine woodworking skills with artistic expression, she went on to build larger versions that held menstrual pads and sex toys. Last year, the Fresno Art Museum handed Ms. Maruyama its Distinguished Woman Artist award and hosted her first career survey. No furniture maker before her has received the honor, which has previously gone to the sculptor Ruth Asawa, the assemblage artist Betye Saar and the weaver Kay Sekimachi. In November, the Manhattan gallery Superhouse exhibited her prismatic tambour cabinets in 'Colorama,' a show that also included furniture by her friend and fellow woodworker Tom Loeser. Ms. Maruyama is not alone in stepping into a gender-specific spotlight. With boundaries dissolving between craft and high art, and women in both areas enjoying a new wave of appreciation, woodworking — which has long been and still remains a male-dominated field — has become more interesting. It is filled with narrative content, social commentary and visually daring forms courtesy of its female makers. Path breakers of the American studio furniture movement who are now in their 70s and 80s are still creating new work, while younger generations of women who learned from them continue to advance the medium. 'Over the years, women are much more likely to be woodworkers or furniture makers or designers,' said Rosanne Somerson, 70, a woodworker who co-founded the Rhode Island School of Design's furniture design department in 1995 and later became the institution's president. 'With every generation, interests change. My generation had more of a lineage from high-level decorative arts, but women now are bringing in a lot more narrative interest and identity issues; it's less about the highest levels of craft and more about the highest levels of expression — and almost provocation.' Because the material carries so many cultural and ecological associations, it is well suited to engage with contemporary issues. Joyce Lin, 30, a furniture maker in Houston, created her 'Material Autopsy' series of conceptual domestic objects to explore the impact of our industrialized society and how most of us are far removed from how things are made. For one chair in the series, which looks like it was grown from a single log sliced open to reveal its rings, Ms. Lin riffed on the decorative arts tradition of faux bois, or realistic-looking artificial wood. 'When I post photos of the piece online,' Ms. Lin said, 'I get people who think I actually grew the wood and then there are a lot of people who think it was A.I.-generated.' For Kim Mupangilaï, 35, a Belgian Congolese interior designer in Brooklyn, N.Y., wood was a natural choice for her first furniture collection, introduced in 2023. 'I really wanted my furniture to come from me, kind of like a self-portrait,' she said. Her utilitarian objects loosely refer to archival photographs taken in central Africa and are made of materials common in Congolese crafts, including teak, banana fibers and rattan. Her Mwasi armoire, an hourglass-shaped piece with woven doors, is currently on view at 'Making Home —Smithsonian Design Triennial' at the Cooper Hewitt museum, and she recently exhibited chairs and stools that refer to Art Nouveau and the colonial history of Belgium at the Fog Design + Art fair in San Francisco. Deirdre Visser, a curator and woodworker in San Francisco, said that speaking more directly about the role of gender in the field was important to welcoming new perspectives and creating more exciting objects. Her commentary has taken the form of a recent book called 'Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century.' It features women and gender nonconforming people involved with the medium: from medieval turners to the Shaker who developed the first circular saw, to contemporary artists like Katie Hudnall, who leads the woodworking and furniture program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Yuri Kobayashi, who studied under Ms. Maruyama at San Diego State University and taught furniture design at RISD for many years. (Ms. Lin was one of her students.) Ms. Visser, 54, rejects the notion that to be classified as a female woodworker rather than just someone working in wood diminishes the maker. 'All of us have identities we bring to making and that is, more and more, where the discussion is rooted,' she said. 'The most cisgender, straight white male is also bringing identity and a set of experiences to the wood shop, and so this perceived neutrality of their identity as a maker is foolish.' Faye Toogood, a British designer, has become more attuned to the ways that her identity shapes what she creates. She used wood for her earliest works, but quickly shifted to industrial materials. 'I looked to my left and my right and thought, if I want to be taken seriously, I need to pick up bronzes and steel,' she said. 'I now realize that was because I felt like I was wacky in a male-dominated field of industrial design.' Recently, Ms. Toogood, 48, returned to wood with 'Assemblage 7: Lost and Found II,' a series of monolithic chairs, tables and cabinets that includes pieces hand-carved from oak and covered in shellac, a finish popular in 18th-century England. 'It made the pieces really modern but feel quite ancient at the same time,' she said. With all the leaps, woodworking can still be unwelcoming and isolating for women, and some makers are bent on building community and support. Natalie Shook, 42, an artist and self-taught woodworker in Brooklyn, is one of them. After her products grew from stools to large-scale modular shelving, she opened her own workshop. This allowed her to 'completely insulate' herself from the hostility she had experienced at other shops, she said. 'There is not an energy or assumption that women can't do things in our studio.' Alexis Tingey and Ginger Gordon, who founded their woodworking studio Alexis & Ginger in 2023, a year after graduating from RISD, experienced culture shock once they left the cozy precincts of their academic furniture program. At school, they were able to 'just focus on materiality and run full force into exploring and articulating our ideas,' Ms. Tingey, 34, said. 'And that hasn't always been the case since.' Sometimes they are the only women in their workshops. 'But at least we have each other,' she added. Katie Thompson, 38, an artist in rural South Carolina, started a blog and Instagram account called Women of Woodworking in 2015 to connect with other makers. 'I felt pretty isolated as a woman woodworker at the time and wanted to help amplify the stories of other women and gender nonconforming woodworkers out there so more people could see themselves being a part of the field, too,' she said. The community has grown to thousands of members from around the world and hosts interviews on Instagram Live and virtual meet-ups. Practitioners hope that this momentum continues. 'As much as I'd love to believe the next few years will bring more progress for women in these fields, the political climate doesn't give me much hope,' Ms. Maruyama said. 'But I'd like to be wrong. I've been pleasantly surprised before.'
USA Today
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Avan Jogia dissects the dark side of Nickelodeon and teen stardom in 'Autopsy'
When Avan Jogia turned 17, his life changed in two ways. He moved to Los Angeles after landing his first acting job as teenage heartthrob "Beck Oliver" on Nickelodeon's "Victorious," and his mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Abruptly thrown into Hollywood, Jogia faced an unsettling juxtaposition — he was at the start of a promising career, simultaneously navigating newfound independence amid his mother's cancer diagnosis. But before he could establish his identity, an idealized version of himself was being fawned over in Tiger Beat and J-14 magazine spreads. 'I was having a more serious experience than I probably should have been,' he says. 'There's an unreality that orbits Nickelodeon. Everyone's like, 'Wow, these kids got picked out of obscurity and they're going to be stars, and all of their backstories are normal and everyone is healthy.' It doesn't allow for reality, for humanity to occur.' Jogia turned 33 on Sunday. On Tuesday, he released his second book 'Autopsy (of an ex-teen heartthrob),' a collection of poetry and prose chronicling his coming of age under the spotlight. Ahead of his sold-out launch party at The Strand in New York, Jogia and I spoke over Zoom. His voice — pensive and composed — has hardly changed since his Nickelodeon days, which he says he also realized while rewatching old interviews from "Victorious." Behind him, an abundance of black, silver, and gold birthday balloons still decorated the walls. He turned the camera to show me a display of decadent mochi donuts, and it seemed like one celebration had bled into the next. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. Unlike the festive décor, "Autopsy" is pretty serious. It doesn't shy away from themes of death, exploring suicidal ideation and mortality bluntly alongside the perils of fame. Teen fame creates a 'weird fantasy relationship' Jogia says the illusion of unconflicted success is what creates a 'weird fantasy relationship' between the 'teen idol' and the audience member, or the fan, and ultimately disconnected his experience of fame from reality. Jogia always felt like an outsider — even with a front-row seat at parties in Hollywood Hills. "Hollywood is a fraternity, a boys' club I've never felt comfortable or included in," he writes in "Autopsy." 'I'm a poor kid from Vancouver who grew up in government housing, who, as soon as the show started, my mom got cancer,' he says. 'When you remove that context, I think it's a disservice to both myself and to the audience member experiencing me.' 'I imagine Jennette (McCurdy) must have felt the same way about her life," he adds. 'I'm Glad My Mom Died':How Jennette McCurdy escaped her narcissistic mother's 'excruciating' abuse Jogia got creative with his promotional videos for "Autopsy." In one, he sits in a sterile room as an old interview of him is projected onto a white sheet, draped over a gurney. He lip-syncs to his younger self: "What I love about my job is that I get the chance to hopefully brighten people's day." In the interview, Jogia is indistinguishable from his "Victorious" character Beck, who also had aspirations of being an actor. 'I was Beck at that time," he says. "Those are little Avan's dreams that I'm saying. It was part of the nauseating amount of promo they made us do at that time.' In 2023 Jogia made his directorial debut with a Canadian film "Door Mouse," and finally "found his role" in the industry. However, "place is a different thing," he says. "I think that what's changed for me is the delusion, or the (idea) that the work that I want is out there for me. I don't feel that anymore. I feel like if I want to be a part of it, I'm going to have to make that personally." Avan Jogia on filming 'Victorious': 'We weren't seen as the kids we were' The second to last piece in the book, 'I am on set getting yelled at,' takes place in 2010 during the filming of 'Ice Cream for Ke$ha,' a Season 2 episode of 'Victorious." 'I am still a teenager, and I am shaking with rage. The kind of quiet anger that makes you change… I am tired, I am hungover, and I am bored,' Jogia writes, detailing his frustration as he continuously mispronounces Kesha's name. 'There's a famous 'Victorious' blooper of me messing that line up. That was a horribly embarrassing day for me,' he tells me with a slight laugh, like he is still masquerading the discomfort the reel brings. And while in past interviews Jogia has said he doesn't look back on 'Victorious' fondly, he wanted to be very clear in our interview that it was 'so much fun on set.' His co-stars — Ariana Grande, Elizabeth Gillies, Leon Thomas, Daniella Monet, Victoria Justice, Matt Bennett and more — are his 'college friends,' and the most important part of his Nickelodeon experience. This week, there's been an outpouring of love between the former co-stars. Grande commented on Jogia's Instagram that she 'couldn't resist' ordering a copy of his book ("i love you," she wrote), and Jogia previously shouted out Thomas' latest album 'MUTT,' which entered the Billboard Top 100 on Feb. 8. The years spent filming 'Victorious' were 'some of the best years' of Jogia's life, spent with his best friends, but it was also 'grueling' and ultimately a job that required 'long, exhausting hours.' Often, he 'felt alone in L.A.' 'We weren't seen as the kids we were,' he says. 'When I look back at those moments that were embarrassing for me and joyful for others, I'm more interested in how that kind of dichotomy can exist. That my reality and someone else's reality can be so disparate.' 'Autopsy' examines mortality, remembrance and celebrity death Writing 'Autopsy,' Jogia didn't realize how often thoughts of death landed on the page — the word appears 15 times throughout the book's 225 pages. In the poem 'it's important to die in a cool way,' he writes: 'They say fame is immortality / But it's not really … In order to matter after your death / Firstly, your death must be untimely.' 'A book about self-dissection and looking at an old version of yourself sort of requires you to talk about and look at death for two reasons,' Jogia explains. 'One being, you have to kill off the older version of yourself… and two, your legacy is so closely tied to your mortality.' But Jogia doesn't believe in immortality, and he's not scared of being forgotten. That's inevitable, he says. But when I ask him if the thought of being remembered as a former Nickelodeon star scares him, he says yes. 'We encapsulate people in general for a single portion of their life,' he says. 'When something really human happens (to a celebrity), like their death, you boil down their entire life to an aspect of their life, and in doing that, you remove their dignity.' Poetry and what it means to Jogia At the end of our call, we talk about how a sector of poetry has taken a dark turn towards appeasing the masses — Instagrammable squares that refuse to ignite discomfort. 'It's losing a tiny bit of teeth,' he says. I tell Jogia to read 'Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper' by Richard Siken, who he hasn't heard of. There's a line I cite from 'Birds Hover the Trampled Field' that resonates: 'The enormity of my desire disgusts me.' 'Autopsy' wasn't written as an act of healing, or in hopes of virality, but rather as an act of self-discovery and self-dissection, Jogia explains. He attempted to be entirely honest with his lived experience — facing the enormity of his desires and fears as a naïve actor at the start of a burgeoning career, and as a young man who was trying to find his way in the world, just like anyone else. If his writing makes you uncomfortable or forces you to look inward, that means it's working.
