KEYWORDS: MISHA KAHN
by PIN–UPMisha Kahn’s sprawling practice is as much rooted in virtual reality as it is in respect and mastery of old-fashioned crafts: the Duluth, Minnesota-born, New York City-based designer is as adept at mapping out his otherworldly design objects through computer simulation as he is at weaving, painting, clay sculpting, carving, or welding components of these maximalist creations. The resulting pieces look like lost artifacts from an alien planet with a healthy dose of homespun appeal — some of the chairs and tables, for example, look like high-design updates of the scrap metal sculptures you see strewn along the desert highways of the American Southwest. Many of Kahn’s pieces incorporate corporeal elements, from a stray hand-like appendage protruding from a lamp or a tongue-slug-hybrid hanging down from what looks like a fish’s mouth on a wall-mounted light fixture. But his latest piece, a collaboration with radical Italian pop-modernist brand Meritalia, takes the general trope of the designer’s corporeal obsession one step further: the modules of sculptured polyurethane foam that he’s assembled into the pieces of Morphologica — an armchair and a sofa — take the inside of the human body as a main reference (a doctor might discern the vague shape of a liver in one of the fabric-upholstered modules, or the tubular shape of a digestional tract in another.) Morphologica marks Kahn’s first collaboration with a furniture brand, and to commemorate the occasion, Kahn shares his thoughts on astronomy, the body, and Americana below.