OLIVIA VIGO BRINGS A HANDMADE TOUCH TO INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Olivia Vigo’s work is caught in a place between industrial design and sculpture. Even the stool that she brought to this issue’s photoshoot, which was part of her début solo exhibition Information Rich at Larrie in 2022 that depicted a “fractured family through an upholstered landscape of salvaged architectural parts,” looks almost like a standard ULINE product at first. On closer inspection, its cast, honeycomb-like surface has clearly been subject to an artist’s hand. “I took the top off, cast it in iron, and reattached it. I live with that stool now, and it’s almost like a family heirloom to me because the lace is cast from my great-grandmother’s tablecloth. It was part of questioning how something’s made, which is a part of my practice in general: working with a standardized set of parts to create something quite different from what they’re intended for,” she says, citing Enzo Mari’s Autoprogrettazione as inspiration. Vigo studied industrial design, but her work always tempers this interest in standardized systems and cast-off industrial parts with a handmade touch, like a wardrobe she made from wool that she sourced and felted herself, working with shepherds to shear the sheep and prepare the fibers. Her new series of lamps that she débuted at American Art Catalogues builds on this contrast, with collages of found materials including smushed Care Bears, galvanized scrap metal shaped into stars, an airbrushed shirt from the California Mid-State fair, and cigarette silks set in frames that recall the sleek uniformity of Apple products. Vigo thinks of them as paused TV screens that chart moments of a lifetime, from adolescence to old age. “I often pair something that shows this split between pre- and post-Industrial Revolution, where there’s a machine part and a handmade part. If you can do both, then why not?” she says.