November 16 – 28
Artists: Graduates Gabrielle Das, Lauren Lederman, and Corey Wellik, and Undergrad Students
Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 18, 6-8pm, with Live Performance by Lauren Lederman at 7pm
Location: Art Lofts Gallery, 111 N Frances St, Madison, WI
A furniture designer, fabricator, and carpenter, Gabrielle Das specializes in custom furniture design and woodworking inspired by the effects found in nature that are stranger than fiction. With hues of bright greens and pinks, infinite textures, and paralyzing sunsets, a glowing universe inspires them to create high-quality, lasting furniture for the home and fight the fast-furniture marketplace.
Under the name gifted to her by her grandmother, Hanum (pronounced ha-noom), furniture designer and woodworker Lauren Lederman seeks to queer the inherited language of woodwork and the body alike, undoing the boundaries between utility and ornament, structure and expression. Through her background in dance, she embodies form as something lived, felt, and constantly negotiating space. Exploring mental health, light—both as material and metaphor—and social and political structures, she creates forms that quietly disrupt what craft is supposed to look like, who it is supposed to serve, and what identities it has been historically asked to reinforce. Her work functions as a way to both translate interior experience into a form others can encounter, study, and feel, and a way to make sense of the world around us and our roles within it.
Corey Wellik uses wood and wooden furniture to create experiences of community and self-belonging, resilience, and liberation. They build work inspired by our collective connection to land and place.