Concept, Identity, Curation, Set Design, Event Organization, Marketing
A New Hive is an effort to help save the indispensable honeybee. These images document an group art installation and event that took place in the Meatpacking District of New York City. Every work in the exhibition was the result of thorough collaboration with artists and New York beekeepers geared to reflect one alarming vision — a future without pollinators.
10% of all proceeds from A New Hive supported sustainable beekeeping practices and the up-keep of hives founded by The New York Beekeeping Meetup and The Brooklyn Bee. To get involved or to learn more about beekeeping visit http://www.nycbeekeeping.com/
Concept, Identity, Creative Direction, Product Development, Package Design, Store Design, Copywriting, Social Marketing
Inspired by a pantheon of fringe thinkers and risk-takers the Occulter artist’s collective and retail project represented a certain beauty found in darkness and an intellect driven by science and wonder. Occulter members created challenging works in a variety of mediums, organized highly attended group exhibitions and displayed and sold works at Occulter’s brick-and-mortar store in the Lower East Side. It also featured a selection of branded and curated goods. Occulter’s online presence garnered a passionate international following evidenced by social media engagement and retail conversions.
The JCReport placed Occulter second to Comme des Garçons Black in its Top Five Small Shops.
Concept, Curation, Installation, Graphic Design, Copy, Event Organization, Sales, Marketing
New York City Artist Collective OCCULTER Presents BLACK BEACH at White Box
White Box is pleased to kick-off its Beach Box Series with “Black Beach”, the first group exhibition by New York City artist collective OCCULTER.
Five OCCULTER artists will be featured in “Black Beach”: Nadav Benjamin; Jeremy Dyer; Derrick Cruz; Jonathan Goldstein; and Gabriel J. Shuldiner. Each artist will present large format works spanning the scope of digital constructions, mixed-media paintings, sculpture and site-specific installations. Smaller works will be presented as a “Consumables Shop” at the White Box-Universal Ltd. Editions Cafe.
In “Black Beach”, OCCULTER members introduce a collection of tenebrous works as a call to worship at the feet of new mythologies still in flux. As symbolists in expectation of an uncertain future, each artist attempts to interpret consciousness or the incorporeal, with history (aesthetic, religious, political or otherwise) as a tool, not a guide.
The installation as a whole evokes a self-reflective spirituality that longs for a community as it shuns it. Contrasting the contemplative allusions in the artwork, on opening and closing nights “Black Beach” will transition from a space of observation to one of participation, as a set of energetic musical performances curated by Todd Pendu of Pendu NYC fill White Box.
Concept, Curation, Installation, Artwork, Graphic Design, Copywriting, Event Organization
New York, NY – Munch Gallery is pleased to present Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, a group exhibition of new works by Derrick Cruz, Jeremy Dyer and Luke Kranker.
Titled after the 1979 manifesto calling for control of the masses through social engineering, the exhibition illustrates each artist’s preoccupation with the didactic as a counterbalance to the use of mythopoeia in commercial and political messaging. In contrast, their work takes shape as minimal plastic objects, stark black and white prints and droning audio all produced from a diversity of new and traditional media.
Cruz’s sculpture synthesizes physical media forms believed to be obsolete to indicate the impact of technological advances on individuation. Inspired by dystopian science fiction, personal physical challenges, and thinkers such as Joseph Campbell and Jaron Lanier, Cruz manipulates religious and humanist aesthetic constructs to produce “an altar for projection and one for self-reflection.”
Dyer’s printed works engage the pastoral landscape as a site of collision. Constructed from original and found photography, his black and white images of menacing fires and collapsing beasts strive to reconcile an anachronistic past with what he considers “the inevitable something that is coming."
Kranker’s sound collages are the byproduct of ten years of psychotropic experimentation and his study of controversial philosophers, such as Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary. Inspired by “the darker aspects of the psychedelic experience,” his long form textural audio compositions create a space where “thoughts flow freely... and self-deception can be observed with sharpened clarity.”
Manifesto
The ultimate goal of the ring is unity! Good design, material integrity and personalization are indispensable parts of our contemporary lives, but not of our rings. Today, these progressive elements exist stunted by corrupt legacy brands from which they can only be salvaged by the purposeful cooperation of artisans and technologists. Designers, craftspeople and engineers must devise new ways of representing the ring, as an experience and in terms of its parts. Their work will then re-ignite the spirit of wholeness a ring signifies, which was lost in the antiquated retail establishments and glossy adverts of our predecessors.
So let us therefore create a new way of experiencing and creating the ring, free of the artifice and blood that raises a barrier of irrelevance between our hearts and our symbols! Let us strive for, conceive and create the new ring of the future that will unite design and technology and ethics, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of couples as a clear symbol of a new belief to come. — Derrick Cruz
Concept, Logo Design, Site Design, Product Design, Copy, Curation, Sales, Marketing
To our animal, some things are mere sustenance. But we’ve evolved. As global consumers, we now respond to fashion, availability, and cost to determine the value of things. And as post-industrialists, our fetish objects have little intrinsic worth and are mainly gateways to an ever-expanding load of ethereal stuff. It’s difficult to reckon how we’ll physically and psychologically adapt to the exponential developments spawned by our own intellect. But we can be certain that our relationship to objects and people will continue to be redefined.
Fortunately, we’re sentient and instinctive. From our very beginnings, we’ve created artifacts to help us cope with the uncanny. The venerable human fingerprint continues to coalesce our intellect and emotional temperament into objects of self-reflection. And we’ve seen reciprocity and the human bond transmute the crafted thing from ordinary commodity to myth making tool. Despite their elusive quantifiability, we maintain that physical skill and artfulness are keystones to cultural identity. This is a marvelous mystery: that we would be modern and still wittingly cherish the transformative power of objects, as if to say, “A thing is not always just a thing”.
THIS IS THE BEAST IN THE ROOM. THIS IS OLIPHAUNT.
Mechanically, Oliphaunt is an object quarterly by creative collective OCCULTER. Metaphysically, it’s an exchange experience enveloped in secrecy and anticipation.
Oliphaunt intends to encourage the conscientious manner in which you relate to the things you own. We believe that intelligent design, artfulness, and craftsmanship are your expectations, while respect, community, and culture can be our mutual rewards.
Membership Programme
There are three parts to an Oliphaunt membership: an induction package, a monthly print newsletter, and four quarterly objects or “Oliphaunts”.
INDUCTION PACKAGE
Induction packages ship soon after enrollment. These consist of an exclusive member badge with your Member ID (enumerating your position in the sequence of subscribers) and a welcome letter.
MONTHLY NEWSLETTER
Every month following, a printed newsletter will be mailed to you. This newsletter will be filled with clues and dates relevant to the content of each upcoming quarterly object.
QUARTERLY OBJECTS
Four member exclusive objects will ship, one every three months, on or near equinoxes and solstices. Each will be signed by the corresponding artist and numbered with your Member ID. Four artists will participate each year, each making one object.
Clues
The monthly newsletters will be replete with hints into the content of Oliphaunts. A season’s parcel may contain a sculptural design object reflecting an artist’s current obsession; an exclusive precursor to an upcoming body of work could be the culprit, or you may find yourself loosely participating in a long distance ritual with tools made by a seasoned craftsman. The possibilities of imagination are truly endless, as Oliphaunt seeks to be, not blur, the line that intersects art, craft and the common; for we believe this is where wonder lives.
Perfumed Paper Collection
For Monet & Venice, I developed the packaging concept and narrative system translating the exhibition’s atmospheric scent installation by Joya–Modern Fragrance House into a portable object.
Three fragrances, originally diffused in timed sequence within the rotunda, were adapted into perfumed paper—an intimate, mailable format designed to extend the experience beyond the museum.
Each scent lives on a hangable paper tag housed within a 4×6 envelope. The format functions as object, artwork, and atmospheric device—designed for gradual release over time.
Placed in a drawer, on a hook, near a window, the fragrance unfolds differently in each space. The intention was continuation, not replication.
The system includes:
• exhibition-grade credit hierarchy
• modular postcard format for museum display
• capacity envelope for bundled sets
• scalable retail iterations (belly band, boxed set)
• landing page architecture connecting artwork, scent, and spatial experience
