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
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Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons (BSPS) is a luxury jewelry and objects brand known for its esoteric aesthetic and integrated approach to storytelling through materials and packaging. It is critically acclaimed for influencing a new approach to fashion jewelry branding. BSPS has been featured in dozens of international publications and sold in high profile retail outlets such as Barney’s New York and Tomorrowland in Tokyo. In 2013, The New York Times commissioned BSPS to interpret its iconic “T” for the Sunday Style Magazine. BSPS holds the GenArt International Styles Vision Award for accessories design.
Concept, Curation, Installation, Artwork, Graphic Design, Copy, 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.”
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Store Design
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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.
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Social Media
In an age when most of our photos are shared far and wide, Little Stardust Co. combines age-old technology with fine jewelry to create intimate, bespoke heirlooms.
Each Little Stardust Co. jewelry piece is a modern way to treasure your personal photo or message. Like a secretive locket, this minimalist charm conceals a microscopic photograph encased inside a small-but-powerful cylindrical lens known as a Stanhope. Bring the pendant close to your eye to see your image (magnified up to 160 times) in beautiful detail.
Art Direction
Styling
Accessory Design
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Curation
Oliphaunt is an art and object quarterly. 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.
Roster
The artist roster for Oliphaunt is made up of our senior most members: Derrick Cruz, founder and Creative Director of Occulter and Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons, instructor at Parsons The New School; artist and photographer, Jeremy Dyer; jewelry designer and sculptor, Jonathan Goldstein of Bevel; and artist Gabriel J. Shuldiner.
Induction Package contents are designed and crafted by Derrick Cruz. Newsletters are designed and crafted by Derrick Cruz in collaboration with Jeremy Dyer.
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.
STATEMENT OF VISION
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”.
Identity
Site Typography
Business Card Design
MOLD is an editorial platform about designing the future of food. Through in-depth, original reporting and a distinct vision for how design can transform our food futures, our editors cover innovative ideas emerging from the world of food design and technology. From cellular agriculture to 3D food printing, entomophagy to beautifully designed tableware (and why it makes your meal taste better), MOLD spotlights the ideas that will revolutionize how we produce, prepare and eat food in the years to come.
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POW! helps you create rich custom home fragrances you can light as the mood strikes. Pow! is organic, biodegradable and designed and manufactured in the U.S.
