Photograph by Pari Ehsan © Friedman Benda and Misha Kahn
Since he first broke onto the scene in 2014 fresh from the Rhode Island School of Design, Misha Kahn—like his close ally Katie Stout—has become a representative designer of the millennial generation. His aesthetic reflects the digital mash-up culture of our era, in which historical references and forms are combined in an intuitive, seemingly arbitrary manner. This “sampling” approach is attuned to the short attention-span online experience, the world of social media and scrolling content. Yet Kahn is very hands on. He uses inventive low-tech processes to realize his forms in an extraordinarily wide range of media, including bronze, glass, concrete, steel, aluminum, resin, raffia, fiberglass, upholstery fabric, and stone.
The manner in which he hurls these various materials together, energetically but with an instinctive rightness, is an apt metaphor for the twenty-first-century experience: the condition by which ideas and objects find their way to us nowadays and are arbitrarily deposited into our consciousness on currents we can’t quite track, somehow accumulating into a sense of the Now.
Those Little Polished Stones They Always Sell at Gift Shops in glass, powder-coated steel. Designed and made by Misha Kahn, USA, 2017.
47" L x 16" W x 12" H
119.4cm L x 40.6cm W x 30.5cm H
SG2327
Courtesy of Friedman Benda Gallery