verayfb51-blog

[verayfb51-blog]

People, Places and Things to Know: Perfect Robes, a Hotel That Sells Thom Browne and More

Looking at art can be tiring business, and resting spots in museums tend to be rare, crowded and generally uninviting. But at last year’s Whitney Biennial, where visitors of course knew not to touch the art, they came to an awkward consensus regarding the work of Jessi Reaves: They sat on it. In their defense, the New York artist makes sculptures with reassuring references to everyday chairs, tables and lamps — though rather than broadcast their functionality, her pieces challenge us to question the very concept of furniture. Cash Advance Online One of the pieces on view, “Basket Chair With Brown Pillow,” resembles a head-on collision between the 19th-century German cabinetmaker Michael Thonet’s classic bentwood Chair No. 14 and the sort of metal butterfly one finds in college dorms. “I didn’t anticipate the sheer number of people and the damage they could do,” says Reaves. Wells Fargo – Banking, Credit Cards, Loans, Mortgages & More “But you can’t create a nuanced instruction for interaction — it can’t be, Sit gently. It’s either all on or all off.”

The 31-year-old Reaves, who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, arrived at these more workaday forms when she started taking freelance jobs as an upholsterer after graduating. “It was amazing because I had all of these materials accumulating around me, and I liked the sensation of peeling things back and getting familiar with pieces in their unfinished state,” she says. She embarked on a series of chair sculptures, dressing a Thonet chair in a diaphanous pink slipcover so that it appeared to be wearing lingerie and covering a cheap plastic chair in jacket fleece in an approximation (or abomination) of an expensive Scandinavian model she’d seen at high-end furniture stores. “In design, there is a lot of theft of ideas, even as people aspire to make something new and iconic,” she says, adding, “which strikes me as really funny and bro-y.”

Reaves isn’t striving for the glory of invention but for nuanced riffs that play with ideas of both usefulness and beauty. Aesthetically, her pieces — erotically misshapen, with more than the edges left raw — have as much in common with the paintings of Jenny Saville than anything produced by Charles and Ray Eames. Earlier this year, she was selected for the Carnegie International, opening on Oct. 13 in Pittsburgh, where she’ll show curvaceous multimedia “recliners,” as well as a baroque chaos of plywood, caning and even a purse that, for lack of a better word, could be described as a shelf. There, her work will literally occupy the no man’s land between art and design, in a space bridging Carnegie Museum’s Hall of Architecture and its main galleries that was originally constructed to house the last office of Frank Lloyd Wright.

But while her body of work is sweepingly subversive, Reaves remains fascinated by the materiality and perceived purpose behind each piece. On the day I visit her studio, in the basement of a former carriage house in Chelsea, she shows me a large electric fan that she’s working on for her friends Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, fashion designers whose own Whitney installation is now on display. “I love the fan because, unlike a chair, you don’t have to use it to activate it. It just acts on you,” she says. Still, she’s built a decorative wire cage and placed it atop a pedestal of scrap wicker, giving it, in effect, a special chair of its own. — ALIX BROWNE

[verayfb51-blog]

DealBook Briefing: World Economic Forum Begins With a Warning

Good Tuesday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.

A bleak message reverberates in Davos

An influential financier warned investors in a letter to pay heed to growing risks and social tensions — and the message is already resonating at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Andrew writes in his column. Loans Online

In his annual letter, Seth A. Klarman, the billionaire investor who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, warns that social and political division risks economic calamity:

“It can’t be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions.”

His message is likely to encourage hand-wringing of a sort usually seen in Davos, Andrew writes. Send Money, Pay Online or Set Up a Merchant Account - PayPal

Mr. Klarman says mounting debt in developed countries since the 2008 financial crisis could lead to a financial panic. He is especially worried about the debt load in the United States:

“There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford. By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order.”

More from Davos: Political turmoil has led several world leaders to skip the gathering. And less than a quarter of people attending are women.

____________________________

Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Stephen Grocer in New York, and Tiffany Hsu and Gregory Schmidt in Paris.

____________________________

China’s economy expands at its slowest pace

The world’s second largest economy grew 6.6 percent last year, the Chinese government said on Monday — its most sedate pace in nearly three decades. The slowdown intensified in the last three months of 2018, and the official jobless rate increased to 4.9 percent last month from 4.8 percent in November.

[verayfb51-blog]

Carma Peña, Matthew Burgos

Carma Liane Peña and Matthew Andrew Burgos were married Nov. 3 at the State Botanical Gardens of Georgia in Athens. Pastor Gregg V. Cash Advance Sizemore, who was ordained by My Life Bridge Church in Kennesaw, Ga., officiated.

Mrs. 支付宝 知托付！ Burgos, 36, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a freelance writer in New York. She graduated from Oral Roberts University, from which she also received a master’s degree in Christian counseling. She holds a second master’s degree, in professional writing, from Kennesaw State University.

She is a daughter of Terin Kayla Bates of Houston and Robert Peña of San Antonio. The bride’s father is a continuous improvement specialist for Johnson Controls, a company in San Antonio that helps residential and commercial customers decrease energy use through advanced technologies. Her mother is a teller and financial services representative for Trustmark Bank in Houston.

Mr. Burgos, 34, is the vice president for journey marketing, overseeing digital client experiences for Citi in New York. He also graduated from Oral Roberts, and received a dual M.B.A. degree from Wagner College in management and finance.