We mentioned this briefly last week here, but here's a bit more detail about a new design exhibition opening in New York on the 15th of this month.

'Make Me: The Emergence of Butch Craft in Contemporary Design' will be opening at Moss, dealing with a new breed of design we've being seeing quite a bit of recently.

Essentially, the show presents a small but diverse body of work by an otherwise un-related collective of artists and designers, which together celebrate a rough-hewn, reductive, anti-academic, craft-driven, “tool-belt and heavy-lifting” aesthetic. 

At the same time, many of these pieces are realised with a great deal of sensitivity and finesse, often embodying subtle, complex theoretical, structural, formal, and compositional aspects, and infused with such poetic narrative as to be necessarily characterized as “butch,” a word defined in today’s vernacular as a stereotypical “brute-masculine” approach taken by a stereotypical “sensitive-feminine” personality.

By grouping together new work by artists and designers including Joost Van Bleiswijk, Kiki Van Eijk, Studio Formafantasma, Aaron Raymer, Christopher Chiappa, and Simon Hasan, the selection aims to present the viewer with a 'tipping point'.

Expect cerebral, yet virile narratives applied to rough work crafted in wood, iron, steel, marble, rush, paint, boiled leather, clay, baked agricultural waste, plant-life, gypsum drywall, and blood, sweat and tears.

Basically a damn good show then.