Reflections, both literal and metaphorical, have long served as sites of inquiry within the history of representation. In Closer Than They Appear, Bay Area artists and designers work with mirrored and reflective materials not only as optical devices but also philosophical provocations — tools for examining how we come to recognize ourselves in images, or fail to.
Cosmic Egg: Part of a series on creativity and gestation, this hand-sculpted egg symbolizes potential and transformation. Its metallic glaze evokes alchemical change, while the shell's fragility reflects the struggle inherent in growth—mirroring the transformative journey from raw material to new life through the alchemy of life-changing experiences.
Cloud Nest: Part of a series on creativity and gestation, this hand-sculpted nest evokes instinctual care and craft. It symbolizes the mutual transformation of artist and medium—an interspecies metaphor for the nurturing, irreversible change essential to the process of creation.
Materials: Stoneware and Palladium Glaze
Elizabeth Barelli/IG
Visual Artist/Creative Strategist
"Being — Becoming" emerges from constant cultural negotiation—not fully Indian, not Indian-American, but something in between. This textile diptych features traditional Indian embroidery and embedded mirrors that offer shifting reflections, changing as you move between panels, and speak to the fluid nature of identity, the complex emotional landscape that comes with living between cultures and countries, and the search for home and belonging.
Materials: Cotton, Kantha Embroidery, Mirrored Glass
Sculptural candle holders crafted from Fyrn’s aluminum bracket offcuts. The stepped metal reflects a brutalist sensibility, tempered by the soft glow of candle light. These raw, unpolished pieces transform industrial remnants into quiet, reflective objects—evoking the integrity and exposed geometry of their origins while inviting new uses.
Material: Aluminum
Ross Broughton of Fyrn Studio/IG
Furniture designer/maker
Morphed is a visualization of contact deformation, where one object imprints or deforms another. The resulting shape is deceptively complex, a squishy, fluid illusion rendered in hardwood. The pinwheel construction amplifies the natural wood grain, creating a softly psychedelic effect. Seemingly simple at first glance, but on reflection, Morphed is a portal that quietly invites a deeper look.
Materials: Mirrored Glass, Ash Hardwood, Aluminum
Brandt Hewitt and Megan McGuinn of Medium Small/IG
Furniture Designer
Cyanotype diptych on Kitakata paper. Imagery of a flower, floating, folding and fragmenting into a pool of distorted blue. Made using a single flower, graphite, a risograph duplicator and cyanotype chemistry.
Material: Cyanotype on Kitakata Paper
Cecilia Mignon/IG
Interdisciplinary Artist
Rooted in the luminous tradition of Mexican tin folk art, this floor lamp is a personal altar to memory and celebration. I’ve long been drawn to the way these handcrafted pieces shimmer with both reverence and storytelling—found nestled in homes, perched on quiet street corners venerating saints, or stitched as milagritos onto garments like whispered prayers.
Material: Galvanized Metal, Tin, Metal Raffia, Canvas
Sergio Mondragon of Avroko/IG
Interior Designer
Altar of Reflection is a sculptural mirror that explores the tension between solidity and illusion, body and void. Its molten ceramic form suggests geological time, while the mirror introduces a shifting presence—inviting quiet confrontation with the self. The work functions as both object and threshold, holding space for stillness, intimacy, and transformation.
Materials: Ceramic, Glaze, Mirrored Glass
Anna Danilova of Anna Monet Studio/IG
Jewelry Designer
Little Idol is a modern study of classical forms and storytelling through the vessel. Though its base form, with pedestal and carrying handles, is reminiscent of ancient amphoras, its ornamentation is distinctively modern and minimal in style. So too is the form's storytelling quality - while classical Greek ceramics often showcased intricately painted scenes of ancient daily life, here, modern life is simply and literally reflected by the vessel's mirrored surface. A series of glaze firings produces a patinated mirror glaze, giving the vessel an air of antiquity, as though it could have been pulled from an excavation site. But of course it was not. It lives with us now, hinting at the past, showing us at present.
Materials: Stoneware, Glaze
AG Nwosu of AG Nwosu Ceramics/IG
Ceramic Artist
Shape Shift 0x04 is a kinetic sculpture that computationally morphs materials and fluids. Electromagnetic forces choreograph organic behavior of magnetic fluid, creating a rich vocabulary of movements from gentle undulations to violent collisions and separations. The piece embraces the ambiguity of the controlled and chaotic, and the animate and inanimate.
Materials: Microcontroller, Custom Electronics, Custom Software, Electromagnets, Magnetic Fluid, Glass Container, Mirrored Glass, Thermoplastic Polymer, Paint, Power Supply
Alex Olwal of Hybrid Surface/IG
Researcher/Engineer
Aperture is a sculptural trio of oil-burning candles, featuring rough patinaed exteriors and mirror-polished interiors. The reflected flame creates an illusion between direct light and reflected glow, inviting contemplation on perception and presence while honoring metal’s historic role as a reflective surface used before the invention of modern mirrors.
Material: Stainless Steel, Chemically Patinaed Black Exterior, Polished Mirror Interior
Ellen Posch of Thuma/IG
Industrial Designer
The steel thali, a quintessential Indian object, is reimagined as a sculptural mirror, reflecting on immigrant identity and cultural duality.
Ever Diametric, consists of a theatrical spotlight shining on an acrylic mirror which has had parts of its reflective surface removed. Light from the spotlight is simultaneously reflected by the remaining mirror surface and is allowed to pass through transparent areas creating two shadow/highlight effects that are diametrically inverted.
Material: Mirrored Acrylic
Depth Perception is an ongoing series of reflective wall sculptures exploring the instability of perception. In this iteration, three intuitively-formed components merge into a singular, mirrored field that holds and distorts the viewer. Undulating metallic surfaces fracture boundaries between object and observer, reshaping space into a fluid, disorienting landscape.
Material: Ceramic, Glaze
Haley Ann Bradley of Studio Hecha/IG
Ceramic Artist
The Relic series is an ongoing exploration of quiet grandeur—each piece a dialogue between collected shells, coastal remnants, and layered textures. I want these works to feel both timeless and regal, as if unearthed from another era.
Materials: Ceramic, Glaze
Sierra Kanistanaux/IG
Ceramic Artist
Sculptural adornments embody a body pushed beyond its natural limits, where grief escapes the flesh and grows outward. They are inevitable as if the body had no choice but to grow them. The series blurs the line between adornment and bodily evolution, highlighting the beauty that arises from discomfort.
The exhibition’s title, Closer Than They Appear, underscores both the laws of physics and metaphorically how reflections might inform us about proximity — of intimacy made strange, enacting a kind of call-and-response with the viewer’s self-imaging. This exhibition draws upon the spatial and psychological dimensions of the mirror, what Lacan famously termed the méconnaissance of the mirror stage, to explore how reflection can mislead, multiply, or undo perception altogether. In this context, reflection becomes sculptural, spatial, and social — shaped by the histories embedded in our physicality and the politics of perception.
Through multimedia works, sculpture, paintings and installations, the artists engage with the reflective surface as an active site, where the gaze can loop, inform, reframe and deflect. The mirror becomes less a surface and more a contingent space where vision and narratives merge, reflecting and rebounding at times in curious rhythms. From polished geometries to fragmented surfaces, the works on view refract, redirect, and propose alternate ways of seeing. They recalibrate light and space as material entities, engineering a circuit that can only be completed by the viewer’s gaze. The mirrored encounters suggest that perception is never stable, that recognition is often partial, and that the self is assembled through acts of misalignment as much as coherence. Is this not, after all, the condition of modern subjectivity — fractured, recursive, and mediated through experiences that both produce and obscure recognition?
This exhibition is co-presented by re.riddle and architect Anand Sheth during San Francisco Design Week. Closer Than They Appear aligns with this year’s theme, Reform, asking how aesthetic experiences can initiate deeper confrontations — with the self, with structures of power, and with the cultural images that shape them.
June 7-July 19, 2025 -- “Closer Than They Appear” is the sophomore curatorial project from Studio Anand Sheth, following its debut exhibition in 2024. Sheth was asked to guest curate the exhibition by re.riddle owner Candace Huey, and he again gathered artists and designers around a central concept. Sheth discussed his curation with art historian and writer Terri Cohn as part of the SquareCylinder relaunch programming. Artworks from the exhibition are also featured in Issue 3 of SHLTR. Follow along @storefrontanandsheth.
San Francisco architect and curator Anand Sheth expresses his design ethos for the fair’s theater space, placing the furnishings included in the context of what’s going on in contemporary Bay Area design more broadly. Sheth has called San Francisco home for 19 years, since studying at the California College of the Arts. Today, he is potentially best known around the city for his bars and restaurants, including a string of wine bars with cult followings (one of which has an excellent dance floor), as well as unusually thoughtful commercial offices, and homes including his own studio and residence in a renovated Victorian. He started his studio with a desire to “unlearn” the hierarchical traditions of the architecture profession in order to create an atypically collaborative way of working. With that in mind, he has asked Bay-Area design studios to contribute furnishings to the theater space with the aim of creating a casual domestic setting that highlights some of the best designers in the region. 
April 17-20, 2025 -- Dwell Magazine Editor Bill Hanley invited Studio Anand Sheth to curate the presentation stage of the prominent art fair at Fort Mason Center. Sheth pulled inspiration from the historic building and its siting along an undeveloped coastal landscape while emphasizing local, contemporary voices in art and design. The curation was discussed in a public talk launching the SF Art Fair's weekend programming. Follow along @storefrontanandsheth.VESSEL is an original group exhibition showcasing the vibrant creativity and diverse talents of individuals with strong ties to the Bay Area. Departing from conventional geographic labels, VESSEL embraces the fluidity of contemporary artistic identity, inviting viewers to embark on a journey through the interconnectedness of artistic communities This multi-city exhibition celebrates the prolific voices and contributions of artists and creatives rooted in the place that changed the world.
Alma Lopez of Studio Alma Lopez
Interiors and product designer
Title: The Reflektor
Dims: 20” h x 18” d
Material: birch wood, plaster, mirror, metal
VESSEL features Studio Alma Lopez, led by Alma Lopez, a Mexican American designer blending Texan and Bay Area heritage with immigrant roots, emphasizing weaving, steel, wood, clay, and plaster. Her creations in textiles, furniture, and objects weave a rich tapestry of cultural identity and craftsmanship, reflecting a diverse and deeply personal narrative.
“The concept of a ‘vessel’ resonates with me as a Mexican-American artist, symbolizing a space where I can reflect on my identity as both a designer and an artist. The Bay Area — [which I believe is] shaped by an unpolished allure, genuine authenticity, and defined by its gritty vibrancy — has gifted me with a unique resilience and strength where I glimpse the essence of my own growth and the heart of my identity.”
Amanda Swain of Othr Space
Interior designer
Title: Soft Glow
Dims: 22”d x 29”h
Material: fiberglass, epoxy, resin, acrylic paint
VESSEL features @othr_space, led by Amanda Swain, born in Oakland California, who comes from a lineage of women artists using their unique perspectives to engage with the world.
To Amanda, design and art is about expressing ideas, backing up vision, and an unwavering commitment to self-trust and exploration. Whether with personal or client work, she fearlessly champions the importance of reaching the best possible outcome and ultimate expression of an intended concept through intentional and sometimes unconventional processes. Her work often finds itself at the cross-section between furniture and sculpture.
“My process focuses on using additive mold-making techniques, along with material and texture exploration.”
Becky Carter of Studio Becky Carter
Interior designer
IG
Title: Vessel
Dims: 8.5" x 5.5" x 3.5"
Material: steel, shattered glass
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Studio Becky Carter, led by Becky Carter who established her interior design studio in 2016. A RISD graduate with a degree in furniture design, and a former teacher of custom woodworking, Carter's spaces and objects are driven by a fascination with retro-futurism, an imagined, ideal reality informed by a reinterpretation of design's history.
“This piece was made to explore both the owning and relinquishing of control.“
Blake Conway of Problem Library
Director
Title: Ground Object 4
Dims: 17.75” x 5” x 7”
Material: solid oak, paper, ink, lighting components
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Blake Conway, a nonprofit director, carpenter and artist concerned with altars, prayer rooms and religious objects. Many works consist of drawings for speculative structures and rooms specifically used for prayer and isolation. His sculptural works are meant to accompany an individual as they construct a set of psychological associations with the work. The intended goal is to create for their owner, an object that can construct an emotional space of alignment towards a singular life goal and purpose.
The artist was homeschooled, did not attend college and has spent a significant amount of time pursuing personal projects, businesses and working with other artists. The latter of which has encouraged him to continue producing his own works.
Blake Conway is the Director of Problem Library, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization focused on education and art. He also works as an art and furniture dealer and is a consultant for the Stryker Corporation.
“A place where sustenance is held.“
Brandt Hewitt & Megan McGuinn of Medium Small
Furniture designers
Title: Dais
Dims: 6”x6”x8”
Material: solid ash, stoneware
VESSEL features Medium Small, led by Brandt Hewitt and Megan McGuinn, whose practice is design-driven, informed by materials and critical exploration through sketching, physical model making, and prototyping. They realize their collections, custom commissions, and in-situ buildouts through modern methodologies, employing a combination of handcrafted techniques, industrial tooling, and CAD and CAM softwares.
All of their designs are produced in their Tenderloin studio and in collaboration with a community of fabricators in and around San Francisco. Paired with our project management expertise and design savvy, this model allows them to keep their studio compact and their work versatile - all while ensuring high standards of quality control.
“Subverting the roles of object and display, a textured stoneware sculpture sits atop a demure wooden podium that conceals a secret function. The piece invites the viewer to commit the ultimate art-world transgression—to touch the untouchable.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Furniture maker and designer
Title: Heads and Tails
Dims: 13”x13”x22”
Material: cherry, silk
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Caleb Ferris, a furniture artist who creates tongue-in-cheek designs that remind us not to take ourselves too seriously. Finding inspiration in life’s overlooked and underappreciated details––such as the ruffled curves of noodles, the tempting glint of fishing lures, or the bounce of inflated cartoons––Caleb draws attention to the things we often take for granted. His creative process borrows motifs from his personal library of objects, which he abstracts and recontextualizes until each piece is infused with its own distinct personality. He also incorporates spontaneous finishing techniques that celebrate materiality and the fabrication process behind the finished product. Through his work, Caleb invites viewers to appreciate the atypical beauty surrounding us and encourages us to be present and receptive to it.
“This piece explores how motifs and ornamentation in European vases, such as serpents borrowed from ancient mythologies, reflect our tendency to repurpose and reinterpret symbols without knowing their origins, thus creating new meanings in the process.”
Interdisciplinary artist
Title: the pollen spills wondering what it meant to be held
Dims: 39” x 26”
Material: hand burnished solvent transfer, color pencil, acrylic on wood panel
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Cecilia Mignon, a non-binary photo-based artist whose work explores temporality, softness and poetic space.
“A vessel pours — out from the arms of two tulips pollen spills. This dust is now my dust. I am tracing memory through images, looking for something else to hold them.”
F. Jason Campbell of ELL Projects
Spatial designer
Title: Homecoming: Letter (Four Panels: No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4).
Dims: 18”x24” prints (19.75”x25.75” framed).
Material: graphite on illustration board (print), shattered tempered glass (sculpture)
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features ELL Projects, led by F. Jason Campbell, an artist and spatial designer. He was born on Long Island, New York of Caribbean descent.
His work curates a thread between architecture, photography, performance, and sculpture. While the medium shifts as needed, the work is informed by the compelling yet challenging experiences that emerge from the dualities and incongruencies in our daily lives. Jason has taught undergraduate and graduate advanced option studios at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design where his studios prioritized the immaterial and narrative structure of decommissioned and derelict space, and the tension between seemingly incompatible uses.
“Coming to terms with how a place has filled you requires a particular language, perhaps one born from a shattered and reimagined self.”
Francesca Soo Hodges of Fear the Feast
Pastry chef and culinary artist
Title: with a strawberry in the mouth
Dims: 60”x24”
Material: cake, italian meringue buttercream, lychees, dried sakura, strawberry powder, non-edible florals
VESSEL features Fear the Feast, led by Francesca Soo Hodges, a cake creator drawing inspiration from the Bay Area’s diverse seasonal produce, terrain, and food culture. While they now focus on cakes, Francesca’s food system experience extends to food waste recovery and redistribution, publishing, and education.
“For this cake, I wanted to offer different textures and tastes in each bite, within the edible landscape.”
Gabriel Kasor
Fine artist
Title: la’ vessel
Dims: 18”x36”
Material: oil paint, pigment stick
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Gabe Kasor, a prolific artist making paintings. Using bold gestures and a variety of colorful mediums, including paint, oil, sticks, pastels and more, Gabriel creates charming scenes that feel like pages torn from a storybook or fragments of a vibrant dream. His confident, fearless expression is textural, layered and often informed by historical reference. His places and faces are familiar with a touch of magic and the uncanny.
“I see woman as the main vessel in life— a holder of grace”
Fine artist
Title: Held/Holding
Dims: 16”x20”
Material: acrylic on canvas
VESSEL features Heather Hardison, an artist specializing in large scale painted installations. Their work explores queer identity, radical joy, and our shared humanity. The technicality of their work is influenced by the art and craft of sign painting.
“I’m utilizing the negative space of the painted hands to hold and contain. The calligraphic marks painted across the background represent the complexity that is contained within an individual.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Fine artist & woodworker
Title: Primary Glow, Green Glow, Orange Glow, Magenta Lime Glow
Dims: 17”x17”x1.75”, 13.75”x11.75”x1.75”, 18.5”x13”x1.75”, 16.5”x27.75”x1.75”
Material: acrylic, shellac, cherry plywood in cherry/walnut frame
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Joe Ferriso, who grew up in Long Island, NY, and moved to the Bay Area in 2009. Working in multiple mediums and disciplines, his artworks are primarily concerned with how color relationships impact perception.
“I'm thinking of the paintings as vessels for an ephemeral color phenomenon.”
Title: Growing Sunflowers on Moontime | Rooting Talismans in Black Earth
Dims: 30” x 30” x 30”
Material: clay, sunflowers, sunflower seeds, magnet, soil, jute, wood
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Lina Bondarenko, whose art practice is rooted in healing the metabolic rift and rewilding perceptions of time through happenings and rituals as mediums of cultural care and environmental kinship. Currently she is an architecture research graduate student at MIT, examining how the urban infrastructure of steep terrain can re-enchant humans with geomorphology and ecology.
“One ongoing year of planting rituals nurtures the soil as a living vessel, hosting sunflowers that root through cosmic, metabolic, ancestral, and terrestrial concepts of time.”
Lynette Nicole Betancur of LNB Atelier and Showroom
Artist
Title: Estar Cerca
Dims: 16.5” x 13.5” x 14.5”
Material: ceramic, sand, cement
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Lynette Nicole Betancur, an artist and designer whose primary practice is creating sculptures with clay. Her sculptures are developed through an intuitive process that is influenced by the changes in light and movement in landscapes, mirrored in the human form, as well as past drawings and other integral parts of her lived experiences.
“My interpretation of the vessel concept is an iteration of an archive; a physical capsule of memory, time, and movement.”
Jewelry and furniture designer
Title: Vinaigrette
Dims: ½”x ½” x ½”
Material: sterling silver and 14K yellow gold
VESSEL features Megan McGuinn, a multi-disciplinary artist whose eponymous jewelry collection draws inspiration from architectural ornament, materiality, mechanical connections, and imaginary worlds. Irresistibly drawn to the miniature, she renders artifacts at a scale that invites a closer look. Each piece is crafted at her bench overlooking a postage-stamp-sized garden, cats by her side—a sort of modern St. Jerome in the Study tableau.
Her work shows a devotion to the mark of the hand, but doesn’t eschew the possibilities presented by modern technology. Trained as an architect, Megan practiced in the city before leaving the field to pursue furniture and jewelry. Along with her partner, she is also one half of Medium Small, a furniture and lighting studio.
“A vessel for memories, evoked by the most sentimental of the senses—scent. Positioned within the long tradition of aromatic jewels, this vessel serves as a phenomenological tool of protection, remembrance, and imagination.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Product designer
Title: Parquet Pedestal Bowl
Dims: 11”h x 8”d
Material: natural cork, pink marble cork, natural marble cork
VESSEL features Melanie Abrantes Designs, a Filipina- Portuguese designer utilizing sustainable and local materials, her designs are made to celebrate the simplicity of everyday living. Melanie is at the forefront of creating sustainable and innovative designs in her industry and her work can be found in shops and retail stores nationwide and abroad.
“This bowl, made from cork, is porous and unable to hold liquids; however, the geometric patterns that create its overall form make the piece resilient.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Curator, glass artist
Title: A Year in a Breath
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Meryl Pataky, an artist of many disciplines and mediums focusing on the relationship between her hands and material. Her work is a physical meditation on the timeless spirituality of craft, manifested by taking materials and imbuing them with meaning. By working with materials that resist, she creates a compromise between her will and reality, accepting the dichotomy within herself. Her recent work has evolved alongside her journey of motherhood, reflecting on dichotomous emotions both personal and universal.
Nicholas Ruiz of Forager California
Product designer
Title: Summer Bounty
Dims:12”w x 12”d x 78” h
Material: italian leather, dry grass
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Forager California, led by Nicholas V. Ruiz, whose two decades of experience in design split evenly between architecture and various design disciplines, including furniture design, photography, industrial design, global workplace design, retail concepts, and soft goods.
Nicholas founded Forager California in 2021 to collaborate with other designers. He offers carefully crafted pieces for the home that are modern in design and timeless in style. The materials they use have integrity and natural beauty. Their roots are based on architecture. Natural materials, technology, and local manufacturing inspire them.
“This vessel carries a symbol of summer and heat.”
Artist and product designer
Title: Vessel
Dims: 96”x40”
Material: acrylic on muslin
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Nihir Shah, a designer and artist with a multicultural experience living across three continents who has cultivated a loving curiosity of the subtle influences that shape a place’s unique identity, culture, and craft. In his work, he savors these observations through meditations on material, light, color, texture, and pattern.
“This city that has come to hold me. Take in its colors, look at its light. Feel its wind, breathe its air, and know that it’d all be so different without the great ocean.”
Furniture maker and designer
Title: When You Forget Vessel in Blue and Mahogany
Dims: 14”x14”x22”
Material: mahogany, maple, poplar, glass sleeve
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features NJ Roseti, whose work carries technologic and religious undertones through its use of classical marquetry techniques and traditional wood species applied onto synthesized distortions and color, yet also readily exhibits features on theoretical physics such as hidden dimensions, the construct of time, and parallel universes through its use of pattern. He personally makes each piece in his workshop, utilizing a blend of computer and traditional hand tools.
“I interpreted ‘vessel’ as a way to find a harsh contrast between what will be put into it (florals) with the vessel itself.”
Anooshey Rahim of Dune Hai
Landscape architect
IG
Title: Buoyancy
Dims: 14”h x 8”d
Material: Wood buoy and acrylic paint
VESSEL features Dune Hai, led by Anooshey Rahim who believes time is porous and all art in design is inevitably entrenched in the dynamics of historical, present and future contexts. Rahim is a landscape architect specializing in poetic landscapes for climate-adapted and unique outdoor spaces.
“Material metamorphosis as conservation: the transformation of a found object from its original purpose into an innate tool, a vessel. Just as a vessel is meant to hold objects, the vessel itself is an object that has lived many lives through its transformations. The wooden buoy, found, and pushed through a metamorphosis, has been given another life.”
Andrei Hakhovich of Gradient Matter
Architectural designer
IG
Title: Light Nexus
Dims: 12”l x 7”w x 5.5”h
Material: wood, recycled plastic, limestone finish with sealant
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Gradient Matter, led by Andrei Hakhovich, who seamlessly blends architecture, design, and art, offering a fresh perspective on space and form through innovative exploration. Every project in his studio, Gradient Matter, is imbued with productive and creative tensions or opposites, giving birth to new narratives and storytelling through design and architecture. His design process blends intuitive exploration with material sensitivity, utilizing geometry to manipulate light and perception and evoke poetic atmospheres within spaces and objects. Andrei embraces unpredictability and play, designing projects akin to living systems that evolve over time, blending precision with the human touch of imperfection, chance, and life itself. His passion for phenomenology, computation, materiality, and engineering serves as a bridge between the mind and heart.
“The ‘Light Nexus’ vessel was born from a fascination with architectural vaults and circular apertures. It intricately weaves together order and chaos with light and shadow, blending refined and primal elements to craft an interplay of mass and opening. As a result, the vessel draws parallels between the artist's life journey and artistic approach.”
Sergio Mondragon of Avroko
Interior designer
Title: Incienso No. 02 - Maize
Dims: 24”l x 12”w x 19”h
Material: paper mache vellum, cotton rope, wheat paste, brass, oak wood, paint
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Sergio Mondragon, an interior designer, artist, stylist, philanthropist and collector of memories and objects.
Born between the farmlands of Northern California and the design scenes of Mexico City, Mondragon started to craft his vision between both worlds, and found passion in creating spaces that are rooted in storytelling, cultural references, and unique untold experiences.
Mondragon’s design career was rooted in philanthropy and nonprofit work where he learned that community, culture, and design mentorship was key to creating community much like his strong Mexican roots.
As an artist, Mondragon works with Paper-Mache, a technique he learned during his childhood, to create objects rooted in his Mexican culture.
“Inspired by a 15th-century brazier of an Aztec deity, this vessel plays with the duality of a ceremonial vessel and features rope-like forms typically found in Mexican piñata assemblies.”
Photographer
Title: Holding Space
Dims: 5” x 1.5” x .75”
Material: wax, wick, fire, bronze
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Robert Canali, who operates as an interpreter and translator, exploring the mystery and beauty of everyday life. His work is a study in themes such as permanence, fragility, time, and individual perception. His concepts are realized as large format analog photographs, sculptures, installations, and books.
“The weight of a feeling is not often proportionate to the scale of the event which elicits it.”
Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary of Soft Geometry
Product designers
Title: Vessel
Dims: 16”x6”x17”h
Material: steel tubing
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Soft Geometry, led by Indian designers Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, who create collectible furniture and objects that serve as poignant reflections on the universal yearning for softness in an often harsh world. With the narrative backdrop of Zacharias and Chaudhary’s own experiences of living and working between cultures in India and the US, soft-geometry’s objects explore the suspension between contemporary geometries and ritualistic hand-building inspired by Indian craft traditions.
“A vessel that holds more than one thing, open on both ends — moves and finds its balance again and again.”
Photographer
Title: 1 4 3 7 & Emergence: 707
Dims: 13” x 19”
Material: thread, paper, light box
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Steph Pan, whose work is multidisciplinary in nature and often takes the form of an experience or tangible object – such as a photograph, spatial arrangement or event.
She studied in New York, where she developed her own path of academic study in urban design, architectural studies and creative production. She is interested in spaces and how people live in or use a space - both in a physical space and through her ongoing research on the relationship between personal identity and the space. Through working with the medium of photography, she is able to document and transport the atmosphere of a space that she feels to those who are not in the room.
“There is something pure and divine, different from the visible reality, and vessel is the container holding the quintessence that fills the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere.”
Artist, furniture maker, and designer
Title: Xylem Moon
Dims: 8”l x 8.25”w x 2.25”h
Material: bismuth
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Yvonne Mouser, an artist, designer, and builder engaged in creative practice that spans furniture design, product, spaces, fine art, and events.
Yvonne Mouser investigates ideas through the making of objects, experimenting with concepts, materials, and methods with a foundation in the traditions of a woodworking studio. She utilizes craft techniques for joining, shaping, and manipulating material to create furniture, everyday objects, and sculpture.
“From within a moon glow basin, layers of cross-section chambers spiral upward like xylem, the vascular tissue in plants. Bending towards the sun, its cellular structure frames and supports it as a table-top structure, an ‘ichirin’ style vessel.”
Kicking off at the Pallas Annex in San Francisco on June 7 at 6pm during SF Design Week, VESSEL will occupy a 60’s-era artist hotel room before being transported and reinstalled at Fig & Oak on June 21 7-10pm for Los Angeles Design Weekend.
VESSEL is curated by Studio Anand Sheth, a visionary multidisciplinary design practice with roots in San Francisco and satellite offices in Los Angeles and New York City. Studio founder Anand Sheth approaches architecture and interiors from a decidedly conceptual and artful point of view. VESSEL brings together Anand’s collaborative community of artists and designers from various experience levels and disciplines. From emerging talents to established practitioners, the exhibition celebrates the rich tapestry of creativity that defines the Bay Area’s cultural landscape.
Anand’s curatorial practice is also informed by core values imbued from his home city, including a resilient and rebellious spirit, and vulnerable and generous hospitality. Anand will visit each artist’s studio and his documentation will be compiled into an exhibit film. The artist group is collaborating across Canoa’s Canvas tool, and each artists’ inspiration and process will be directly included in the printed exhibit catalog.
VESSEL invites viewers to explore the intersections of art, design, and culture, celebrating the enduring spirit of creativity that emerges in the Bay Area and transcends man-made boundaries.Featuring process-heavy practices in landscape design, ceramics, lighting, furniture, interiors, architecture, painting, photography, sculpture, cuisine, fashion, product design, graphics, and more, VESSEL offers a panoramic view of artistic expression. The one-of-a-kind artworks will remain unpublished until they debut in San Francisco and become available for purchase via STOREFRONT Anand Sheth.
April 17-20, 2025 -- Dwell Magazine Editor Bill Hanley invited Studio Anand Sheth to curate the presentation stage of the prominent art fair at Fort Mason Center. Sheth pulled inspiration from the historic building and its siting along an undeveloped coastal landscape while emphasizing local, contemporary voices in art and design. The curation was discussed in a public talk launching the SF Art Fair's weekend programming. Follow along @storefrontanandsheth.VESSEL is an original group exhibition showcasing the vibrant creativity and diverse talents of individuals with strong ties to the Bay Area. Departing from conventional geographic labels, VESSEL embraces the fluidity of contemporary artistic identity, inviting viewers to embark on a journey through the interconnectedness of artistic communities This multi-city exhibition celebrates the prolific voices and contributions of artists and creatives rooted in the place that changed the world.Alma Lopez of Studio Alma Lopez
Interiors and product designer
Title: The Reflektor
Dims: 20” h x 18” d
Material: birch wood, plaster, mirror, metal
VESSEL features Studio Alma Lopez, led by Alma Lopez, a Mexican American designer blending Texan and Bay Area heritage with immigrant roots, emphasizing weaving, steel, wood, clay, and plaster. Her creations in textiles, furniture, and objects weave a rich tapestry of cultural identity and craftsmanship, reflecting a diverse and deeply personal narrative.
“The concept of a ‘vessel’ resonates with me as a Mexican-American artist, symbolizing a space where I can reflect on my identity as both a designer and an artist. The Bay Area — [which I believe is] shaped by an unpolished allure, genuine authenticity, and defined by its gritty vibrancy — has gifted me with a unique resilience and strength where I glimpse the essence of my own growth and the heart of my identity.”
Amanda Swain of Othr Space
Interior designer
Title: Soft Glow
Dims: 22”d x 29”h
Material: fiberglass, epoxy, resin, acrylic paint
VESSEL features @othr_space, led by Amanda Swain, born in Oakland California, who comes from a lineage of women artists using their unique perspectives to engage with the world.
To Amanda, design and art is about expressing ideas, backing up vision, and an unwavering commitment to self-trust and exploration. Whether with personal or client work, she fearlessly champions the importance of reaching the best possible outcome and ultimate expression of an intended concept through intentional and sometimes unconventional processes. Her work often finds itself at the cross-section between furniture and sculpture.
“My process focuses on using additive mold-making techniques, along with material and texture exploration.”
Becky Carter of Studio Becky Carter
Interior designer
IG
Title: Vessel
Dims: 8.5" x 5.5" x 3.5"
Material: steel, shattered glass
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Studio Becky Carter, led by Becky Carter who established her interior design studio in 2016. A RISD graduate with a degree in furniture design, and a former teacher of custom woodworking, Carter's spaces and objects are driven by a fascination with retro-futurism, an imagined, ideal reality informed by a reinterpretation of design's history.
“This piece was made to explore both the owning and relinquishing of control.“
Blake Conway of Problem Library
Director
Title: Ground Object 4
Dims: 17.75” x 5” x 7”
Material: solid oak, paper, ink, lighting components
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Blake Conway, a nonprofit director, carpenter and artist concerned with altars, prayer rooms and religious objects. Many works consist of drawings for speculative structures and rooms specifically used for prayer and isolation. His sculptural works are meant to accompany an individual as they construct a set of psychological associations with the work. The intended goal is to create for their owner, an object that can construct an emotional space of alignment towards a singular life goal and purpose.
The artist was homeschooled, did not attend college and has spent a significant amount of time pursuing personal projects, businesses and working with other artists. The latter of which has encouraged him to continue producing his own works.
Blake Conway is the Director of Problem Library, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization focused on education and art. He also works as an art and furniture dealer and is a consultant for the Stryker Corporation.
“A place where sustenance is held.“
Brandt Hewitt & Megan McGuinn of Medium Small
Furniture designers
Title: Dais
Dims: 6”x6”x8”
Material: solid ash, stoneware
VESSEL features Medium Small, led by Brandt Hewitt and Megan McGuinn, whose practice is design-driven, informed by materials and critical exploration through sketching, physical model making, and prototyping. They realize their collections, custom commissions, and in-situ buildouts through modern methodologies, employing a combination of handcrafted techniques, industrial tooling, and CAD and CAM softwares.
All of their designs are produced in their Tenderloin studio and in collaboration with a community of fabricators in and around San Francisco. Paired with our project management expertise and design savvy, this model allows them to keep their studio compact and their work versatile - all while ensuring high standards of quality control.
“Subverting the roles of object and display, a textured stoneware sculpture sits atop a demure wooden podium that conceals a secret function. The piece invites the viewer to commit the ultimate art-world transgression—to touch the untouchable.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Furniture maker and designer
Title: Heads and Tails
Dims: 13”x13”x22”
Material: cherry, silk
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Caleb Ferris, a furniture artist who creates tongue-in-cheek designs that remind us not to take ourselves too seriously. Finding inspiration in life’s overlooked and underappreciated details––such as the ruffled curves of noodles, the tempting glint of fishing lures, or the bounce of inflated cartoons––Caleb draws attention to the things we often take for granted. His creative process borrows motifs from his personal library of objects, which he abstracts and recontextualizes until each piece is infused with its own distinct personality. He also incorporates spontaneous finishing techniques that celebrate materiality and the fabrication process behind the finished product. Through his work, Caleb invites viewers to appreciate the atypical beauty surrounding us and encourages us to be present and receptive to it.
“This piece explores how motifs and ornamentation in European vases, such as serpents borrowed from ancient mythologies, reflect our tendency to repurpose and reinterpret symbols without knowing their origins, thus creating new meanings in the process.”
Interdisciplinary artist
Title: the pollen spills wondering what it meant to be held
Dims: 39” x 26”
Material: hand burnished solvent transfer, color pencil, acrylic on wood panel
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Cecilia Mignon, a non-binary photo-based artist whose work explores temporality, softness and poetic space.
“A vessel pours — out from the arms of two tulips pollen spills. This dust is now my dust. I am tracing memory through images, looking for something else to hold them.”
F. Jason Campbell of ELL Projects
Spatial designer
Title: Homecoming: Letter (Four Panels: No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4).
Dims: 18”x24” prints (19.75”x25.75” framed).
Material: graphite on illustration board (print), shattered tempered glass (sculpture)
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features ELL Projects, led by F. Jason Campbell, an artist and spatial designer. He was born on Long Island, New York of Caribbean descent.
His work curates a thread between architecture, photography, performance, and sculpture. While the medium shifts as needed, the work is informed by the compelling yet challenging experiences that emerge from the dualities and incongruencies in our daily lives. Jason has taught undergraduate and graduate advanced option studios at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design where his studios prioritized the immaterial and narrative structure of decommissioned and derelict space, and the tension between seemingly incompatible uses.
“Coming to terms with how a place has filled you requires a particular language, perhaps one born from a shattered and reimagined self.”
Francesca Soo Hodges of Fear the Feast
Pastry chef and culinary artist
Title: with a strawberry in the mouth
Dims: 60”x24”
Material: cake, italian meringue buttercream, lychees, dried sakura, strawberry powder, non-edible florals
VESSEL features Fear the Feast, led by Francesca Soo Hodges, a cake creator drawing inspiration from the Bay Area’s diverse seasonal produce, terrain, and food culture. While they now focus on cakes, Francesca’s food system experience extends to food waste recovery and redistribution, publishing, and education.
“For this cake, I wanted to offer different textures and tastes in each bite, within the edible landscape.”
Gabriel Kasor
Fine artist
Title: la’ vessel
Dims: 18”x36”
Material: oil paint, pigment stick
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Gabe Kasor, a prolific artist making paintings. Using bold gestures and a variety of colorful mediums, including paint, oil, sticks, pastels and more, Gabriel creates charming scenes that feel like pages torn from a storybook or fragments of a vibrant dream. His confident, fearless expression is textural, layered and often informed by historical reference. His places and faces are familiar with a touch of magic and the uncanny.
“I see woman as the main vessel in life— a holder of grace”
Fine artist
Title: Held/Holding
Dims: 16”x20”
Material: acrylic on canvas
VESSEL features Heather Hardison, an artist specializing in large scale painted installations. Their work explores queer identity, radical joy, and our shared humanity. The technicality of their work is influenced by the art and craft of sign painting.
“I’m utilizing the negative space of the painted hands to hold and contain. The calligraphic marks painted across the background represent the complexity that is contained within an individual.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Fine artist & woodworker
Title: Primary Glow, Green Glow, Orange Glow, Magenta Lime Glow
Dims: 17”x17”x1.75”, 13.75”x11.75”x1.75”, 18.5”x13”x1.75”, 16.5”x27.75”x1.75”
Material: acrylic, shellac, cherry plywood in cherry/walnut frame
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Joe Ferriso, who grew up in Long Island, NY, and moved to the Bay Area in 2009. Working in multiple mediums and disciplines, his artworks are primarily concerned with how color relationships impact perception.
“I'm thinking of the paintings as vessels for an ephemeral color phenomenon.”
Title: Growing Sunflowers on Moontime | Rooting Talismans in Black Earth
Dims: 30” x 30” x 30”
Material: clay, sunflowers, sunflower seeds, magnet, soil, jute, wood
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Lina Bondarenko, whose art practice is rooted in healing the metabolic rift and rewilding perceptions of time through happenings and rituals as mediums of cultural care and environmental kinship. Currently she is an architecture research graduate student at MIT, examining how the urban infrastructure of steep terrain can re-enchant humans with geomorphology and ecology.
“One ongoing year of planting rituals nurtures the soil as a living vessel, hosting sunflowers that root through cosmic, metabolic, ancestral, and terrestrial concepts of time.”
Lynette Nicole Betancur of LNB Atelier and Showroom
Artist
Title: Estar Cerca
Dims: 16.5” x 13.5” x 14.5”
Material: ceramic, sand, cement
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Lynette Nicole Betancur, an artist and designer whose primary practice is creating sculptures with clay. Her sculptures are developed through an intuitive process that is influenced by the changes in light and movement in landscapes, mirrored in the human form, as well as past drawings and other integral parts of her lived experiences.
“My interpretation of the vessel concept is an iteration of an archive; a physical capsule of memory, time, and movement.”
Jewelry and furniture designer
Title: Vinaigrette
Dims: ½”x ½” x ½”
Material: sterling silver and 14K yellow gold
VESSEL features Megan McGuinn, a multi-disciplinary artist whose eponymous jewelry collection draws inspiration from architectural ornament, materiality, mechanical connections, and imaginary worlds. Irresistibly drawn to the miniature, she renders artifacts at a scale that invites a closer look. Each piece is crafted at her bench overlooking a postage-stamp-sized garden, cats by her side—a sort of modern St. Jerome in the Study tableau.
Her work shows a devotion to the mark of the hand, but doesn’t eschew the possibilities presented by modern technology. Trained as an architect, Megan practiced in the city before leaving the field to pursue furniture and jewelry. Along with her partner, she is also one half of Medium Small, a furniture and lighting studio.
“A vessel for memories, evoked by the most sentimental of the senses—scent. Positioned within the long tradition of aromatic jewels, this vessel serves as a phenomenological tool of protection, remembrance, and imagination.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Product designer
Title: Parquet Pedestal Bowl
Dims: 11”h x 8”d
Material: natural cork, pink marble cork, natural marble cork
VESSEL features Melanie Abrantes Designs, a Filipina- Portuguese designer utilizing sustainable and local materials, her designs are made to celebrate the simplicity of everyday living. Melanie is at the forefront of creating sustainable and innovative designs in her industry and her work can be found in shops and retail stores nationwide and abroad.
“This bowl, made from cork, is porous and unable to hold liquids; however, the geometric patterns that create its overall form make the piece resilient.”
Collector pickups in San Francisco can be scheduled at no additional cost.
Los Angeles drop off can be arranged, additional fee may be requested.
Shipping or alternate delivery locations will be coordinated between collector and artist.
Curator, glass artist
Title: A Year in a Breath
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Meryl Pataky, an artist of many disciplines and mediums focusing on the relationship between her hands and material. Her work is a physical meditation on the timeless spirituality of craft, manifested by taking materials and imbuing them with meaning. By working with materials that resist, she creates a compromise between her will and reality, accepting the dichotomy within herself. Her recent work has evolved alongside her journey of motherhood, reflecting on dichotomous emotions both personal and universal.
Nicholas Ruiz of Forager California
Product designer
Title: Summer Bounty
Dims:12”w x 12”d x 78” h
Material: italian leather, dry grass
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Forager California, led by Nicholas V. Ruiz, whose two decades of experience in design split evenly between architecture and various design disciplines, including furniture design, photography, industrial design, global workplace design, retail concepts, and soft goods.
Nicholas founded Forager California in 2021 to collaborate with other designers. He offers carefully crafted pieces for the home that are modern in design and timeless in style. The materials they use have integrity and natural beauty. Their roots are based on architecture. Natural materials, technology, and local manufacturing inspire them.
“This vessel carries a symbol of summer and heat.”
Artist and product designer
Title: Vessel
Dims: 96”x40”
Material: acrylic on muslin
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Nihir Shah, a designer and artist with a multicultural experience living across three continents who has cultivated a loving curiosity of the subtle influences that shape a place’s unique identity, culture, and craft. In his work, he savors these observations through meditations on material, light, color, texture, and pattern.
“This city that has come to hold me. Take in its colors, look at its light. Feel its wind, breathe its air, and know that it’d all be so different without the great ocean.”
Furniture maker and designer
Title: When You Forget Vessel in Blue and Mahogany
Dims: 14”x14”x22”
Material: mahogany, maple, poplar, glass sleeve
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features NJ Roseti, whose work carries technologic and religious undertones through its use of classical marquetry techniques and traditional wood species applied onto synthesized distortions and color, yet also readily exhibits features on theoretical physics such as hidden dimensions, the construct of time, and parallel universes through its use of pattern. He personally makes each piece in his workshop, utilizing a blend of computer and traditional hand tools.
“I interpreted ‘vessel’ as a way to find a harsh contrast between what will be put into it (florals) with the vessel itself.”
Anooshey Rahim of Dune Hai
Landscape architect
IG
Title: Buoyancy
Dims: 14”h x 8”d
Material: Wood buoy and acrylic paint
VESSEL features Dune Hai, led by Anooshey Rahim who believes time is porous and all art in design is inevitably entrenched in the dynamics of historical, present and future contexts. Rahim is a landscape architect specializing in poetic landscapes for climate-adapted and unique outdoor spaces.
“Material metamorphosis as conservation: the transformation of a found object from its original purpose into an innate tool, a vessel. Just as a vessel is meant to hold objects, the vessel itself is an object that has lived many lives through its transformations. The wooden buoy, found, and pushed through a metamorphosis, has been given another life.”
Andrei Hakhovich of Gradient Matter
Architectural designer
IG
Title: Light Nexus
Dims: 12”l x 7”w x 5.5”h
Material: wood, recycled plastic, limestone finish with sealant
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Gradient Matter, led by Andrei Hakhovich, who seamlessly blends architecture, design, and art, offering a fresh perspective on space and form through innovative exploration. Every project in his studio, Gradient Matter, is imbued with productive and creative tensions or opposites, giving birth to new narratives and storytelling through design and architecture. His design process blends intuitive exploration with material sensitivity, utilizing geometry to manipulate light and perception and evoke poetic atmospheres within spaces and objects. Andrei embraces unpredictability and play, designing projects akin to living systems that evolve over time, blending precision with the human touch of imperfection, chance, and life itself. His passion for phenomenology, computation, materiality, and engineering serves as a bridge between the mind and heart.
“The ‘Light Nexus’ vessel was born from a fascination with architectural vaults and circular apertures. It intricately weaves together order and chaos with light and shadow, blending refined and primal elements to craft an interplay of mass and opening. As a result, the vessel draws parallels between the artist's life journey and artistic approach.”
Sergio Mondragon of Avroko
Interior designer
Title: Incienso No. 02 - Maize
Dims: 24”l x 12”w x 19”h
Material: paper mache vellum, cotton rope, wheat paste, brass, oak wood, paint
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Sergio Mondragon, an interior designer, artist, stylist, philanthropist and collector of memories and objects.
Born between the farmlands of Northern California and the design scenes of Mexico City, Mondragon started to craft his vision between both worlds, and found passion in creating spaces that are rooted in storytelling, cultural references, and unique untold experiences.
Mondragon’s design career was rooted in philanthropy and nonprofit work where he learned that community, culture, and design mentorship was key to creating community much like his strong Mexican roots.
As an artist, Mondragon works with Paper-Mache, a technique he learned during his childhood, to create objects rooted in his Mexican culture.
“Inspired by a 15th-century brazier of an Aztec deity, this vessel plays with the duality of a ceremonial vessel and features rope-like forms typically found in Mexican piñata assemblies.”
Photographer
Title: Holding Space
Dims: 5” x 1.5” x .75”
Material: wax, wick, fire, bronze
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Robert Canali, who operates as an interpreter and translator, exploring the mystery and beauty of everyday life. His work is a study in themes such as permanence, fragility, time, and individual perception. His concepts are realized as large format analog photographs, sculptures, installations, and books.
“The weight of a feeling is not often proportionate to the scale of the event which elicits it.”
Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary of Soft Geometry
Product designers
Title: Vessel
Dims: 16”x6”x17”h
Material: steel tubing
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Soft Geometry, led by Indian designers Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, who create collectible furniture and objects that serve as poignant reflections on the universal yearning for softness in an often harsh world. With the narrative backdrop of Zacharias and Chaudhary’s own experiences of living and working between cultures in India and the US, soft-geometry’s objects explore the suspension between contemporary geometries and ritualistic hand-building inspired by Indian craft traditions.
“A vessel that holds more than one thing, open on both ends — moves and finds its balance again and again.”
Photographer
Title: 1 4 3 7 & Emergence: 707
Dims: 13” x 19”
Material: thread, paper, light box
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Steph Pan, whose work is multidisciplinary in nature and often takes the form of an experience or tangible object – such as a photograph, spatial arrangement or event.
She studied in New York, where she developed her own path of academic study in urban design, architectural studies and creative production. She is interested in spaces and how people live in or use a space - both in a physical space and through her ongoing research on the relationship between personal identity and the space. Through working with the medium of photography, she is able to document and transport the atmosphere of a space that she feels to those who are not in the room.
“There is something pure and divine, different from the visible reality, and vessel is the container holding the quintessence that fills the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere.”
Artist, furniture maker, and designer
Title: Xylem Moon
Dims: 8”l x 8.25”w x 2.25”h
Material: bismuth
Price: Email artist for pricing and availability
VESSEL features Yvonne Mouser, an artist, designer, and builder engaged in creative practice that spans furniture design, product, spaces, fine art, and events.
Yvonne Mouser investigates ideas through the making of objects, experimenting with concepts, materials, and methods with a foundation in the traditions of a woodworking studio. She utilizes craft techniques for joining, shaping, and manipulating material to create furniture, everyday objects, and sculpture.
“From within a moon glow basin, layers of cross-section chambers spiral upward like xylem, the vascular tissue in plants. Bending towards the sun, its cellular structure frames and supports it as a table-top structure, an ‘ichirin’ style vessel.”
Kicking off at the Pallas Annex in San Francisco on June 7 at 6pm during SF Design Week, VESSEL will occupy a 60’s-era artist hotel room before being transported and reinstalled at Fig & Oak on June 21 7-10pm for Los Angeles Design Weekend.
VESSEL is curated by Studio Anand Sheth, a visionary multidisciplinary design practice with roots in San Francisco and satellite offices in Los Angeles and New York City. Studio founder Anand Sheth approaches architecture and interiors from a decidedly conceptual and artful point of view. VESSEL brings together Anand’s collaborative community of artists and designers from various experience levels and disciplines. From emerging talents to established practitioners, the exhibition celebrates the rich tapestry of creativity that defines the Bay Area’s cultural landscape.
Anand’s curatorial practice is also informed by core values imbued from his home city, including a resilient and rebellious spirit, and vulnerable and generous hospitality. Anand will visit each artist’s studio and his documentation will be compiled into an exhibit film. The artist group is collaborating across Canoa’s Canvas tool, and each artists’ inspiration and process will be directly included in the printed exhibit catalog.
VESSEL invites viewers to explore the intersections of art, design, and culture, celebrating the enduring spirit of creativity that emerges in the Bay Area and transcends man-made boundaries.Featuring process-heavy practices in landscape design, ceramics, lighting, furniture, interiors, architecture, painting, photography, sculpture, cuisine, fashion, product design, graphics, and more, VESSEL offers a panoramic view of artistic expression. The one-of-a-kind artworks will remain unpublished until they debut in San Francisco and become available for purchase via STOREFRONT Anand Sheth.June 7-September 30, 2024 -- VESSEL marks Studio Anand Sheth's curatorial debut. Sheth gathered artists around a central concept and asked each to include him in their process of interpreting the concept into an artwork to debut in San Francisco and Los Angeles. VESSEL was featured in Dezeen (twice), Sight Unseen, NUVO, CA Home & Design, KCRW, SFGate and Stir World. Follow along @vesselgroupshow. 
Designed for slow evenings and good company, the Nightcap series invites you to settle in — with a drink, a smoke, or a story.
