NYAB Event - Andrew Jay Rumpler Exhibition

Andrew Jay Rumpler Exhibition

P339 Gallery

[Image: Andrew Jay Rumpler "untitled #004" (2015) die boards (birch plywood, steel, neoprene), brass, nylon, 26 x 13.5 x 4 in.]

This event has ended.

P339 presents work by New York based artist Andrew Jay Rumpler. These new works stem from the artist’s investigation into the use of a seldom seen waste product of the packaging industry: die boards. Nine Stories Furniture Co, the design studio run by the artist, is known for using distinctly un-furniture like materials to realize their work. Here the same approach is taken to create three dimensional objects that function on a level less apparent.

In the day to day practice as a furniture designer/builder, Rumpler sees many possibilities, but is able to explore very few of them. This presents a problem because it is in the explorations of form, color, density, etc. that he can find the most value. To achieve this, Rumpler tries to reorder the importance of things; to shuffle the components that we understand functional object making to be. If a thing functions as it should - if a chair, for instance, can be sat in, then there is less of it to question. By rearranging the components, the chair doesn’t need to be sat in if it fulfills some other requirement. What these requirements are is in part what Rumpler’s work is an examination of.

One way he facilitates this reordering has been to remove a component typical to the equation - the material - and replace it with something similar but distinctly from another context. Using waste materials as the stand-in works because there is a surplus of it and because it comes with no predetermined way of working with. Die boards are used at the end of the packaging process to define the shape of a package. Paper or chipboard is cut into puzzle-like shapes by means of the custom made die and then folded to become the outer packaging for a product. These things are temporary tools that are built for the making of a limited set of packaging only. When the run of this package is complete, the die is discarded. In the works featured in this exhibition, Rumpler uses discarded die boards to build objects of different sorts. The nature of the material and the shapes within, suggest architectural forms. There are correlations between pressing a thing from a pattern, nearly the standard symbol of “manufacturing” and what architecture has been, and can still be at times. A building is in a sense a “package” to hold us, the product. To a degree Rumpler has allowed this idea to come forward in the work.