Emma Scully | Emma Scully Gallery
Emma Scully founded her eponymous gallery in November of 2018 to commission, collect and curate contemporary design. Her collection uses design as a lens to examine the relationship of the digital and physical worlds. In exhibitions at the Los Angeles gallery, and through outside installations and partnerships, Emma uses academic curation to increase the interest of functional art. Today, we sit down with the gallerist to discuss her upcoming Cast Iron exhibition at her new Upper East Side gallery in Manhattan.
Where and what did you study? My undergrad degree is in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University and my MA is from the Bard Graduate Center in Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture
Who are your favorite artists/designers? Favorite movements? It constantly shifts and changes. I believe work resonates with you when you need it. Right now - other than the designers I work with - Allesandro Mendini and Robert Stadler. In both cases as much for their writing as design work. Italian Radical Design, Chinese Export Porcelain, Shaker furniture, Mimbres Pottery, and Cycladic art. All have led me to what I collect today.
Who or what inspires you? Craftspeople are a constant source of inspiration for me and have led me to collect in the way I do, which is to say working with craftspeople directly. Reading. Seeing lots and lots of gallery and museum shows. Inspiration - for me - comes from a lot of preparation.
What inspired you to open your own gallery? Wanting to share my collection.
What do you collect? Contemporary limited edition or unique design.
What inspired you to open in NYC after LA? How do the cities/art markets differ? I was in LA working for Rose Tarlow. LA is remarkable for it’s space - I lived in a massive loft where I could show the work I was collecting. Space is a luxury we don’t have in NYC. The design community in LA is very warm and inclusive and the collectors are really willing to experiment so I felt very fortunate to start my business there. Being back in NYC for the holidays, with the emptiness in retail here it seemed like the time to do an experimental show here about community - pushing forward some news ideas I have had about design. And I had been working on this show for a year
Tell us about Cast Iron, your inaugural exhibition at your New York gallery? I commissioned eight young designers across the world to digitally design exclusive pieces of furniture/lighting/decor, with two caveats: the pieces would only be produced using cast iron and the production itself would be handled with the help of the O.K Foundry – a third-generation foundry in Virginia.
By materializing digital files into cast iron – the quintessential symbol of the 19th-century industrial revolution – I married the material origins of industrial-making to the current digital hyper-connectivity of design ideas. My goal with this exhibition is to challenge the relationship between the designer, the gallery, and the buyer, and propose an alternate model aimed at minimizing the environmental impact of production and sale.
Tell us about the gallery design? The Cast Iron collection is presented in a quintessential Upper East Side art gallery, which I reimagined with the help of Brooklyn-based studio Wallpaper Projects, who applied their Patina Study N1 on the primary gallery wall, creating an intriguing conversation between the objects and their surrounding environment.
Who are the participating artists and designers? The exhibition will feature works from Chen Chen & Kai Williams (USA), Tellurico (Italy), Brecht Wright Gander (USA), Faissal El-Malak (Dubai), Bradley L. Bowers (USA), Ryan Decker (USA), Charlotte Kingsnorth (United Kingdom), and Nel Verbeke (Belgium).
Text: Veronica H. Speck Photo: Chris Mottalini