Joy. The scream-out moment. The Ah-ha! The lightbulb flashing on is the ephemeral spark I infuse into my work by remixing and combining genres, playing with tropes, iconography, and hybridizing the roles objects play in our lives. I enjoy playing with expectations — designing pieces that camouflage into a role and surprise with unusual prescriptions, like carvings on the bottom of a table, or subvert an implied use with unexpected characteristics, like shelves that wiggle.
Meticulously stacked and separated with stickers, drying wood fills my studio with earthy and piney scents. My material is rich, warm, natural wood, and I am just as interested in its narrative as its characteristics. I want to know where it is from, how it lived, why it was felled. If it was used in a structure, I want to know its history and purpose. I consider all of this when designing a piece from wood.
I employ these tactics through a combination of analog and digital craft — rendering designs in digital 3D space, using analog technologies to prepare stock, and subtractive CNC technology to create parts. Pieces assembled with live joinery and finished with hand-planed surfaces demonstrate not only a fusion of design roles but a hybridization of craft, combining the knowledge of tradition with the creative use of new and hacked industry technologies to produce works that make you say "Ah-ha!" while honoring the spirit of the material they are made from.
Andrew Riiska is a Los Angeles–based furniture designer and maker working at the intersection of design, art, and craft. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado and an MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work has been shown at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum (now Craft Contemporary), and the Petersen Automotive Museum, among others, and was most recently featured in Wallpaper*'s "Sheer Genius," on Diego Cano-Lasso's Mount Washington house. He has taught woodworking and furniture design at Parsons School of Design, SCI-Arc, the Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts, and USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, and is a founding member of the LA-based Box Collective.
Using the attractive techniques of flower architecture, my work aims to draw users in like bees, giving them luxurious spaces to live and lounge in, inviting surfaces that encourage interaction. I want my work to break from the static and move and flow like lilies floating in a lake, mimicking the soft teardrop shape of their petals. It seeks beauty in the natural process of decay — fallen trees, old beams, communication hub root balls — distilling it through cosmic artisanry, chilled and served with an olive.