Exhibitions

Special Special presents Handle with Care, our 2018 holiday shop concept featuring a curated selection of art and living editions for your holiday gift giving. All delicately (and creatively) wrapped in our 2018 Special Special Edition Gift Wrap, the space has been transformed into a playful, dynamic guessing game of unusual shapes and functions. You will be sure to find something for the one that has almost everything!

In addition to our Special Special editions, we’ve curated a few of our favorite gifts from design brands such as Open Editions, Fredericks and Mae, and This That.

Special Special presents Fur East Far Tokyo, featuring Japanese artist Sebastian Masuda. Fake fur is a material often used by Masuda to prompt an awakening of the senses through layers of vivid color and soft textures. While initially simulating real fur through mimicry, faux fur has developed into something uniquely its own, incorporating colors and patterns that do not exist in nature. It is now accepted as something separate from its initial intention and has become real in its own right. As use of fake fur has progressively spread throughout the world, like the birth of a new culture, it is hard to determine where the old ends and the new begins. 

Masuda searched throughout Asia to select the best fake furs for wearable artwork, to design in his Tokyo studio and brought to New York. Inspired by a conversation with Special Special's Director Wen-You Cai, to make artworks more accessible to the public, Sebastian was motivated to release wearable art into the world, to continue the spread of Kawaii Culture.

The collaboration  between Special Special and Sebastian Masuda features shirts and bags designed by the artist, as well as workshops inviting the public to participate by utilizing collection of exhibited fake furs to create new editions of featured products.

Sebastian Masuda is an artist known for his role in expanding Harajuku Style and a key figure in developing the Kawaii Culture. In 1995, Masuda opened his iconic 6% Doki Doki store in Harajuku and has since gone on to open Kawaii Monster Cafe in Shibuya.

Easily contained in letters and sound, overflow is ‘language contraband’ guiding as it deceives. It escapes the conditions of its term by a commitment to movement and fluidity. Overflow’s eddying indeterminacy is a reminder that tools like language and the body regularly fail us. ‘Art won’t save us,’ either.

Overflow is a group show that will flood the gallery space with artworks and artist paraphernalia surveying the myriad ways we play in order to stay afloat. The show will conceptually revolve around a vessel, with artworks, tools, toys, merchandise, and design works spilling out of the receptacle and onto the walls, floors, and ceiling of the gallery space and storefront. By cruising forward, the artists in Overflow map alternative routes to navigate the high seas.

Dana Davenport, Leah Dixon, Sujung Chang, Ian Faden, Tallulah Hood, Khari Johnson-Ricks, and David Kirshoff stage playful interventions. E. Winslow Funaki, Bianca Kann, and Tristan Scow hi-jack the aesthetics and craft of ‘cuteness.’ Patrick Carlin Mohundro, David Chan, Luba Drozd, Jackson Hallberg, Emily Janowick, and Grace Linderholm document the quotidian. Ginssiyo Apara, Sam Cockrell, Umber Majeed, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Buzz Slutzky, and Ondine Viñao re-contextualize ephemera from days long past. 

Special Special invites New York based photographer Benjamin Langford to collaborate on a Special Special Edition Hawaiian shirt as well as a site-specific installation of his tantalizingly beautiful and surreal flower sculptures. In the artist’s own words, these photographic canvas sculptures “draw attention to photograph’s ability to convincingly create the illusion of space, texture, and material qualities.” The effects of trompe l’oeil allow the viewers to compare the qualities of photography to sculpture in terms of their differing dimensionality, fragility, and flexibility.

Special Special Edition No. 24, Hibiscus, is a Hawaiian Shirt collaboration with Benjamin Langford. This limited Edition of 50, with digital prints of hibiscus flowers can be subsequently dyed in a bath of hibiscus flower, allowing traces of the flower to envelop their printed representations.

Langford’s work pertains to contemporary representations of nature and the hyperreal. He uses technology as a tool to bring people closer with nature through increasingly vivid modes of representation, while distorting the human appreciation for nature in an unmediated state. Using large-scale digital prints on canvas to create large-scale illusionistic flowers that hang flaccidly off the wall or droop across the floor, the work brings seductive and hallucinogenic qualities of images to attention by reversing the way photographs are ordinarily perceived: not as windows to be looked through but simulacra that seemingly extends beyond their real dimensions.

Benjamin Langford (b. 1992, Connecticut) received a BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. He grew up in London, and went to High School in Singapore and Connecticut. His work has been exhibited at Zaha Hadid West 28th, PPOW, MX, and Project:Artspace. He has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar Korea, Bullett Magazine, Wallpaper, Dis Magazine, You-Do-You, and Editorial Magazine.

Hibiscus is part of SPF, our first group show transforming the living room storefront into a swimming pool. SPF is a metaphor of the Special Special logo, a blue oval that is the pool of water to be submerged for creative dialogues. A fluid arrangement of various artist projects evoking the spirit of a poolside retreat, offering New Yorkers a refuge from the sweltering heat. Interspersed throughout the months of May through August, each highlighted project, workshop, and event opened with a “Pool Party.”

Participating artists in SPF includes Lu Zhang, Aria McManus, Ben Langford, and an “Overflow” curation by John Belknap.

Melding the two essentials for all things beach, no need to carry a cumbersome towel and an easy to lose swimsuit — here they come as one, materialized as ideal. Keep the baes at bay, have all your haters throw in the towel when they lay eyes on you in this. Put the OW in towel, make them wish they were the sun of your beach. Follow suit, make this the one piece you get laid on the beach in.

Special Special Edition No. 23, Towelkini, is an art edition of 42, in Athletic Gold and Hot Pink, serves all purposes for the summertime for $199.00.

Aria McManus (b. 1989, St. Paul, MN) is an artist based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in various solo and group shows, including at 99 Cent Gallery, Fisher Parrish, Muddgutts, the New Museum (all New York), AA|LA, Ed Varie (Los Angeles), Sunset Drive Gallery (Miami), and Biennale Internationale Design (Saint-Etienne, France). Aria is a founding member of Auto Body, a curatorial collective based in Bellport, Long Island.

Towelkini is part of SPF, our first group show transforming the living room storefront into a swimming pool. SPF is a metaphor of the Special Special logo, a blue oval that is the pool of water to be submerged for creative dialogues. A fluid arrangement of various artist projects evoking the spirit of a poolside retreat, offering New Yorkers a refuge from the sweltering heat. Interspersed throughout the months of May through August, each highlighted project, workshop, and event opened with a “Pool Party.” 

Participating artists in SPF includes Lu Zhang, Aria McManus, Ben Langford, and an “Overflow” curation by John Belknap.