Harry Nuriev Emphasizes the Nuances of the Metaverse through Denim House at Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery

Harry Nuriev, a Russian-born, NYC and Paris-based architect and interior furniture designer is revealing a slice of what a metaverse could look like. He seamlessly glides between fashion, sculpture, and interior architecture by utilizing a reimagined and thought-provoking understanding of everyday materials.

The blurred disciplines have been a way of thinking since Nuriev was a youngster. In 2014, he founded Crosby Studios which allowed him to flesh this out as Transformism, a term to depict his style. It is a boundaryless way of thought grounded in “rethinking and reevaluating the spaces and objects around us.”

Transformism has taken the internet by storm with his Balenciaga sofa, converted Jimmy Choo store on 34th Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and Denim House on display at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles.

The re-purposing of objects can also be seen in pieces like Salvador Dalî’s Lobster Telephone, (1938), or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, (1964). But the artist goes beyond that. He takes a step further, perhaps, into the metaverse, with re-materializing.

Denim House, featured from September 20 to December 22 at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, displays this re-materialization. The rough-at-first but made-to-be worn-in fabric covers a modular family couch, a dining table for 12, and boxes made to hold magazines to tablets. Each of these pieces has further personalization through hand-embroidered sketches and personal notes painted by Nuriev.

This journey of denim from being worn on the body to serving the body interestingly reveals how the metaverse doesn’t have to be all virtual reality and augmented reality. The hot pink TVs are not what the eye is drawn to. The focus is on the cascade of a familiar fabric used in a way to reorient an urban space to something outside the typical human experience.

Nuriev shows that new spirit and meaning in things already existing are crucial, which ultimately reveals nuances to the metaverse.

He is not the only one challenging what an immersive space means outside of technology. Also on display at Carpenters Workshop Gallery are works from Martin Laforêt and Léa Mestres. Laforêt focuses on bringing personality to ordinary materials and Mestres makes ridiculously big objects. A common thread between these three artists on display is, perhaps, that the metaverse requires child-like imagination where nothing makes sense.