The third year of Colony's Designer's Residency culminates next week on April 17th at 6PM, please join us then as we introduce the design world to three dynamic, emerging studios:
Another.World will present an exploration into their vulnerable inner worlds with the From Elsewhere collection; Studio B.C. Joshua brings his ancestral history to life with the Harlem Cottage collection; and MTM Studio looks closely at historical influences with their elemental and material-driven Recent Relics collection. We caught up with each studio to delve into the inspiration behind their work.
ANOTHER.WORLD
Artist, designer, and maker Youtian Duan and visual storyteller Yingxi Ji are the creative minds behind Another.World, an innovative design studio dedicated to reimagining the relationship between humans, inanimate objects, and nature. Their unconventional and humorous projects are gateways to an imagined realm, a safe and inclusive space where individuality shines.
Youtian and Yingxi, where did you draw inspiration for the "From Elsewhere" collection?
Y&Y: From Elsewhere was born out of our wild, untamed imaginations and brings to life remnants of dreams and glitches in reality. To us, objects are not just objects. They are alive with their own magic, purpose and untold stories.
STUDIO B.C. JOSHUA
Blake Carlson-Joshua’s work, of Studio B.C. Joshua, is infused with a unique blend of cultural and environmental influences, producing expressive furnishings that balance rawness with nostalgia, the rough and the refined, the ephemeral and the grounded. Blake splits his practice between London and his Minneapolis hometown.
Blake, how did you find your way into the "Harlem Cottage" collection?
B: I took initial inspiration from the empowerment of the Harlem Renaissance, a period when artistic expression opened new conversations about identity and belonging in American culture. The pieces in this collection draw from that legacy of quiet transformation, were creativity helped reshape perspectives about community and place.
Each pieces aims to integrate seamlessly into settings where people gather, rest and connect with nature—continuing a conversation about leisure that belongs to everyone.
MTM STUDIO
Brooklyn-based Maxwell Taylor-Milner of MTM Studio combines their background in design and art history to create work that engages not only the expressive capacity of materials but the history of the forms into which they are molded. In work at once essayistic and enigmatic, they strive to make objects that are as compelling conceptually as they are tactile.
Max, how did the desert landscape of your childhood in northern New Mexico inform the "Recent Relics" collection?
M: Growing up in the desert, I was always finding artifacts in the dirt. Recent Relics reflects on the elemental effects of nature and how light, heat, and water shape the land and everything on it. I wanted for each single object to show evidence of the system that created it.
