The Dikeou Collection houses some puzzling artworks that defy space, materiality, and presentation, but with some background information provided by one of the docents or from the cell phone tour, visitors can understand the meaning and intent behind them. One of the simplest and most unassuming of works, though, is the one that raises the most questions that can be tricky to explain. A Fine Monday Morning by Luis Macias is a series of ten lithographs that, according to the curator’s statement, meditates on “the between-ness of things.” This includes the “between-ness” of art and decoration, client and creator, what is spoken and what is heard, permanence and impermanence, integration and consumption, real and surreal. The scenes are from inside Bette Midler’s luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment, for which Macias was one of its interior decorators and fabricators. These seemingly banal shots of lamp fixtures and staircases are interrupted by cartoonish speech bubbles filled with phrases that make no sense like, “dirt in the T-shirt Molly is the real brainabuse.” Frustration is the underlying cause of this gibberish, which stems from a broken intercom system that cannot be repaired or replaced - a situation that irks both the designer and the patron. A story such as this, about the dramas of decorating one’s home, would bore your face off if it was told over brunch by your mother-in-law, but Macias turns it into an artful symbolist tale of intrigue that leaves the viewer wanting to know more.

Exhibited alongside A Fine Monday Morning is a thirty-minute video by Macias called Superbarn. Superbarn is a documentation of Lucy Dikeou’s (Devon Dikeou’s mother) home in Aspen, Colorado. The video begins with Lucy telling the story of how the home came into being, starting off as a barn before undergoing renovation in 1969. She mentions the prolific early-twentieth century English poet, novelist, and garden designer, Vita Sackville-West, who transformed the mid-fourteenth century Long Barn in Kent, England into her grand home, thus aligning herself and her domestic achievements with that of English cultural nobility. Ms. Dikeou worked closely with her personal designer to create the detailed, finely tuned interiors of her home, which she describes room by room. Everything from the wallpaper, hand towels, and planters, to the artwork and chandeliers has a unique story about their origins and Lucy’s adventures in acquiring them, which she earnestly recounts with much specificity.

There are moments when Macias’ camera pans across a bookshelf or through a closet of robes when one can hear snippets of conversation from people out of view saying, “I don’t want to go to lunch with him,” or “I wish you wouldn’t say those things.” These brief instances are what make the connection between the video and the lithographs apparent. They are those fragments one overhears from another room, echoing down the hall and permeating through walls, that only make sense when in their immediate presence. Superbarn and A Fine Monday Morning show how the home is an environment that appears orderly on the surface but has surreal undertones created by those who share an intimate relationship with the space, but to which they may not be attuned because they are so enmeshed with their surroundings. Macias has the ability to assimilate himself with these spaces and their residents, but is still far enough removed to notice all the quirky eccentricities and reinterpret them artistically.

Artists and designers have a long history of utilizing one another’s strategies and materials to manifest their own creations, but rarely do they share their underlying concepts of function and expressiveness. An artist like Andrea Zittel and designers like Charles and Ray Eames are examples of professionals who have achieved much success in their abilities to cross over from their respective form/function realms and create a balance between the two. The question remains, though: does one has more precedent or influence than the other? According to New York designer Marc Hohmann , art is “a compass for design.” Conversely, Kevin Buist from ArtPrize posits that art presents questions and problems while design seeks to answer and solve them. They basically constitute two sides of the same coin. Where they do intersect is that both art and design have the ability to convey messages that make us think differently about the world. In regards to Luis Macias, he problematizes domestic space by compounding the familiar with the deranged, and challenges the viewer to probe beyond what is obvious and realize how outlandish the ordinary world can be.

A Fine Monday Morning appears in issue 8 of zingmagazine , and Macias’ statement for the project says, “This three-nippled artist lives and works in the most beautiful and fashionable island in the Mediterranean Sea: Mallorca. When asked about his domestic mood, he answered, ‘What I hate most is to bend down in order to get my slippers under the bed.’” A fine example of an artist presenting a problem. How does the designer in him respond? See below.

-Hayley Richardson