If you didn’t have time to swing by Cadillac House during New York Fashion Week to check out Visionaire’s latest installation with Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s Toiletpaper installation, you must go right away. The wildly fun and creative installation is on display now through April 12 at The Gallery at Cadillac House on 330 Hudson Street in NYC. The best part? You don’t have to view the installation from afar. Guests are invited to come hang out in the madcap space and immerse themselves completely in the Toiletpaper universe (which happens to be a particularly brilliant setting for Instagram snaps). Visionaire’s Cecilia Dean filled us in on the imaginative Toiletpaper set and Visionaire’s ongoing artist installations in the space.
Tell us about the space!
We encourage people to really come and immerse themselves in the space. You can jump on the bed and take a nap or you can have a meeting or eat your lunch in the kitchen. I’m planning to have some meetings here just so I can say, “Let’s meet at the kitchen in Toiletpaper paradise!”
How did Visionaire choose Toiletpaper for this Cadillac project?
I’m very close with Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. Together and separately they’ve both been contributors to Visionaire for a really long time. We were at Art Basel Miami in December and they had been given a small space by the Baylor Foundation in the convention center and they did something similar to this in a much smaller space. It was just so much fun and everyone was really interacting with it and taking photos. Every photo you take looks so good. Right then and there I knew we had to bring this to Cadillac House. I knew it would be such a hit so I asked them to do it right then and there.
This came together fast!
We work crazy fast. They came and saw the space and were really into it so they put this all together.
How did Visionaire become involved with Cadillac House?
Cadillac opened the space back in June of last year and they hired us to do the programming for the space since the beginning. This is our fifth installation. We did a really fantastic Richard Avedon moving picture show with all of his commercials that had never been seen before in the United States. Our first one was with a really amazing digital artist named Geoffrey Lillemon. We had smoke on the ground and all of these LED lights, which was really fun. So we’ve just been experimenting. After this installation, we’re going to do two more.
What do you love about putting these installations together?
It’s really fun for us because we deal more in objects and in print, so to have a 3D space to play in is a lot of fun. There are all of these artists, like Geoffrey, that we’ve wanted to work with in the past but it hasn’t made sense because they didn’t fit into print. As free and open as we are at Visionaire, there are still a lot of things we can’t do so having this space gives us so many more opportunities.
What’s new at Visionaire?
Our book came out at the end of last year. That was a huge relief! So that’s out in the world. Now we’re selling our 66th issue called Ritual. We did a bunch of sculptural scented candles to go with the issue and one of them is actually by Maurizio. Barbara Kruger and Bruce Weber also created candles for us. Right now we are working on a second set of them with three other artists, which we will announce soon. We also did a free issue throughout last year and we’re now going to do a deluxe version of it with Marc Jacobs.
When can we expect that to debut?
I don’t know. It was supposed to come out already. [Laughs] It’s getting there.
Will it also be free?
That won’t be free, because it’s the deluxe issue. It’s the unfree free issue. It’s funny because we were never thinking of doing a deluxe version of free, because it’s the opposite of what free is all about, but so many of our collectors were asking us how they could complete their collection because they couldn’t be at all of our locations to pick up the free issue. They wanted us to do something so they could keep their collections complete, so that’s how that came about. We love Marc Jacobs so much and have been wanting to do something together. It’s all 36 posters and a Marc Jacobs bag.
What happens to all of the design items after this is over?
Other than some antique props it’s all for sale! Anyone can come and buy it or order it online through Toiletpaper.
