Phases

Endlessly curious about the behavior of light, artist and designer Sabine Marcelis has built one of the most celebrated practices in design today from her studio in the harbor of Rotterdam. Phases, her first solo exhibition in the United States, is the fullest expression of that pursuit to date — an entirely new body of work conceived exclusively for Salon 94 Design, rooted in the cycles and phenomena of the natural world.

Phases considers how objects shift through changing conditions rather than exist as fixed forms. Color deepens or recedes depending on temperature and illumination. Reflection destabilizes orientation. Light moves through resin in ways that alter the physical reading of the work itself. The exhibition draws from phenomena that operate just beyond immediate perception — lunar phases, earthshine, gravity, atmospheric color, the gradual transition between darkness and daylight — and translates their logic into material form.

Marcelis's suspended works find their source in the sky. The Lune sconces, twelve cast resin panels each named for a full moon of the calendar year — Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Blue, Harvest, Hunter's, Beaver, Cold — contain a single integrated LED tunable from cool to warm. As the temperature of the light meets the color of the resin, the work transforms, producing something that feels closer to magic than material science. The three Nebula spheres — pale green, warm amber, deep plum — each contain a colored core, raw material in a state of potential before form is decided. Light passes through and is altered by what lies within. The Orb and Phase mirrors return the viewer's image and surrounding space filtered through color. Each flat surface dissolves orientation, offering something altered back.

Against these, the Beam tables — dining, coffee table, and console, suspend their surface on a single beam — and the Beam Light, a resin bar running thirteen feet in length overhead, reduce support to its most essential gesture. A leaning Dawn light in deep burgundy resin serves as a conduit between floor object and atmospheric event, marking the point of transition between sky and earth within the exhibition itself.

What emerges is an exhibition built around the idea of continual adjustment. Nothing fully settles. Objects remain in dialogue with their environment, with the body moving around them, and with the conditions activating them. In Phases, Marcelis treats transformation not as spectacle, but as something gradual, cyclical, and quietly constant.