Phases

The best colors occur when you are above the clouds. At sunset, when the clouds and the sun mix… how do you harness this ephemeral moment in a permanent object? That's the question I always ask myself. — Sabine Marcelis

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.

The title names both a subject and a logic, and the two are inseparable in Marcelis's practice. Color deepens or recedes depending on light 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 volumes 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, a centre of gravity made visible. 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.

Across the exhibition, transformation is the constant. Objects remain in dialogue with their environment — responding to light temperature, to the conditions of the room, to the body moving around them. Nothing is presented as fixed.