ONES TO WATCH: Mix Masters
Words by Hannah Martin, Photography by Amy Lombard
At their subterranean studio in Queens, the design duo Ficus Interfaith combines stones, shells, pits, and more into terrazzo creations rich with narrative meaning
Raphael Martinez Cohen and Ryan Bush’s basement studio in Maspeth, Queens, feels a bit like a grotto with shimmering panels propped up against subterranean walls. A quick glance around reveals buckets of mussel shells, pine cones, crushed marble, and more, all fodder for their intricate terrazzo creations, made under the moniker Ficus Interfaith. “It kind of looks like a tackle box, showing all of our aggregates,” Bush says of a tile-like series titled 48, wherein peanut shells, corn kernels, corks, animal vertebrae, and even broken pieces of a scented Santa Maria Novella terra-cotta pomegranate are presented like specimen samples. “Each one is beautiful because of its individuality,” he continues. “We don’t privilege pearls over a crushed beer bottle.”
At the time of our visit, the duo was busy preparing for “The Study,” their first solo exhibition with Nina Johnson gallery in Miami, on view through May 17. Like a madcap cabinet of curiosities, the show delves into the research, reflection, and imagination that fuels their collaborative process. An industrial laptop-charging cabinet has been retrofitted with cedar drawers and filled with natural ephemera; an Arts and Crafts-inspired study table displays trompe l’oeil tomes with fantastical titles; and wall-mounted works depict extinct or invasive species like Bachman’s warbler and the spotted lantern fly. For the latter, peach and cherry pits, two crops affected by the pest, figure into the composition. As in all of their past shows, the final piece produced was a terrazzo sunflower, which makes use of all the leftover odds and ends.
The pair, who met as painting students at Rhode Island School of Design, first teamed up to create potpourri. “It had a similar ethos in that we were reclaiming material that was going into the waste stream,” says Martinez Cohen. Research into more monumental mediums led them to terrazzo, an age- old composite made by embedding chips of stone or glass into mortar-a more permanent potpourri, if you will.
Today, their nonhierarchical approach yields many forms, including functional benches and tables. But their artworks all start as drawings, which the duo then adapts into a scaffolding of metal strips that they fill with dye, concrete, and aggregate before polishing the overall slab. With AD100 designer Adam Charlap Hyman, Ficus Interfaith has created everything from a dining table inspired by a client’s beehive to a figurative floor fit for the Seagram Building. “Their work makes a lot of sense in an architectural context,” says Charlap Hyman, who praises the “open mind and genuine enthusiasm” they bring to such commissions.
Currently, Martinez Cohen and Bush are making a 60-foot- long mural for a Staten Island school that was demolished and rebuilt, incorporating rubble from the site’s original tile and marble windowsills. Meanwhile, they dream of leaving their mark on urban infrastructure, a subway platform perhaps. “Originally our goal was to make terrazzo of diamonds and rubies and meteorites and things like that,” says Bush, who cites the influence of jewel-encrusted Fabergé eggs. “But now we feel a responsibility to the more irregular materials-the rejects or the waste.”
