The City: Adam Frezza & Terri Chiao
“Try to have fun with it.”
Foreword
Modern-day Renaissance couple. Imaginative thinkers. Multimedia artists. Inventive parents. Founders of Eternity Stew. Owners of an art + design studio, CHIAOZZA (pronounced CHOW-zah).
Preface
CHIAOZZA began on a rainy September Saturday night at a dive karaoke bar in Chinatown NYC circa 2011. After a night of singing songs and getting to know each other, we spent the next few months discovering how much we really enjoy playing and working together. It started in the kitchen with food experiments; a pink frittata, making prints with our pancakes, and a legendary eternity stew we once made for dinner – it took so long to cook that joking about it inspired our eventual website name.
Our journey as collaborative and romantic partners has really centered around the idea of PLAY as a tool for discovery and interaction. This casual way of visual and tactile experimentation probably helped pave the way for other creative practices together, such as painted paper and paper pulp sculptures, geometric wooden works, collaborative collages, home improvements in the form of spatial design and furniture design, etc.
One day early on, Terri was working on a project for a website called Parallelograms. She was building a model of a treehouse that she wanted to fill with scale models of houseplants and asked Adam if he would like to help. He immediately sat down and started painting two sides of small sheets of paper in different colors, and we spent the rest of the afternoon cutting tiny paper plants to put inside of the treehouse model. We became enamored with the plants as sculptures and photographed them each individually on our camera phones on a tiny seamless paper on the kitchen table. When we saw the sculptures in the scaleless space of photography, we realized that we may have stumbled upon something we could explore endlessly in many different iterations, materials, and scales.
Nearly 9 years later, there are tightly sealed 9-year-old eternity stew leftovers in our fridge and we are still collaborating everyday; honestly, we often feel like we are just getting started.
Eternity Stew
Puzzle Paintings | Acrylic and painted paper on a plywood board (2015)
The Cartoon Plant Sculptures | Acrylic on plaster and paper pulp, painted paper, pigmented concrete (2016)
Impossible Stairscape | Set design for Opening Ceremony x Teva (2016) | Acrylic paint on plywood and PVC | Watch Opening Ceremony x Teva ad on Vimeo
Chiaozza Garden | Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival (2017) | Painted stucco
Chiaozza Rug | The Fifth IKEA Art Event (2019)
The Invisible Traveler | Hermès Maison Shanghai spring window (2019)
Epilogue
Our projects often begin with a dialogue together, where we discuss ideas, thoughts and materials we want to explore. In the case of specific projects, we try to discuss elemental ideas at the root of a project prompt: we sketch, we talk, we work through ideas, we model with paper, clay, and sometimes digitally. The ideas that we both feel connected to in an elemental way tend to be the clearest, most direct, and most fun projects. Once we have the basic concept design, we begin the making process, the person that is feeling that part of the process the most will often take the helm in that phase. With sculptural projects, there can be many phases: building (which might involve drawing detailed measurements, making armatures, creating the base forms with paper, foam, clay or wood), paper pulping (for pulp-based projects), painting, and finishing (such as any external elements like sprouts or gold-leafing).
Sometimes we work independently on various explorations and then bring them to the collaboration, for instance when we de-collaborate at artist residencies – many projects have emerged that way. It is important to work together as well as give ourselves personal creative time in order to keep the work fresh and meaningful.
Currently we are quarantining at a friend’s farm in southern Vermont during COVID-19. Our resources are limited and we are using found materials to activate new work and experiments. We believe in sharing joy and curiosity through our art and we are being patient with ourselves during these strained and sensitive times. Now feels like the right time to inspect what we have been doing, how we have been doing it, who are we doing it for and how we are contributing to a positive, empowering, diverse environment. Ultimately, we love working together and making things and sharing with others. Moving forward, we want to continue working and making and thinking in ways that feel progressive, sustainable and supportive.
Bibliography
Tove Chiaozza (our daughter)
Coffee + Nature
The City
Favorite thing about living in New York ↝ The energy and diversity of the people
One thing you can't survive without in the city ↝ Our community of friends
Three adjectives describing New York ↝ Active, exciting, inspiring
The most inspiring spot in the city ↝ Wherever we are standing
Current obsession ↝ Cheburashka
