Flower Power! Designer Ryan Dunn furnishes our minds with possibility

Date
27 June 2012

Ryan Dunn, aka “Inane Systems”, uses furniture, photography and collage to furnish our minds with spatial challenges, possibilities, and realities.

Dunn studied multi-media textile design at Loughborough University before going on to do an MA in industrial design at Central Saint Martins. His work harnesses our everyday material environments – chairs, plugs, and lifestyle magazines – to present and reconfigure the potential and limitations of design. His Multi Chair, for example, initially appears to be a piece of furniture that is conveniently multi-purpose, but in actual fact, with each rotation it is exactly the same piece, again and again. Bench Chair, meanwhile, highlights the territorial awareness that often occurs in public spaces, and is a tongue-in-cheek reflection on the treatment of street benches – as if to say that they might as well only seat one.

His Fairy Lights images, meanwhile, interesting meditations on light and process, while collage work such as Warhead presents a sinister and systematic layer of advertising.

Florescence stems from all of these occasionally clashing or cleverly juxtaposed ideas; the electric plugs look like tulips, and sit calmly in a vase of water – electronic wares sweetly disguised as harvested natural resources, there is a sinister sense of sugar-coated danger in this still life. How current.

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Ryan Dunn (Inane Systems): Florescence

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Ryan Dunn (Inane Systems): Multi Chair

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Ryan Dunn (Inane Systems): Multi Chair

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Ryan Dunn (Inane Systems): Bench Chair

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Ryan Dunn (Inane Systems): “Someone’s sitting there mate”

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Ryan Dunn: The Suspense

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Ryan Dunn (Inane Systems): Photography. Exposed photographic paper and fairy lights

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Ryan Dunn (Inane Systems): Photography. Exposed photographic paper and fairy lights

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About the Author

Bryony Quinn

Bryony was It’s Nice That’s first ever intern and worked her way up to assistant online editor before moving on to pursue other interests in the summer of 2012.

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