Local Act
Metal Heads
By Todd Harrison
Photo by Naomi Finlay
What do you do with a broken chair? If you’re Jonathan Sabine and Adam Pickard of local design team Chromoly, you recreate the damaged or missing components – but in bronze.
Conceived for Heavy Metal: New Cast Objects, a group show held during the Toronto International Design Festival in January that explored the “formal properties of cast metal in design,” Chromoly’s bronze and wood table, coat rack and low-back Windsor chair bear the title New & Improved. But how much better is half-metal furniture?
“In a lot of ways we’ve made them worse,” jokes Sabine. “Now they’re way more expensive, and way heavier. We wanted to look at the idea of objective restoration and how it’s kind of an impossibility – because when you restore something, you remake it.”
Reinvention is nothing new to Sabine and Pickard; these are the guys who created the brass knuckle corkscrew as well as the ninja star thumbtacks you may have seen at Ministry of the Interior on Ossington Avenue. Pickard (an art director) and Sabine (a designer who does solo work under the banner Mat Cult) were friends for years before starting Chromoly, but they eventually realized that their minds were too much in sync to ignore. “We had this habit of talking about stuff, and at the end of the conversation having an idea,” says Pickard. “And then we both kind of figured that if we don’t do anything with those ideas, they’re meaningless.”
So they began working together. Soon, the ideas became prototypes. The prototypes became products, and Chromoly (an alloy used in BMX bikes) was picked as a name to market them. Sabine and Pickard incorporated about a year and a half ago, but despite this more serious turn, their friendship remains central to their company’s creative process. During their freewheeling, tangential interview, they conceived of several ideas to follow on their New & Improved collection – though they asked us not to spoil the surprise by printing them. Pickard calls these occurrences “F--k yeah! moments,” and they’re not something that can be engineered.
“Whenever we’ve sat down and tried to brainstorm, it doesn’t work,” says Pickard. “We have to sit here and just have a conversation, with politics and economics interspersed.” Adds Sabine,“Drinking, biking and playing video games helps.”
“We’re still talking to our accountant about certain write-offs,” says Pickard. “If we could expense Call of Duty, that would be good. And our bicycles, too.”