Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.
Age: 35
Occupation: Sculptor and light artist.
Instagram: @marcusv_depaula
Hometown: Bethesda, MD. I’m a first-generation American with parents from and family in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which also feel like my home.
Studio location: Brooklyn.
Describe what you make: I craft light sculptures that evoke sci-fi symbolism and imagine relics from another world.
The most important thing you’ve designed to date: The collection of work I created while living nomadically over the past year taught me lessons both practical and emotional. The pandemic took away access to my shared studio, my materials, and my job. It was a scary and uncertain time. My wife and I left our Brooklyn apartment in March, got a cargo trailer and canopy to become my mobile workshop, and traveled to Maine, the Utah desert, and the northern California coast. The series of work at the end of all this was crafted from and inspired by local materiality and landscapes. The work reflects my celestial inspiration as much as it does watching families and small businesses across the country face their own unknowns with courage, ingenuity, and sheer tenacity.
Describe the problem your work solves: As celestial-inspired relics, my work seeks to call attention to civilizational fragility and have us question what will be left of us, to think about the things we create and what our legacy will be far into the future. Too much of our daily activity is to produce disposable work. I had been designing theater sets and immersive experiences for events that—despite an incredible level of detail, investment, and care—end up in the dumpster after their short use. I hope that engaging with my work, designs that recall the future, made from materials that last decades or even millennia, makes the viewer reconsider how they spend their time.
Describe the project you are working on now: I’m executing designs that build on new skills and materials I learned to use in this past year. While in Maine, I was cut off from the alabaster and marble that I had been carving and turned to the resin the local boat builders use to cast hulls. Working with their suppliers’ chemists to develop formulations for the unusually thick castings I was interested in creating, I only had the space to produce smaller prototypes. Now that I’ve moved into my own studio space I’m starting to bring some of the designs and ideas to full scale.
A new or forthcoming project we should know about: I just opened my studio and private showroom in Dumbo. I’m loving this neighborhood as many other artists and creatives are moving into all the spaces that tech companies moved out of during the pandemic. Now that my space is set up, I’m moving into a high-production mode trying to make all the things I dreamt about and sketched over the past year, so I have multiple pieces in progress, both in resin and in stone. Later this year, I’ll also release a few limited-edition prints of photographs I took of the pieces I created in situ amongst the landscapes that inspired them.
What you absolutely must have in your studio: The first thing I do when I walk into my space in the morning is to turn on all my finished pieces and play music. It immerses me in the world I’ve imagined and motivates me to finish my in-progress work. It can take months to finish a piece, so to be reminded of what I’m working toward is helpful in getting started on the day.
What you do when you’re not working: I love adventure travel and the planning process involved. Maybe it’s a reaction to living in the city—I tend to gravitate toward dramatic landscapes and unusual locations. My wife and I have camped in the world’s largest caves in Vietnam, rappelled off the cliffs of Sardinia, sailed a Brazilian archipelago, and explored the Amazon. These trips provide such a deep reset on a sense of existence, reminding me of the small place in Earth’s history that humans have occupied with visceral understanding of what has come before us.
Sources of creative envy: Fred Eversley, Pedro Reyes, Philip K. Smith, João Filgueiras, Roberto Burle Marx, Stanley Kubrick, and the cosmos
The distraction you want to eliminate: I want more distraction. I find that taking walks, taking trips, doing completely unrelated things gives the brain a chance to rest and continue working quietly in the background. As humans we didn’t evolve to be sitting at a desk for hours on end—we evolved to be up and active. My best ideas have come to me while doing a crossword or on a hike.
Concrete or marble? I love concrete forms found in the Brutalist style of my parents’ native Brazil, though I like to put a spin on those influences by making my work out of marble and other classic stones. It’s that contrast between form and materiality that presents a bit of a surprise to the viewer.
High-rise or townhouse? A ranch. I need outdoor space, I want to make noise, I want to have room to spread out. I dream of a hangar-sized studio with massive windows and an overhead crane system atop a hill. I want to be immersed in nature and the landscapes that inspire me.
Remember or forget? It’s so important to remember—where we came from, what we’re working toward, the larger context in which we operate. That continuity is central to my work. That said, I regularly forget people’s names and where I parked the car.
Aliens or ghosts? Aliens, but can we just refer to them as other civilizations, other worlds? Growing up, my father—a NASA engineer—would bring home stacks of photos captured from various missions. Using all our scotch tape I would place them edge to edge on my bedroom walls and ceiling, immersing myself in the vast expanse of space and the worlds waiting to be explored.
Dark or light? Both. One does not exist without the other, and contrast is a significant driver of my work. I’m intrigued by the biological attraction to light and how even in our place of technological advancement we still love to gather around a campfire. While I craft sculpture, I like to think how these pieces will serve the place of the campfire whether in a home, gathering place, or even in a gallery. With this in mind, a few of my pieces have no back, with their wiring run from the bottom, they can be placed for viewing in the round, serving the role of that campfire.
