Stephanie M. Kim

This one is dedicated to my love for industrial beauty, gloves, and user-unfriendly design.

I decided to come up with this Russian doll-style glove as a reference to people’s aversion to scaffolding and to imagine there’s this troll-under-the-bridge that hides under the construction. The cutout reminded me of the bathroom entrance at the Princess Diana cafe in Kensington, London. There was a plastic window on the top of the door for visibility purposes, so the customer leaving the bathroom stall would make direct eye contact through this glass pane with the customer thinking about entering the bathroom. While I understand the design purpose, it results in an uncomfortably intimate encounter. I tried to quickly take a picture of the door in between uses because I didn’t want to be a creep and violate GDPR.

Aside from scaffolding affecting the timing of my own foot traffic, I actually don’t mind it that much. Scaffolding can be likened to the color field style of a Rothko painting if you were to frame your outlook differently.

The door and scaffolding both represent unwanted sights. (Also they’ve both been used as les toilettes formally and informally.)

In NYC, there’s a plethora of gloves and mittens scattered around. I started finding straggler gloves on the street and began categorizing them for my archive. Within my own pathways around downtown to uptown Manhattan the past couple of years, I found over half of the gloves to be blue nitrile gloves. These are used in healthcare, service work, and food preparation. It’s interesting to see how remnants of important everyday functions are littered onto the streets.

This animation is part of my Industrial Beauty series that started out with the vending machine. There are spooky gloves that hide inside the scaffolding cave, if you dare to peek!