Candlestick c. 1936

Curator: Oh, it’s strikingly Art Deco! I find it fascinating that utilitarian objects from the 1930s still embody aspirations for beauty. This watercolor and colored pencil rendering is of a candlestick, made around 1936 by Ronau William Woiceske. Editor: It feels so…optimistic, doesn’t it? The vibrant green color and streamlined design give off a sense of progress, almost as if it's meant to signal abundance and celebrate nature’s persistence through artifice. The fish motif also feels symbolic. Curator: The stylized dolphin adds such an interesting mythological layer. Dolphins have been symbols of guidance, protection, and transformation since ancient times. This rendering offers up a continuity through the symbol. A bridge between past and a modernist present, and maybe even a future we can now look back on. Editor: Right, and by situating that dolphin within the larger aesthetic project of Art Deco, we see it repurposed, but also still carrying that historical baggage and contemporary baggage too. It feels very much of its time while engaging with themes far beyond it. And is it simply decorative? It also presents an image of exploitation in the context of industrialized fishing, right? It becomes ambivalent. Curator: It seems Woiceske’s work aimed at a seamless blending of nature and technology. I see in that approach, the ambition and anxiety of its era – wanting progress without discarding beauty. Woiceske is playing into our persistent nostalgia, not necessarily to recapture what came before but to move into an idealized, if potentially precarious, future. Editor: Absolutely. And looking back, the tension between those ideas – progress versus nature, production versus sustainability—remains very pertinent to this day. The candlestick reminds us of this long history of cultural production embedded within larger structures of environmental impact. The candlestick glows green, the color of promise or peril. It makes me question: what kind of light does this object hope to shine on the future? Curator: A charged little emblem for illuminating how we imagine—and use—our world. It offers us an unexpected vision into our persistent longing for a harmonized state of humanism in the machine age. Editor: A contested illumination of our place in history. A great reminder to continually question design.