The weight of absence is conspicuous. It takes up as much space as the visible and the visceral. What makes the presence of light profound are the perpetual shadows in attendance. What does this absence encourage, conceal, convey, or create? Isn’t that dovetailed relationship greatly compelling, an omnipresent, cosmic dance that seduces, perplexes, and inspires?

The reappropriating of creative work as a finished entity involves elements of emptiness, the contrarian, the anti—that brings it to actual fruition, assaying engaging connections (despite). The silence of an artist, architect, or designer; the absence of a creator syndrome; the art, architecture, or design in an isolated context—is it a necessary, intrinsic 'antithesis' to the creative matter itself?

Our issue this week treads the kindred complexity between the absent and the present: ‘The Absence of Mark Manders’ blurs the line between sculpture and architecture, striking integrity between empty and personal spaces; via a deliberate skewing of the conventional, Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich's ‘ANTIFURNITURE’ provokes, opposes, and subverts what is considered the normative, the comfortable, and the accepted.

Absence in the presence is the very soul of the creative process. These interactions redefine the creative entity as a gestalt, serving to throw the act of (essential) provocation, of questioning the orthodox through the creatively distilled ‘antithesis,’ into high relief.