On a Comfortable Sofa Dreamed

Superhouse is pleased to announce On a Comfortable Sofa Dreamed, its first guest-curated exhibition, co-organized by Homan Rajai and Elena Dendiberia of San Francisco-based Studio AHEAD, alongside Superhouse founder Stephen Markos. This summer presentation brings together six artists—three from Northern California and three from the East Coast—whose sculptural works explore the interplay between art, architecture, and home.

At the heart of On a Comfortable Sofa Dreamed is an enduring idea: the relationship between artist and patron. Studio AHEAD, known for its deep commitment to educating clients about contemporary makers, approaches interior design as an opportunity to cultivate meaningful relationships between collectors and artists. In many cases, these connections extend far beyond the scope of a project, recalling the intimate, almost Renaissance-like patronage that shaped the history of design and decorative arts.

With this ethos in mind, the curators posed a prompt to the selected artists: How might your work respond to the architecture of a fictional home? The exhibition becomes a speculative interior, furnished with new commissions that evoke rooms, rituals, and architectural elements—each reinterpreted through the distinct sculptural language of the artists.

From Northern California, Ben Peterson, Gay Outlaw, and Nico Corona contribute materially adventurous works. Outlaw presents a wall of leaning 2x4s made from puff pastry—a gesture that slyly questions the presumed solidity and permanence of sculpture and structure. Corona, a first-generation Mexican-Bolivian queer artist based in San Francisco, channels the aesthetics of medieval light fixtures in a massive steel candelabra, welding chain links into a symbol of both labor and transcendence. Peterson, known for his architectural fragment-like ceramics, constructs a hearth-like mantel—a nod to the mantelpiece as a once-ubiquitous site for artisan expression and decorative embellishment.

From the East Coast, Ficus Interfaith, a Queens-based duo, debuts a hybrid object: part library ladder, part reading nook, complete with integrated lighting—an invitation to linger with a book in hand. Ellen Pong, also from Queens, contributes ornamental mouldings, inspired by stepped Indian temples and Lloyd Wright’s Maya Revival architecture, continuing her process-based practice exploring repeating geometries through Brutalist-inflected molds. Massachusetts artist Maris Van Vlack softens the exhibition’s material palette with a fiber work that engages with structure through tension, weave, and suspension.

Together, the six artists imagine a home that transcends functionality. Their works forward the curators’ vision that architectural ornament and artistic intervention need not be confined to traditional objects or decorative programs. Instead, Studio AHEAD argues for a more integrated vision—one where the artist’s hand is visible in the built environment itself.

In doing so, On a Comfortable Sofa Dreamed offers a contemporary meditation on historical patronage models. Rather than looking at collecting as a final act, the exhibition suggests it can be a process of collaboration, co-creating space, and living alongside art in the most intimate sense.

Studio AHEAD is a San Francisco-based art and design collective founded by Homan Rajai and Elena Dendiberia. Our approach is “borderless” in that our roots are far-flung yet deeply embedded in Northern California’s history. Drawing from our diasporic experiences, we believe strongly that there is no universal idea of functionality that fits all cultures and people. What remains constant is an appreciation of tradition and craftsmanship. Studio AHEAD launched its production arm in 2019 and in 2020 began publishing California: A Journal, which chronicles Northern California's vibrant cultural history. The biennial Same Blue as the Sky began in 2023 as a way to celebrate the regional artists who continually inspire us.

About the Artists

Ben Peterson
Ben Peterson Born 1977 Hawthorne Nevada, currently lives and works in Oakland California. Current work consists of ceramic sculptures Plastered or painted to resemble archeological objects, or fragments of architecture and design He has a BFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and a MFA from Stanford University. Peterson’s works are found in numerous public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, the Berkeley art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA. He is a recipient of the Pew Fellowship, as well as the Fleishhacker foundation Eureka award, and has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, as well as Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland.

Ellen Pong
Originally from the West Coast, growing up in a suburb outside of Seattle, Ellen Pong now lives and works in Queens, New York. The designer graduated with a degree in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley. Pong’s self-taught practice blends sensorial observations from both the Pacific Northwest and the chaotic streets of New York City to create furniture, lighting, and objects with a studied playfulness. She has held a solo exhibition at Superhouse (New York, USA) and participated in group exhibitions at Downtown+ (Paris, France), Emma Scully Gallery (New York, USA), Marta (Los Angeles, USA), and Objective Gallery (New York, USA). Her work is held in a number of important private collections. Selected publications include Artnet, Curbed, Elle Decor, Metropolis, PIN-UP, Sight Unseen, Surface, and The World of Interiors.

Ficus Interfaith
Ficus Interfaith is a collaboration between Ryan Bush (b. 1990, Colorado) and Raphael Martinez Cohen (b. 1989, New York City). As a sculptural practice, Ficus Interfaith explores the ingenuity and novelties that emerge from craft. Their focus is on historical narratives and materials that are ubiquitous to the point of being overlooked or misunderstood. Ficus Interfaith embraces the spirit of collaboration and reuse, reimagining how craft can enter our lives and influence the spaces we create and inhabit. Selected solo exhibitions include Nina Johnson (Miami), Deli Gallery (New York), and Prairie (Chicago). Selected group exhibitions include “Noplace” at P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York) and “In Practice: Total Disbelief” at SculptureCenter (New York). In 2024, they were visiting artists at Salmon Creek Farm in Albion, California as well as Numano Hashi in Tokyo, Japan.

Gay Outlaw
Gay Outlaw works with a unique palette of materials, ranging from the traditional to the ephemeral. She draws upon her immediate environment as well as her personal history to craft forms that have a strong sense of pattern and play. Outlaw has been making sculpture since the early 90’s, when she was first recognized for her temporary works made of various types of pastry: puff pastry, spongecake, caramelized sugar, and fruitcake. She attended cooking school in France and worked in the food business before becoming an artist. She also studied photography at the International Center for Photography in New York City. Outlaw’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently Et al. and Cushion Works (San Francisco), SOTA (Kyoto, Japan), Le Consortium (Dijon, France), and the Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, CO). She completed a major sculpture commission for the San Francisco International Airport in 2020. Her work is in the collections of SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, the San Jose Museum of Art, The Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts and the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA). Outlaw was the recipient of the SECA award from SFMOMA in 1998. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Maris Van Vlack
Using traditional textile techniques, Maris Van Vlack constructs tactile images that reference topography, geology, and generational memory. The Rhode Island School of Design graduate’s work is primarily hand-woven, consisting of panels of fabric slowly built up thread by thread, trapping memory and history in the sedimentary process. After hand-weaving the base tapestry, she layers the surface with drawn, painted, and stitched marks and incorporates areas of industrial jacquard weaving and stoll knitting. Each piece balances the materiality of the fibers and the atmosphere created within the deep pictorial space. The landscapes in the work depict architectural spaces from her family’s history, referencing photographs of places in Europe destroyed during World War II, where family members lived. Her work is a window through which to see layers of time and memory, depicting the space between the past and the present. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Bromfield Gallery (Boston, USA) and Gallery 263 (Cambridge, USA), as well as in group presentations at the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland), the The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, D.C.), and the RISD Museum (Providence, USA).

Nico Corona
Nico Corona (b. 1993, Pomona, CA) is a queer sculptor based in San Francisco. As a self-taught metalworker, he views metal as both personal and cultural archaeology, a medium to adapt and preserve histories often overlooked. Through lost wax casting, sand casting, and welding, Nico explores the “queerness of metal” and its transformation of “fixed” forms into fluid, mystical objects. His work reconfigures everyday items into enduring sculptures that embody resilience and shared autonomy. By shifting metal across states of solid, liquid, and gas.