Seven Sisters is pleased to present the living room, an immersive domestic environment by artist Miles Lawton Gracey, opening on June 14, 2025. Gracey, who earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art earlier this year, weaves together refined woodworking, art historical references, and playful surrealism to create objects that blur the lines between functional and fanciful.
At the heart of the living room is an exploration of what it means for furniture to be “living.” Drawing on the long history of anthropomorphic and biomorphic design—from the shell-encrusted grottoes of the 17th century to the sinuous flourishes of Louis XV interiors—Gracey builds upon a lineage in which ornament breathes and surfaces swell with latent life. This tradition, revived by 20th-century visionaries such as Tony Duquette and John Dickinson, treats furniture not as a still life but as an animated presence. Earlier this spring, Gracey spent time at the Wendell Castle Workshop, deepening his engagement with the legacy of biomorphic abstraction and sculptural furniture. Echoes of Castle’s philosophy—treating furniture as personality, form as gesture—reverberate throughout the living room, where function and figuration intertwine with wit and reverence.
Gracey’s ongoing fascination with the shell—specifically, the spiral geometries of snails and conch shells—anchors the installation. Long associated with protection, enclosure, and interiority, shells suggest spaces that shelter as much as they conceal. The word “shelf” even shares a root with “shell,” echoing this notion of structure as a sanctuary. “There’s something enduring and symbolic about the shell,” Gracey notes. “It’s both armor and home... I’m interested in how it wraps, protects, and unfolds—how it invites you inward.”
Gracey’s furniture reimagines classical forms with contemporary restraint. His Conch Couch, a scalloped-back cherrywood settee inset with abalone is a resting spot that might tempt Botticelli’s Venus ashore. Its companion, a spiraling table titled Moon Shell Surface, holds small inlets inlaid with mother of pearl, like tide pools or secret altars. Carved wooden snails inch up the walls to become shelves, and sometimes appear as cast silver nails—tiny armatures of life. Though functional, these pieces suggest creatures mid-metamorphosis—part animal, part architecture. Through a hybrid language of Baroque ornament, modernist clarity, and vernacular wit, Gracey constructs a visual grammar that is as reverent as it is mischievous.
the living room is ultimately a celebration of ornament, transformation, and presence. It evokes the uncanny stillness of a room long unattended, the quiet magic of a place where the garden begins to creep back in—not in decay, but in emergence. In this way, Gracey’s domestic world channels a kind of dreamscape where time is suspended and the objects themselves begin to whisper.
Miles Gracey (b. 1987, Cambria, CA) grew up in California and initially studied music composition at a college in San Luis Obispo but quickly shifted focus to other creative fields, which led him to woodworking. The root of his artistic practice remains an expressive spirit of lyrical engagement with memory and sensory experience, underpinned by unmatched technical efficiency and charming sleights of hand.
After receiving an BFA in Sculpture New Genre from Otis College of Art and Design, he attended The Krenov School of Fine Woodworking, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, was a fellow at The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine and a resident artist at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2023). His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Houston, and San Francisco. In 2025, he graduated with an MFA in 3d Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and now resides in Hudson, New York.
