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About
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Onzai is a practice of formal arrangement. We work with found objects, branches and moss and stone and seedpod, gathered and composed in a single vessel. Each piece draws from stumpery, bonsai, and flower arrangement, but is not bound by any of them.
What we are after is proportion and the way different aesthetic languages sit together in miniature space. Each piece is interested in scale, and in how scale shifts what you are looking at.
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The artist
Stylist, curator, and collector of fallen things.
Edward Blee was born and raised in Philadelphia. For decades, he worked as a stylist and later owner of Persona Salon in Boston, building a reputation as one of the city's leading stylists. During those same years, he designed and curated homes across Boston, Savannah, and now Palm Springs. He incorporated stumpery into these spaces from the beginning, sculptural arrangements of found and natural materials that lived in yards and rooms. Some were temporary. Some stayed.
What started as a recurring interest became something more focused. He collects obsessively now. He walks through the Coachella Valley and deserts. He picks through local dealers. Road trips across the country end with a car full of branches and driftwood and stone. The searching is part of it.
Onzai is the work itself. These pieces draw from stumpery and bonsai and flower arrangement, but they're not bound by any of those traditions. They exist in a state neither living nor dying. They need nothing from you. What he's after is proportion and formal relationship, the way different aesthetic languages sit together in miniature space. He's interested in scale and how it shifts what you're looking at.
Process
A piece is the patient end of three steady acts. Each begins where the previous one quieted.
We walk the desert and the canyons. What we bring back is what we find, a branch the wind shaped, a stone the rain wore, moss from a north-facing wall. The searching is part of the work.
Pieces sit in the studio until the formal relationship is right. A composition emerges slowly. Sometimes a single arrangement takes weeks. Proportion is the question, and the question takes a while.
Each finished work is one of one. We deliver locally in Palm Springs when possible, and we crate carefully for those further afield. A piece is meant to live in a single room, for a long time.
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Most pieces live in the studio in Palm Springs until they are claimed. Local pickup is encouraged for those nearby; for distant collectors, crating and freight is arranged on a per-piece basis.
Commissions are accepted in limited number each season. Write to us with the room, the light, the scale, and the rough budget. The conversation begins there.