Objects of Our Affection: You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories

Tejo Remy, designer, Droog Design, design collaborative, You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories, designed 1991, manufactured 2004, maple, recycled drawers, and jute strap; Carnegie Museum of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories, on view in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries, not only physically recycles mismatched drawers, it reuses the ideas and memories associated with each, says designer Tejo Remy. Influential design cooperative Droog compared the formless and imperfect shape of the object to human memory: “Each drawer carries its own memories and these are all jumbled up in your head. So the chest must be just as chaotic.”