Prior to that, he collected art with donkey iconography, including a beat-up painting in his stairway punctured with two bullet holes that “supposedly hung in a Mexican bar, where they used to get drunk and shoot at it,” he says. He glances down from the sleeping alcove into a raw open-plan apartment with 22-foot-high, wood-beamed ceilings that’s filled wall to wall with his many aesthetic fixations: Before his oversize phase - which he’s now renouncing, having noticed ironically large objects becoming trendy in design circles and online - there was the tangential-but-different papier-mâché one. “I want the best, weirdest version of something, and I want to live my life like I’m in a sculpture garden,” says Pessin, 51. There, lying across the duvet, is a pair of jeans so large, it makes the mattress seem as if it’s taken off its own pants. He’d recently lost out on a plastic rotary phone fit for a giant (“It still haunts me,” he says), though who knows where it might have gone in a 1,500-square-foot space already overstuffed with a to-scale sculpture of the Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe a massive leather chair modeled on the glove of the legendary Yankees center fielder Joe DiMaggio a human eye-shaped bowling ball that lolls on Pessin’s couch in place of a throw pillow and a papier-mâché Ticonderoga pencil, nearly as long and yellow as a school bus, that lines the balcony railing of the bedroom upstairs. Reportedly produced by the Coca-Cola Company circa the 1970s or 1980s, the six-foot-tall sculpture was one that Pessin, a collector and dealer of strange objects and furniture, says he had been “thinking about seriously” for quite some time, a kind of white whale in his yearslong pursuit of tracking down various quotidian items rendered in Claes Oldenburg-like proportions. ![]() IT HAD TAKEN several months of scouring flea markets before Jonathan Pessin finally found the weathered, hollow fiberglass Coke bottle that now stands sentry between the dining and kitchen areas of his loft in Los Angeles’s industrial Frogtown neighborhood.
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