Benjamin Critton and Heidi Korsavong

We let our Husky-and-Shepherd mix, Wiley—who looks sort of like a Coyote and was named after Chuck Jones' Wile E. Coyote—out in our backyard to romp around and chase whatever long-gone wildlife has inevitably left its scent from passing through the night before.

It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, coffee, generally in the form of an oat-milk latte that I [Benjamin] prepare for the both of us. When we got married in 2022, one of my vows was to make Heidi coffee every morning forever and ever. We use one of those Breville 'Express' machines (Model No. BES870XL) which we're sure is indecent to true espresso-makers and -machines, but suits us perfectly.

Heidi generally waters plants, flowers, and vegetables with a tin watering can from friend and colleague Fabien Cappello's Objetos de Hojalata series. The dog invariably comes back inside from the garden smelling like Mexican Marigold (Tagetes lemmonii). We drink coffee on a really long, really unexceptional sofa that we drape in lots of nicer-than-unexceptional blankets and pillows that vary depending on the season (linen in the summer, shearling in the winter). The sound of kibble hitting ceramic is a centering jingle each morning, both for us and the dog. And the feeling of Wiley's inordinately soft brindled fur—which is white-grey-black-orange not in that order—is wonderfully pleasant.

At the gallery, we drink out of a set of mugs made by the excellent George Sherman, an artist we work with here in Los Angeles; the cups are all adorned with snakes in various poses and demeanors (teeth bared, one reads scrawlingly 'THE BUSINESS END').

At home, we have a nearly full run of Taylor & Ng's (FKA 'Environmental Ceramics', which is a name we love) slightly kitschy 1972 animal mugs ('La Baleine', 'Le Poulet', 'Le Chat', 'Le Canard'). The typography on them—this kind of Art Nouveau meets International Typeface Corporation—is really charming, and they come from my Dad and his second wife, Virginia. He drank from the Whale mug daily; now we sort or reserve that one for special occasions, but it's really potent to sort of commune with your people through the objects they once used.

Curiously, but maybe not surprisingly, we think about hospitality *a lot*. We think about hospitality as it relates to hosting, and to making space, and to opening one's doors to patrons real and imagined. And then, of course, we think about it as it relates to community: the active and passive fostering of a place-and-time and that place-time's constituents. And then we think about the works in the gallery as a bit of a community, too: how objects give one another life or contextualize each other, how they contain multiple truths depending on what one places near or next-to. This is part of the gallery's constant and ongoing push-pull: the having-one's-cake-and-eating-it-too of creating sacred space for viewing art while courting the profane in offering a guest or patron the ability to touch it or sit on it or live comfortably with it.

Marta is so much bigger than the sum of its parts. Atop that, all the parts are excellent. We function ostensibly as a commercial gallery for art works and design objects, but the gallery often feels like an entity or an idea more than it does an enterprise. Interestingly, Marta seems capable of platforming quite a lot of endeavors or initiatives under the guise of 'gallery'.

The most honest answer, because at some point it becomes difficult to care meaningfully about All Creative Things, and we feel like we had to pick a lane based on what we do at the gallery, is the music that we know and love and shared from the time Heidi and I first met, circa 2013. It's a very specific vein of generally East Coast-y, Westward-looking, reverb-heavy, mostly-conventional rock-and-roll music: bands like The Drums, Beach Fossils, Real Estate; a little further back and it's, like, French Kicks, Radio Department, Broken Social Scene. It's really deeply nostalgic, and quite grounding. We generally listen to full albums at a time; no skips, no jumps.

George Sherman—who we mentioned above via the Snake Mugs—goes for a swim most mornings in his unheated pool up on Kineloa Mesa in Pasadena. An in-ground pool is an admittedly problematic but nevertheless romantic piece of infrastructure. One day, we'll hope to have the option of following in George's footsteps / backstrokes.

We stretch and do a set of really low-key exercises each morning that have become invaluable as a means of centering ourselves in advance of days that can often be quite long (a bed of our own making) and can often contain a plethora of little epochs that might otherwise leave us reeling. After stretching, we gather each morning for coffee and breakfast on the overlong couch. I make the coffee, Heidi generally makes the eggs and toast. It sounds so plodding as I recount it here, but there is nothing quite like it: a moment with one's other half, and the dog, and some sustenance, on a sofa, in a tiny hundred-year-old bungalow in a great city filled with excellent people, many of whom we have the pleasure of calling our friends and colleagues.