TotemStar: A Visual Artist's Los Angeles Bench

TotemStar is the brand name under which Los Angeles-based visual artist Gunnar Weber-Prada gathers his pipes and pipe accessories. Weber-Prada's primary field is drawing, painting, photography, and film; he only came to the bench in his late thirties. For this reason the brand is remembered less as a mass-production workshop than as a personal working space where someone engaged in design experiments with the formal possibilities of the pipe. No exact founding year is given; the dates of his first products and first exhibition place the brand in the mid-2000s.

Stamp and Grading

On TotemStar pipes, the brand name is stamped within an oval frame. An emblem called RedLine also appears on the stem; the lines of this emblem are noted to be noticeably thicker on examples from the first two years of production, as also seen on pipe number 001.

The quality grade is repeated a second time through metal dots inlaid into the stem near the shank. The ranking rises from copper to silver, then to gold and platinum; records indicate each metal has its own three intermediate steps distinguished by the number of dots. In this way, the distinction made according to the grain and blemish condition of the briar block becomes a legible mark for anyone looking at the pipe.

From T-Shirts to the Bench

The brand's first products did not come from pipe making itself but from design objects around pipes: pipe-themed T-shirts and an acrylic pipe stand called The Pipe Monolith. His turn to carving came after these. Two years after he began learning to make pipes, he first appeared before the community at the Los Angeles pipe show with a large, pickaxe-shaped freehand numbered 001 in his own system.

The Chicagoland International Pipe & Tobacciana Show he attended in May 2007 is considered a second threshold for the brand. At the show he met makers from various countries; by his own account he subsequently came together with American master Lee von Erck and received detailed guidance at the bench. This kind of one-on-one contact is a familiar form of transmission in the American handmade pipe scene, which lacks any institutional training path.

The Icon Tamper

Weber-Prada's best-known design outside of pipes is the pipe tamper called Icon, which he shaped in late 2007. Its first examples were made of solid aluminum; a copper version was introduced in May 2008, again at the Chicagoland show. By 2009, steel and brass versions of the piece were also in production. Icon is considered one of the works that most clearly shows the brand's artistic side: the tamper, ordinarily a plain accessory, is here treated as a design object in its own right through material and proportion. The tamper's repetition in different metals shows an approach that treats the material itself as a distinguishing measure, as with the grade dots on the pipes.

Accessible information on TotemStar belongs largely to the brand's first five years; no independent record documenting production after this period could be found. For this reason, the brand is remembered as a one-person bench with limited output.