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Category Archives: 8 Things

1. 03.10.10

   8 Things

   Lisa Congdon, artist and collector

   On January 1, the San Francisco–based artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon began documenting her various collections on a new blog, A Collection a Day. A new day, a new grouping: vintage Boy Scout cards, delicate sewing notions, paint tubes, plastic charms, erasers, paintbrushes, pencil leads, even — strangely — multicolored buoys. “No, I don’t have a collection of buoys,” Congdon laughs. Or a collection of Victorian shoes, for that matter. As her website explains, while she photographs the collections that decorate her house and studio, “some are imagined; those I will draw or occasionally paint.” Scroll through her site, and you’ll find twigs and toiletries drawn with ink on paper, and, yes, buoys painted with gouache on Masonite.
2. 02.09.10

   8 Things

   Esther Stocker, Artist

   It’s funny to hear Esther Stocker talk about reading between the lines. The Vienna-based painter is known for manipulating spatial geometry using the framework of the grid — both on canvas and in her trippy 3-D installations — until the mind starts making linear connections that aren’t really there, trying to find order in the optically illusive chaos. But that’s not what Stocker’s referring to. She’s talking about Charles Schultz’s Peanuts.
3. 02.05.10

   8 Things

   39.22.’s Wallpaper Designers

   Long ago, wallpaper was reserved for royalty — a handcrafted thing made with high artistry and hung with equally high aspirations. But since then, with a few very recent notable exceptions, it’s become the ambitionless cop-out of modern-day interior design, a failure blamed on wimpy printing techniques but which probably has to do more with a lack of imagination. Among those getting it right is the Athens-based design collective 39.22., which draws both its name and its stable of talent from its own geographical coordinates.
4. 02.03.10

   8 Things

   Alexandra Verschueren, Fashion Designer

   At 22, Alexandra Verschueren has interned for Preen, Proenza Schouler, and Derek Lam. She’s been honored by a jury that included former Rochas creative director Olivier Theyskens and the International Herald Tribune’s fashion critic Suzy Menkes. And in the last six months, her graduate collection Medium has been fêted by Wallpaper magazine and the Mode Museum in her hometown of Antwerp. So why, when she applied to that city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts straight out of high school, did no one expect she’d get in?
5. 01.25.10

   8 Things

   Alejandro Chavetta, art director and collage artist

   For San Francisco graphic designer Alejandro Chavetta, life has in many ways been a series of revisions. Fifteen years ago, he traded his native Argentinean wine country for the hills of San Francisco, and in college, after a false start in journalism, he quickly switched to graphic design. Three years ago he took a post as art director of San Francisco magazine, but he spends his down time obsessively adding to a sprawling, moody archive of Moholy-Nagy–like paper collages. “My job is multiple undos all day in InDesign and Photoshop,” Chavetta says. “I like to do something where I can’t go back.”
6. 01.08.10

   8 Things

   Atelier NL, Product Designers

   Atelier NL’s Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck keep a studio in the airy loft of a ’70s-style church in Eindhoven. They live there, too, but you wouldn’t exactly say that’s where they work. More often than not, the designers can be found doing fieldwork, whether that means scouring the area’s secondhand shops for mechanical knickknacks to inspire their more analog designs — like van Ryswyck’s hand-cranked radio — or digging up clay in the Noordoostpolder, an area of reclaimed farmland north of Amsterdam that until the 1940s was submerged under a shallow inlet of the North Sea.
7. 12.18.09

   8 Things

   Lauren Kovin, Clothing Designer

   Lauren Kovin had one of those creatively privileged childhoods we all dream about: Her father was a graphic designer, her mother an interior designer who stocked their New Hope, Pennsylvania, home with Memphis furniture and modern art. Kovin spent more time in galleries than in shopping malls. An Avedon portrait of a nude Nastassja Kinski hung over the family’s dining room table. Heaven, right? Wrong.
8. 11.03.09

   8 Things

   Dror Benshetrit, Furniture Designer

   Some furniture expands if you’re having extra dinner guests, or folds if you’re schlepping it to a picnic. But most of it just sits there, content to be rather than do. This drives New York–based designer Dror Benshetrit crazy. “Static freaks me out,” he’s said.