The Belger Collection in Outpost Journal #3

So many of the designers we've featured here on Sight Unseen grew up somewhere small, but left their hometowns behind for someplace big. Kiel Mead grew up in Buffalo but moved to Brooklyn. Max Lamb started out on the beach in Cornwall but headed inland to London. Sam Baron spent his childhood in the mountains of France, but is now so worldly he splits time between Paris and Lisbon. But what of the people who stay behind? Who are the artists and designers who make up the cultural fabric of, say, a Tucson or a Des Moines? That's what the three-year-old annual nonprofit magazine Outpost Journal purports to find out.
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Wilder Quarterly, Spring 2013

Up until three weeks ago, neither of Sight Unseen’s editors had a green space to call our own. Neither of us has a plot in one of New York’s many community gardens, and between us, our houseplant count hovers around three. So why exactly have we both had a thing for Wilder Quarterly — a magazine about nature and gardening that features lengthy discourse on things like asparagus, outdoor shelters, and slugs — since it launched nearly two years ago? Abbye Churchill, the magazine’s editorial director, explains: “Wilder at its essence is just about encouraging people to go outside — to fall in love with nature and to get their hands dirty. For us, that means taking responsibility for making things on your own, and that can be as diverse as building or cooking or beauty projects.” All of which translates to a magazine that can slot a feature on organic nail polish next to a Mark Borthwick photography portfolio inspired by the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson — as the recently released Spring issue does — and have none of it seem out of context.
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mono.kultur #32: Martino Gamper, All Channels Personal

It took me 16 issues (Miranda July) to discover the Berlin-based magazine mono.kultur, after seeing its pull-out poster on my friend's wall a few years back. "Dear life," it read, "do you want to hang out tonight? I should warn you that I will not be wearing any make-up and my hair is dirty. If you can handle that, call me. Yours, Miranda July." Five issues later (Tilda Swinton), I was obsessed: Here was a publication that, with each issue dedicated to a single long-form interview, was less about collecting personalities for front-cover bragging rights and more about truly, painstakingly, and intimately getting to know them. Which is all any of us dream about when it comes to our cultural idols, even those of us who, from time to time, have the honor of crossing their paths ourselves. So even though we've profiled Martino Gamper on Sight Unseen before — our lovely London contributor Claire Walsh having toured his home garden and secured us his favorite pasta recipe — we still jumped at the chance to excerpt mono.kultur's new sit-down with the Italian RCA grad, who talked to its editors about his latest public design projects, his feelings about Ikea, and the use of humor in his work. The interview runs to 10,000 words and — in print — comprises three booklets hand-assembled into one exhaustive artifact that stretches far beyond the small sample presented here. After reading it, scroll down to learn how to get your own copy before it — like most of the issues this cult favorite has produced — sells out forever.
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Clemence Seilles in PIN-UP #12

Berlin's many charms are hardly lost on your editors. After a sunny, weeklong trip five summers ago, we both fell in love with the German capital — the wide open spaces, the well-situated swimming pools, the way clubbing unfolds as an actually enjoyable activity. But while my partner in crime has returned to the German capital each consecutive summer, I've never been able to find the time to go back. This summer, then, I was lucky enough to visit by proxy through the eyes of Felix Burrichter and his staff of Berlinophiles over at PIN-UP Magazine, which devoted its entire Spring/Summer issue to the changing metropolis. "For very long, Berlin was this one thing: You went when you had no money," says Burrichter, who serves as both editor and creative director of the architecture biannual. "But there’s a cultural elite — a moneyed elite — that has developed there over the past 10 years. Mostly people from out of town or in the art world. So there's an interesting friction right now. When that moneyed elite takes over, the city will lose a lot of its charm. But right now it still feels very raw and budding." The issue was in some ways a homecoming — Burrichter grew up in Düsseldorf — but in the end, the Berlin depicted in the magazine's pages bears more of a resemblance to Burrichter's adopted home in New York. "What fascinates me about Berlin right now is that it's very international," he says; hence the features run to a British architect who recently remade the city's Neues Museum (David Chipperfield), a West African transplant (Francis Kéré), and Clémence Seilles, a Frenchwoman who arrived in Berlin with a singular goal — to assist in the studio of designer Jerszy Seymour — and who never left. We've been fans of Seilles' work for some time now, and her conversation in the magazine with fellow Sight Unseen friend Matylda Krzykowski was too good to confine to print. Burrichter has graciously allowed us to excerpt it today on Sight Unseen.
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Nicolas Trembley’s Fat Lava vases in Apartamento 07

If I hadn't taken as long as I did to read issue number 07 of Apartamento, which came out around this time last year, I would never have gone stumbling around the web only to realize that Nicolas Trembley's wonderful Sgrafo vs Fat Lava exhibition — which started in Geneva last year, making stops along the way at Galerie Kreo in Paris and Gisela Capitain in Cologne — will end its world tour this June in my own backyard, at the Zachary Currie gallery in New York. In this excerpt from Apartamento, the Parisian art critic and curator explains how his collection of more than 150 instances of the bizarre German ceramics came to be.
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The Bouroullec Brothers in Disegno #1

Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.
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Jason Schwartzman interviews Andrew Kuo for Bad Day #11

In the realm of magazine-making, photographer Eva Michon and creative director Colin Bergh could be considered populist heroes. Whenever they begin an issue of their four-year-old side project Bad Day Magazine, they make a wish list full of dozens of potential subjects they happen to be interested in at the moment — Sofia Coppola, Glenn O'Brien, Ariel Pink — and then, except for one fateful attempt to woo Nicki Minaj, they actually manage to go out and persuade those disparate personalities to appear together among their monochromatic pages. The pair have gotten so good at the curatorial hunt that when Michon, who serves as editor, agreed to let us reprint an article from the recently released Bad Day Issue #11, we were spoiled for choice: There were interviews with Sight Unseen favorites Martino Gamper and Tauba Auerbach, both of whom we're planning to feature on our own in the near future, plus stories on Mike Mills, David Shrigley, Tomi Ungerer, and David Shearer. But ultimately we settled on the curious multidisciplinary dialogue between the actor Jason Schwartzman and the New York artist Andrew Kuo, who meander between topics like music, color-mixing, hangovers, and what it would be like if they looked like Jesus.
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David Lynch’s workshop in The Chronicle #2

It wouldn’t be totally wrongheaded to view The Chronicle — a new biannual publication produced by the cultish Copenhagen ready-to-wear brand Rützou — as a fashion designer’s mood board, come to life. For each issue, the creative team — which consists of Rützou’s designer, founder, and namesake Suzanne; her husband, creative director Peter Bundegaard; and editor-in-chief Frederik Bjerregaard — selects a thematic framework and then collates together visual inspiration to support it. Called “Poetic Realism,” the first issue was abstract and moody, with photographic essays on pattern or urban decay and collages of the magazines’ own diverse inspirations, including Luigi Colani, Matthew Barney, Ernst Haeckel, melancholy, and a Mott Street acupuncturist in New York’s Chinatown. The latest issue, called Sense and Sensibility, more literally serves as a scrapbook for creative inspiration: “Sketches, abstractions in watercolor, visual logbooks, black-and-white imagery, personal portraits, simple doodles, this vast collection is a glimpse into a range of international artists’ creative processes and their final work,” the team writes. By international artists, they mean the likes of Marc Newson, Julie Verhoeven, and David Lynch, who offers a glimpse into his Parisian printmaking lair in the excerpt we’ve reprinted today on Sight Unseen.
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An Interview With Dan Funderburgh from WRAP Issue #2

Though it was never intended that way, Wrap magazine might just be the perfect racket. With each 11.7 x 16.5–inch editorial spread backed by an illustration meant to double as wrapping paper, it's practically compulsory to buy two of every issue — one to keep forever, and one to dissect into packaging for your best friend's birthday present. As far as the London-based magazine's founders, Chris Harrison and Polly Glass, are concerned, either approach is perfectly valid. "As designers, the most satisfying feeling is seeing people using and enjoying what you've made," they say. Both began as jewelry designers for brands like Matthew Williamson and Paul Smith, with Glass venturing into furniture design for Innermost before leaving to devote her time to Wrap, which they hope will eventually blossom into an illustration-driven housewares and stationery brand. The pair's first issue launched last fall with stories about and contributions from up-and-comers including Merijn Hos and Sam Harris, and the second issue came out last week, its size bumped from A4 to A3 and its designer interviews even more in-depth. Sight Unseen secured permission to reprint here an interview with the Brooklyn-based illustrator and William Morris disciple Dan Funderburgh, whose wallpaper design pictured above was adapted especially for Wrap.
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Spaces, By Frankie Magazine

When it comes to its namesake subject matter, Spaces magazine doesn’t discriminate: There are live-work lofts in the wilds of Brooklyn, warehouses in Australia turned into artist communes, cafes in Hamburg lined with vintage shoe lasts and gumball machines, and even a section of so-called wall spaces, where entire spreads are devoted to close-ups of textile, teacup, or taxidermy collections. “We wanted an eclectic mix, somewhere between vintage, designy, and handmade,” says Louise Bannister, managing editor of the cult indie lifestyle magazine Frankie, who co-produced Spaces as one of the magazine’s twice-annual special projects. While past editions have included a recipe book or a small photo album filled with 110 snapshots culled from contributors around the world, the editors chose to focus on interiors after the success of Frankie’s only section devoted to them: Homebodies, where they feature casual portraits of the homes of musicians. For Spaces, the team scoured the internet from their homebase in Melbourne looking for creatives of all stripes, pairing large-format images with personal interviews about how they found their space and what they keep in it.
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Journal de Nîmes no 6: The Dutch Issue

Two years ago, in the Nine Streets shopping area of Amsterdam, two lifelong friends, René Strolenberg and Menno van Meurs, opened a store called Tenue de Nîmes. Like a lot of very hip retailers these days, Tenue de Nîmes is devoted in large part to denim — Nîmes, France being the fabric’s birthplace — and also like a lot of very hip retailers these days, it publishes a semi-annual magazine, this one called Journal de Nîmes. The shop has become widely loved for its expansive outlook and inventory (great denim doesn’t have to be Japanese!, it seems to say), and the magazine, while nominally a vehicle to promote brands sold by the shop, has also become, over six issues, something much more. This is due in part to its excellent art direction and photography, which come courtesy of Another Something blogger Joachim Baan, but also because of its simple, very Sight Unseen–like aims: to reveal the personalities and the stories behind how things are made.
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Death Magazine, Issue #2

The funny thing about Death magazine — a thrice-yearly publication inviting designers, artists, and writers to use humanity's darkest subject as a creative catalyst — is that it's not really all that morbid. You'd get more depressing stuff asking musicians to write songs about love. While Portland-based graphic designer Forrest Martin was moved to found the magazine last year in part by a deep-seated fear about his eventual demise ("I'm an agnostic worrier raised by a professional hypochondriac," he told a blog at the time), his contributors filter the issue at hand through all kinds of artistic lenses, some of them masterfully subtle. In Death's recently launched second issue, Michael Zavros's lush large-scale charcoal drawings of young male models with their faces scratched out could just as easily be from an artsy spread in a fashion glossy as they could a death threat from a homicidal stalker, while photographer Jason Lazarus's super-saturated color fields, sprinkled with the cremated remains of the late artist Robert Heinecken, on first glance resemble star systems photographed in deep space.
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