Newest/Department
Sighted at MOLDE, a Buenos Aires–based online magazine on crafts and applied arts run by Juan Ignacio Moralejo: An interview with British food and portrait photographer Toby Glanville, who says, “I have been drawn to photographing people in the workplace for a number of reasons, chief of which is the idea that work places us in the world. And as a photographer working from day to day on commissions for magazines and books as well as my own projects, one inevitably feels comparatively itinerant. Freedom can be a terrifying prospect.”
Sighted on Design Milk: A Friday Five interview with the intriguing Icelandic designer Sruli Recht, whose studio is “a small cross-disciplinary practice caught somewhere between product design, tailoring and shoe making,” it writes. In the story, Recht shares five of his materials inspirations, including the chest of an Atlantic Seabird given to him by a leather tanner.
Sighted this week on The Morning News: “German photographer Julian Faulhaber captures public spaces — supermarkets and parking garages — in the moments between their construction and when they are opened for public use. His long-exposure photos, which remain untouched after developing and for which he uses only available lighting, look unreal and Photoshopped. But what does it mean to say that reality looks Photoshopped?”
Sighted on Core77, a new exhibition at Art Center’s Williamson Gallery on the rarefied world of patent models. “‘Up until 1880, if you had a brilliant idea, something that you thought would change the world, and you wanted to get patent protection for it, you had to submit a working scale model to the government,’ says Stephen Nowlin, vice president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Nowlin is hosting an exhibit called ‘The Curious World of Patent Models,’ a traveling show organized by the Rothschild Patent Model Museum, which will reveal more than 50 artifacts submitted for patents way back in the day.” In honor of America’s Independence Day holiday, we’ve chosen six of our favorite scale models — each no larger than 12 inches square — from the collection.
Sighted on the blog Another Something: Shopkeepers, a photography series by Amsterdam-based Niels Helmink that documents, Andreas Gursky–style, the personalities and interiors of a fast-disappearing retail landscape.
Sighted on the website of London-based design couple Doshi Levien: A section called Loves, which reveals the inspirations behind the couple’s colorful East-meets-West sensibility.
Sighted on Mohawk Paper’s Felt & Wire blog, a little-known artistic pursuit of graphic designer Stephen Doyle’s: making intricate, gorgeous paper sculptures. “They are the only things I create without a rationale,” Doyle says.
Sighted on MoMA’s Inside/Out blog: “Many of MoMA’s employees aren’t just guardians of the Museum’s collection: they are artists in their own right, and have found inspiration for their own work through their engagement with artwork shown at MoMA … This new series of blog posts will focus on a few of MoMA’s many employee/artists, and will address the ways in which they have incorporated their daily work experiences into their own artistic processes.”
Sighted on Dwell’s website: A glimpse inside the toolbox of Bruce Greenlaw, a carpenter and architectural woodworker in Northern California. He explains: “It never fails that, as I perform my rituals to prepare for carpentry, such as sharpening plane irons and lubing gears, I see tools as something more than merely form following function. If only for a moment, I see art, animated by timeless design, world geography, and memories—every bit as riveting as the architecture and furnishings it helps to create.”
Sighted yesterday on The Inside Source: “Here is what I do every single morning, in between teeth-brushing and waiting for the coffee to boil: I turn on my laptop and type ‘baby locket’ into eBay. This is followed by ‘baby brooch’ and then either ‘sweater 1930-46 (Depression, WWII)’ or ‘antique enamel charm bracelet’ or ‘Becassine doll.’ I do this because I am an avid, some would argue rabid collector, with a shifting catalog of enthusiasms that at the moment includes vintage cardigans and 1920s bracelets; rag dolls meant to resemble French cartoon characters (the aforementioned Becassine dolls) and Victorian children’s jewelry — the rarer, the more elusive, the less findable, the better.”
Sighted today on Bite! Magazine: For Better, For Worse by Mark Mahaney of Brooklyn, New York. “I have a fascination with the Oregon Trail — the purpose it served in American history and the seemingly endless possibilities it symbolized for the hundreds of thousands of pioneers who traversed the almost yearlong and extremely grueling, sometimes deadly course. I’ve started to loosely travel this course, winding from Missouri to Western Oregon. The photographs created from this project will serve as a document of the modern Oregon Trail — what stands in these territories today, both its people and its places — and what has resulted from the possibilities of America’s great western migration.”
Sighted today on The Morning News: Taking inspiration from Dutch vanitas paintings, photographer Justine Reyes’s latest series “Vanitas” creates still lifes from contemporary objects, getting the composition, textures, and colors so precisely “right,” it’s a wonder we’re not seeing some 17th-century Flemish take on contemporary life.