Newest/Department
Sighted on the illustration blog Pikaland, an interview with artist Katy Horan, whose intricate paintings channel Victorian mourning rituals, ghost stories, children’s books, and traditional feminine crafts. Of her folk-art influences, she says: “All these art forms that at one point may have been considered outside or less-than by the contemporary art world can make our work so much more interesting and dynamic. There has been a noticeable acceptance of (for lack of a better term) ‘low brow’ art forms such as illustration and folk art lately, and I think it’s a very exciting development for the art world.”
On the photography blog Feature Shoot: An interview with artist John D’Agostino, who uses smashed stained-glass Tiffany windows from the 1930s as photographic negatives. D’Agostino’s grandfather rescued the shards from the East River when Tiffany’s studio was being torn down; the grime crusted on them from being stored away for 75 years now forms a crucial part of his imagery. “The layers of detritus on the surface of the glass have decomposed into wonderful biomorphic forms [that] combine with the layers of color underneath,” he says. “This creates a dialogue between past and present.”
Sighted on Robot shop’s website: Norwegian graphic designer Magnus Voll Mathiassen and Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley have an open-ended discussion about art, illustration, Lou Reed, rulers, and art versus branding. Of the latter, Shrigley says: “I sometimes think of my work as always the same, but then at the same time always different. It’s the same aesthetic and maybe the same attitude, but (then) if there wasn’t something different in there; if there wasn’t some kind of surprise each time, I would probably stop doing it.”
Sighted at Gestalten: The Berlin-based book publisher posts a video documenting Established & Sons’s Design Against the Clock event at last week’s London Design Festival, which invited five teams of designers to spend a day creating works in front of the public. “There’s somewhat of a distance that’s been created through technology between the actual material and the hand-eye coordination of making things, and that’s what I’m keen to experiment with,” says E&S co-founder Sebastian Wrong.
The first film in a new series exploring the idea of home, by New York–based documentary duo Lost & Found Films, takes us inside the Boerum Hill apartment of Korean assemblage artist Chong Gon Byun. Like many object artists, Byun decorates through a process of accumulation, and he seems to regard his home as an extended art piece, fretting over the positioning and juxtaposition of each thing. The series, called This Must Be The Place, is the first self-initiated project by filmmakers Ben Wu and David Usui, who since forming Lost & Found a year ago have produced short docs mostly on commission for the likes of Wallpaper, Good, Wired, and The New York Times. We recently caught up with them to chat about the new project.
Sighted on the website of Dossier, the Brooklyn-based fashion and culture journal: An interview with the London-born textile designer Suki Cheema. “He collects vintage china, takes annual trips to India and owns more art books than is generally healthy. If these are his joys, then his work — translating these elements into unique textiles that are classic and exotic, artistic and marketable — can be nothing less than a passion.”
Sighted on 032c’s website: Carson Chan interviews the American fashion designer Rick Owens about his work and his interest in architecture and interior design. Regarding the latter, Owens replies: “I’m very much a dilettante. I’m not a connoisseur, and I don’t have the memory for all the names and dates. People ask if it’s different to design furniture than clothing, and the answer for me is no. Doesn’t every designer want to design their entire environment, and apply their aesthetic to everything around them?”
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.