08.26.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Shiny Cubes and Popsicle Sticks in a California Light & Space Artist’s Retrospective

It’s a sweltering hot day in downtown Los Angeles when I visit California Light and Space artist Peter Alexander’s career retrospective at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, but I feel immediately refreshed upon entering. It isn’t just the effect of the A/C, but also of Alexander’s geometric polyurethane sculptures, their glistening surfaces at once enticingly reflective and mysteriously opaque.

More

08.25.16

Up and Coming

Everything is Illuminated: Anthony Bianco’s Cool, Contemporary Glass Lights

When it comes to working with glass, says designer Anthony Bianco, the journey, so to speak — intense, immersive, rarely improvised — is just as notable as the destination. “The material is so physically demanding,” he says. “I’ve come to appreciate the involvement and the many steps it requires, from understanding the chemistry to creating the colors.” Having discovered a passion for glass nearly two decades ago, it’s a process with which the artist is more than well acquainted.

More

08.23.16

Sighted

A Brooklyn Furniture Studio Goes Minimal in Geometric Steel

When we first featured the Brooklyn design-build studio Uhuru, back in 2010, they were known for creating imaginative furniture collections out of salvaged materials, but their newest collection feels like a leap in a whole new direction. After finding success last year with a geometric blackened-steel console called Tack, they've expanded the series to include stools and end tables that would make Donald Judd proud.

More

08.22.16

Excerpt: Book

Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part II: On Color and Defining ‘Modernism’

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-'80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we'd excerpt text from both. The second interview we're posting today comes from New York New Art, a 1989 tome that Monica unearthed at an antique mall in Nashville. The interview, with John Griffiths, took place at a Judd exhibition where the artist was showing new pieces in metal and perspex. It covers everything from why Judd began using color to whether the term "Modernism" actually means anything. Read on for more after the jump!

More

08.22.16

Excerpt: Book

Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part I: On Cor-Ten Steel and the Scourge of Handiwork

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-’80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we’d excerpt text and photos from both. The first interview we’re posting today comes from Donald Judd Cor-Ten, the 72-page volume that accompanied a David Zwirner exhibition of the same name last winter. Here he speaks with curator and art critic Claudia Jolles about his friendship with Richard Serra, his aversion to public commissions, and why we should never refer to his furniture as art.

More

05.07.14

Studio Visit

Upstate, Fashion Designers

If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at Sight Unseen, it’s that a lack of training can sometimes go an awfully long way. Such was the case with Kalen Kaminski and Astrid Chastka of Upstate, who started their popular Brooklyn-based, shibori-inspired womenswear and accessories label back in 2010 with nary a day of fashion training between them. When they first met a few years earlier, Kaminski was an anthropology major turned prop stylist and Chastka was an architecture grad turned unhappy architect. Soon after bonding over an appreciation of handcrafted items, they found themselves trawling New York fabric stores, trying to replicate one of Kaminski’s vintage scarves. “We couldn’t find anything we liked, and we probably had no idea where to go,” Chastka told me when we visited the pair’s Greenpoint studio a few months back. “At the time, Kalen was living with an artist, and he had a shibori tapestry on his wall. We saw that, and we were like, ‘That’s perfect.’”

More

08.20.16

Saturday Selects

Week of August 15, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, it's all about the upgrade: chic, elemental sculptures to brighten up your desk; a perfectly patterned Poäng; and a bathing suit that'll make your design friends green with envy at the beach.

More

08.18.16

Sighted

An Experimental Collection by a Studio at the Forefront of Seattle’s Design Scene

For their textile pieces, the Seattle-based studio Grain has been known to travel far and wide, working primarily with women artisans in Guatemala — after all, that's where founders James and Chelsea Minola first met and fell in love. But for their newest collection, the two stuck a bit closer to home: a rug woven by a textile mill near their alma mater, RISD; wooden trays and benches made in their Bainbridge Island studio; bottle openers cast in a Pacific Northwest foundry; and a glass series made in collaboration with John Hogan.

More

08.16.16

At Home With

Surprise, Surprise: The Brooklyn Home of Dimes’s Chef is As Gorgeous As Her Food

If you’re not quite sure how a chef like Alissa Wagner fits into Sight Unseen’s usual focus on design and visual art, then you’ve probably never been to Dimes, the restaurant she opened with her longtime friend Sabrina De Sousa in 2013. The pioneer of a new apex of cool on East Canal Street in Manhattan, Dimes sells Cassie Griffin pottery and edible fragrances by Regime des Fleurs, and serves diners bowls of rainbow-colored food on tables inspired by Matisse cut-outs. Some people go because it’s a scene, and because the design vibe is right, but most go because those bowls — filled with things like kale gomae, wild sumac stems, and mejadra — are visual art in just about any sense of the word.

More

08.15.16

Eye Candy

Matisse-Inspired Prints By a Graphic Designer On the Rise

Much in the way our love for a book is evident in loose binds and worn-out pages, there's a certain value in the way we let beloved things blemish or roughen overtime. The Japanese call this permission of imperfection wabi-sabi — wabi denoting a singular, often uncontrolled uniqueness akin to a flowing streak of paint, and sabi literally meaning "chill" or "withered," which references the beauty of corrosion. Marleigh Culver, a graphic designer at Need Supply by day and visual artist by night, feels a certain kinship with this design approach. "I like sloppy shapes and rough edges, and for my pieces to look like they’ve been moved between houses for generations," Culver says.

More

08.13.16

Saturday Selects

Week of August 8, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: modular lighting, a London home putting a new spin on modernism, and a 5,000-acre “museological complex” that's like Storm King and Longhouse on steroids.

More

08.12.16

Sighted

A Darkly Cinematic Furniture Collection, Rooted in Retrofuturism

Use Your Illusions is the third collection we've featured by the Sydney-based design studio Page Thirty Three, but it's the most cohesive by far, inspired by nostalgic visions of the future but rooted in the here and now and the studio's interest in ritual. "I love looking at how the future was forecast 50 years ago, and comparing it to how we live today," explains co-founder and creative director Ryan Hanrahan. "In most cases I like the alternate space-age visions that I saw on the big screen — or dreamt up as a kid — much more. I think a lot of what we design comes from these childhood obsessions."

More

08.11.16

Shopping

A Day’s Worth of Designy Studio Essentials From Need Supply’s New Housewares Arm

Need Supply has always been one of the first places we look when we're in the market for affordable yet fashion-y basics. But this month, the online retailer officially launched Need Supply Life, its permanent home for designs for the home. After taking a spin through the site, we realized that its wares would be equally suited to the studio, so we put together a game plan for upgrading your typical workday with gear sourced from the new site — not to mention some of our favorite makers.

More