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SU-DH
06.07.13
Eye Candy
Dale Hardiman, Designer

Dale Hardiman mixes artificial substances with natural elements. The ‘Pogle’ collection of polymer based bangles and bowls swirl radical colors while morphing into globby forms. Hardiman “explores material substitutes and an autonomous approach to furniture and objects. The majority of his work is based around the exploration of differing methods of manufacturing outside those of industrial practice.”

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Campana_Racket_Group_20_sm2
06.07.13
Excerpt: Exhibition
The Campana Brothers at Friedman Benda

If you’re a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, you know it’s rare that we write about a big-name designer. In part, it’s a question of access — it’s far easier to get an RCA grad on the phone than, say, Hella Jongerius. But it’s also a question of ubiquity: If you read a bunch of design blogs, you’re going to hear about something like Yves Behar’s new Smart Lock until your face falls off. But the Campana Brothers — despite being one of the biggest names in design — have somehow always eluded that extreme ubiquity.

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Scandi design bk 14
06.06.13
From the Library Of
Ladies & Gentlemen Studio: Scandinavian Design Gallery

Books about mid-century Scandinavian design are a dime a dozen. Jacobsen chairs, Aalto stools, Juhl sofas — you know the drill. But if you’ve ever been to a design museum in Stockholm or Helsinki, you probably also know that some of the coolest objects made in the region date back to a more unexpected era: the ’80s, when good things weren’t just happening in Italy, believe it or not. A few months back, we spotted some examples of said amazingness on the Instagram feed of the Seattle design duo Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, which they’d noted were pulled from a vintage book they’d rediscovered while cleaning house. And so this column was born, a place for people to show off strange, beautiful, and mostly out-of-print volumes that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day. Browse selections from Scandinavian Design Gallery in the slideshow here — complete with caption text plucked from the book and sporadic Ladies & Gentlemen accompanying commentary — then let us know if you have a gem of your own to share.

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SU-LS
06.05.13
Eye Candy
Laura Slater, Surface Designer

Laura Slater cuts, pastes, paints and layers carefree shapes and patterns to create artful textiles. Slater’s surface designs are lively with dynamic brushstrokes and sharp shapes. Modern paintings and housewares all in one. “Informed by the interaction of colour and shape, my design focuses on the translation of drawing and surface through hand printed processes.” Slater runs her busy studio and print workshop in West Yorkshire, England.

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HazelStark_Terrazzo_Masks_all
06.04.13
Up and Coming
Hazel Stark, designer

If this is what Hazel Stark can come up with spending only one or two days a week in the studio, we’d love to see what she could do working fulltime. The London-based designer spends most days tending the website, marketing and events for bagmaker Ally Capellino, but on her off days she slips away to a shared studio space in Hackney to dabble in ceramics and textiles infused with the same lighthearted cheer she exhibited when I phoned her up last month. But who’s to say she’ll ever take the fulltime plunge? “I started out as an artist’s assistant, and it helped me figure out the ways to run a design business before I ever started designing,” Stark says. “In some ways, seeing other people struggle put me off a bit! So it’s baby steps for now.”

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WANTED_Chicagoland_Teapot
06.03.13
What We Saw
At New York Design Week 2013, Part V: The Rest

New York Design Week may already feel like a distant memory, but we couldn’t move on to covering the upcoming Design Miami Basel fair — or start publishing all the amazing studio visits and house tours we’ve been saving up for the past few weeks — without doing one last post about all the offsite shows we saw (and didn’t see) during this year’s ICFF. From magnified eyeballs to garbage arches to our favorite watering can of all time, check out the official Sight Unseen roundup below.

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SU-AM
05.31.13
Eye Candy
Aaron S. Moran, Artist

Aaron S. Moran assembles discarded wood scraps into colorful jutting bursts of sculpture. Patterns, shapes and materials cut and collide to make new forms. He describes his work as “excavat(ing) the history of locations through the use of found materials while drawing attention to the inherent aftermath of growth in both urban and ‘sub’urban environments.” Moran lives and works in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada.

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IMG_5997
05.30.13
What We Saw
At New York Design Week 2013, Part IV: ICFF

We had a dream for ICFF this year: to set up a “Sight Unseen Canteen” staffed by an avant-garde chef who would purchase food items from the conference center cafeteria and recast them into amazing gourmet meals, a bit like the now-defunct website Fancy Fast Food. The reason we had this dream (which we still hope to someday realize) is that no one in their right mind ever has anything good to say about the Javits itself — the climate, the lighting, and of course, the hideous, overpriced cuisine — and so pretty much everyone, we figured, would get the joke. If we could add on a foot massage station, a napping pod, and a daylight simulator, our vision would truly be complete. But alas, this year all there was to comfort weary fairgoers like us was plain old great design, and the joy of running into old friends and colleagues, and so we had no choice but to settle for that. We came, we saw, we conquered.

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