One of the things we love so much about the website Core77 is that it makes the very wide, sometimes dry world of industrial design feel like such a small, warm, tight-knit community; it’s all that insider info, combined with a jovial, conversational tone and a knack for rounding up essays and other up-close-and-personal content from so many great design voices. We’re all about the up-close-and-personal here at Sight Unseen, so we love it every time Core starts a new series devoted to things like entrepreneur profiles and Proust questionnaires; their newest column — called, simply, the Core77 Questionnaire — is only two subjects old, and we’re already looking forward to finding out what the designers we admire love and hate about their job, how they procrastinate, and where they see themselves in 10 years. Last week’s interview was with an old SU mainstay, the Brooklyn furniture and product designer Paul Loebach, whose responses we’ve excerpted here for your reading pleasure.
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.
When we first started writing about design nearly a decade ago, almost all young furniture talents had the same starry eyed aim: to get a piece produced by a big European company like Cappellini, then sit back and watch the 3% royalties trickle in. My how things have changed. These days emerging designers are just as likely to produce their own work and sell it online, cutting out the middle man and relying on press, exhibitions, and social media to get the word out. And for those who would rather operate somewhere in the middle, now there’s also BYCO, a new micro-financing site for fashion and housewares designers who are motivated enough to promote their own ideas but wouldn’t mind having someone else deal with the logistics of production. Founded by Jesse Finkelstein of JF & Son and his sister Meredith, the site lets you submit a design, then promote it to potential funders to cover the costs of making a prototype. If you’re successful, your design is sold on the site for a month, with BYCO handling production and fulfillment and your funders getting a nice little discount to the shop. As a designer, you receive 20% of sales and one of your pieces for free (or 30% if you cover the sampling cost). Starting today, Sight Unseen has teamed up with BYCO to sweeten the pot even further — submit your own design to the site by Monday, June 3, and we’ll pick the best three submissions to bypass the funding stage and go straight into production on the site. Just follow the directions below to get started! Just follow the directions after the jump to get started!
Ferréol Babin designs fanciful household necessities with a nod to nature, referencing insects, land formations, and moon light. Less natural is Babin’s three piece series entitled Écume, a trusty little pine wood table that “mix(es) elementary shapes and functions with surprising patterns and colors.” Babin lives and works in in France.
Like many of his peers, 29-year-old Parisian David des Moutis is obsessed with finding new possibilities for traditional handicrafts, and if he could, he’d probably spend all of his time geeking out in workshops watching glass being blown, stone being carved, or metal being spun. One of his pieces — an eyeball-shaped bentwood stool he showed at IMM Cologne in 2010 — even came about after he discovered an old manual wood press in the back of a local shop that its own employees didn’t even know how to operate. One could say he’s the ultimate tinkerer; even when he’s not the one fabricating his own designs, he can’t help but leap in and try to learn the ropes. Check out some of the results here.
Mel Nguyen’s work stretches, oozes, and floats across net-scapes and paper planes. One of her most recent projects is the wearable statement, Bolted. The necklace is a mix of shiny ball bearings, rock hard metals and neon plastic slinky tubes, styled to viral-able perfection. Lots of likes. Nguyen is currently a student at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Many Sight Unseen readers will no doubt be familiar with the work of Gaetano Pesce, the Italian design icon most famous for his use of amorphous, Jello-y plastics. But how many of you knew that he’s been based in New York since 1983, with a huge studio in Soho and a workshop near the Navy Yards? You heard me, the Navy Yards! If you had no idea, it’s not really your fault; the man is rarely spotted at design openings or speaking on panels, and he hasn’t had a major solo show in the city in 25 years — until now, that is. To mark the debut of L’Abbraccio, a retrospective of his work that opens tonight at Fred Torres Collaborations in Chelsea, I interviewed Pesce for the online magazine The Aesthete about why he moved to New York in the first place (because it’s a “service city,” aka whatever you want whenever you want it) and why he feels like he “didn’t exist” here until now. Special treat: studio photos shot by SU contributor Brian W. Ferry! Check out a preview of the piece after the jump, then head back to The Aesthete for the full story.
Tim Colmant blazes trails of flickering gifs across the internet. ’80s style soft-pop colors flood over his dynamic diagonals, jiggly squiggles and pitter-patter dots. He makes gifs that keep on giving. Colmant employes his childhood favorite, the simple drawing program MS Paint, to create his illustrations. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Swatch out! The Design Center at Philadelphia University houses over 200,000 textiles and fashion objects. A sliver of this massive archive is now available for all to see via The Design Center tumblr. It’s striking how contemporary many of these prints look, the designs from the late 1880s are often the most eccentric/in vogue. Take a look at these selections, featuring prints of many styles and eras, along with Dorothy Liebes and Jack Lerner Larson wovens.
If you’re wondering why we chose to kick off a story about a graphic designer with a series of objects that fall squarely in the art/furniture realm, there are two reasons: First, they were our first introduction — via Pinterest — to Till Wiedeck’s work, and second, they illustrate perfectly what’s so great about the Berlin-based talent. Though he refers to himself as a hyper-functionalist, preoccupied with detail and simplicity and too serious to answer our sillier interview questions about Google searches and fictional characters, somehow he’s still the kind of guy who would take a sizeable chunk of time out of his client schedule to build a suite of semi-useless objects like these. You’ll find the same juxtapositions in the portfolio of his graphics studio, HelloMe, where he might pair spare typography with lush hyper-color flower arrangements, creepy Photoshop smears, or experimental acid-trip paintings he and his cohorts have made by hand. It all comes together in our interview with Wiedeck, who has a thing for both Bauhaus and Memphis, modernist chairs and tchotchkes. Whatever it is, it’s working.
Courtney Reagor’s photographs overflow with juicy colors and fresh foods. Pictured here are selections from her most recent still life experiments, as well as product shots featuring the collection of the young Brooklyn furniture-design studio Souda. Reagor was born in Chicago, lives in Brooklyn, studied illustration in Savannah, Georgia, and until very recently, tumblred at Raised on Sandwiches. She’s influenced by “organic shapes, patterns, and color as well as their contrast with man-made objects.”
If photographer Brian W. Ferry shoots like he takes absolutely nothing for granted — making us pine hard for moments of intensely quiet, understated beauty that probably already exist in our everyday lives — it’s likely because he feels so grateful to be doing what he’s doing. He may have discovered his inner camera nerd way back when he was growing up in Connecticut, but just a few short years ago, he was working long hours as a corporate lawyer in London, taking pictures merely as a personal creative escape hatch. Only after his blog began delivering fans and potential clients to his digital doorstep did he gather the resolve to quit his job, move to Brooklyn, and make a career out of triggering in people a kind of strange, misplaced nostalgia. “I think a lot about taking photos that are about more than capturing something beautiful, that have a heaviness attached to them,” Ferry told us earlier this winter at his Fort Greene garden apartment, as we rifled through his belongings together.
To the extent that we cover art on Sight Unseen, it makes sense that we’d naturally gravitate towards action painting — artists may always have plenty to say about the relationship of their work to the viewer, or to philosophy, or to the context of art history, but most of the time we’re interested in something a little more prosaic than that, like how they get their hands dirty, and why they’ve chosen one medium over another. With gestural works, it’s all about the process, and the liminal moments just before and after materials cease to be ordinary and paintings transform into something more than the sum of their parts. The work of the Greenpoint-based artist Landon Metz is a perfect example: His paintings are about painting, and how colorful enamel shapes laid down on a tilted canvas will move and evolve as their surface interactions and drying times are influenced by factors like humidity, daylight, and temperature. Sight Unseen contributor Paul Barbera visited Metz’s studio recently for Where They Create, and — oh lucky day! — he did our work for us, creating his own podcast interview with the artist which you can listen to after the jump.
We first spotted Shino Takeda’s awkwardly lovable, one-of-a-kind ceramic spoons and desert-style dishes at Caitlin Mociun’s store in Brooklyn, but the ceramicist’s work is a testament to the fact that you can still find amazing things on Etsy if you know where to look: Takeda keeps a store there called “Shino’s World,” and browsing its vases and bowls, you really get the sense that she lives inside her own storybook, where tea sets are named after bluebirds and sake cups appear poised to kiss. But we didn’t know much more about the real Shino until last week, when Inventory Magazine took a more literal look inside her world — with editor Ryan Willms photographing her at work in her Brooklyn studio — and so we couldn’t resist the chance to feature the story here in an attempt to put all the pieces together. The text of Inventory’s piece is after the jump, along with a few of the images, but you can see a lot more back at Inventory’s own site, including a portrait of the ceramicist herself.
Okay, so the cat isn’t the most pertinent aspect of Gonzalo Arbutti and Matias Resich’s Buenos Aires–based art practice and toy-making company, Laboratori. But it does speak volumes about the site we found it on — Slanted Mansion, a newish interiors inspiration blog that we stumbled upon this weekend when they retweeted us (thanks guys!). Siobhan Frost, the photographer and interviewer responsible for all of the content on the site, has a knack for taking the just-right portrait: the Parisian cinematographer playing the French horn in his kitchen, the photographer making pretzel faces outside his Australian studio, the perfectly poised kitty. The photos are shot in a manner similar to many sites of its kind, but the breadth of countries seems wider than most (Israel, Argentina, Jordan), and the list of disciplines spans all the way from glass artist to wooden toy maker, which is how we found the studio visit we’re excerpting today.
If we had to sum up our favorite kind of designer in a just a few brief sentences, it might read something like Alyson Fox’s biography: “I like making things from paper, found objects, thread, furniture, and plaster. I like designing things for commercial ends and designing things for no end at all. I have a degree in photography and an MFA where I focused on many mediums. I am inspired by hardware stores, building sites, empty rooms, people’s messes, stories, fabric, and quiet days.” But while we had some inkling of the Austin designer’s multidisciplinary chops — from girly-tough jewelry to patterned editions for the likes of West Elm — we weren’t aware of her artier inclinations until only recently. Those include a fantastic photo series documenting the textiles people use to cover up outdoor plant life when the weather gets cold, as well as our most recent discovery: a series of 1.5×1.5-inch plaster cubes, each one embedded with bits Fox and her husband found on the 5-acre plot where they last year built a house from scratch.
When Jill Wenger opened the first incarnation of the Seattle store Totokaelo in 2003, she had a few goals: showcasing the work of local designers, improving choices for all-weather gear. But as she grew to be the most fashion-forward resource in the city, she took on the more important mandate of helping to raise Seattle’s style profile in general, banishing annoying sartorial habits like square-toed shoes, embroidery, and pleather handbags. While there’s still work to be done in that arena, this year — with the opening of her massive new store and its “Art—Object” component — Wenger expanded her tastemaking activities beyond the body and into the home. Her stable contains more than a few of our favorite players, from Philip Low to Seattle’s hometown heroes Iacoli & McAllister, but months ago, it was Morgan Peck who really caught our eye. Not only was the ceramicist suddenly showing up on shelves at Iko Iko and Mociun, among others, there was almost no information about her on the web. And so we invited Wenger to take a stab at interviewing the Los Angeles–based talent for our Peer Review column.
Rhiannon Gilmore’s posts on Intelligent Clashing often begin with a tiny nugget of an idea — a pattern, a color, a shape — that after a bit of research flourishes into a loose, visually driven narrative. In her most recent post, though, the nugget wasn’t so much tiny as nearly floor-length: a beautifully draped woven silk poncho trimmed with fringe and edged with reclaimed and antique textiles. The poncho was the creation of Milena Silvano, a UK stylist-turned-slow fashion enthusiast who’s become something of an obsession for Gilmore in recent weeks: “For some time I’d been wondering: Where were the UK designers producing small, slow collections like those coming out of the States? I was thinking along the lines of ERMIE or Wiksten — collections that hold the personalities and the passions of the women who make them and are small enough to feel truly intimate and exclusive, in a warm wholesome way. I’d started to think there just wasn’t anyone working in this way here in the UK, and then I found Milena Silvano.”
The biggest reason why we love our new Peer Review column: because it lets us heap mountains of credit onto blogs like Arcademi — the source of more of our “holy shit” moments than almost any other site — while giving us good reason to borrow their content. Namely, the opportunity to hear their subjects wax poetic about things like hairy tufting and multiple personalities, like today’s subject, Caroline Achaintre. We were lucky enough to convince Arcademi editor Moritz Firchow to interview the London-based artist, who trained as a blacksmith before finding her way to a multidisciplinary practice inspired by the way German expressionism, post-war British sculpture, and Primitivism merge influences from both ancient and modern culture.
It may look like a staging area for the production of Stuart Haygarth chandeliers or Massimiliano Adami cabinets, or possibly an excerpt from the website Things Organized Neatly. But the comely technicolor garbage pile pictured above is actually a piece by the Mexican art-star Gabriel Orozco, who’s known for his use of humble materials and found objects, and it’s moving into New York’s Guggenheim museum as of this Friday. Asterisms is a process-oriented installation — our favorite kind! — featuring thousands of objects Orozco collected from two separate sites: a sports field near his New York home and a wildlife reserve on the coast of Baja California Sur, the latter of which happens to enjoy a constant flow of industrial backwash from across the Pacific that every so often yields bits of aesthetically pleasing detritus.
For those of you who weren’t aware, your editors — Jill and Monica — are based in New York, where a massive tropical storm is bearing down today with increasing intensity. Jill is safe in the East Village with her family, while Monica fled her Brooklyn apartment for a world of luxurious denial at the Ace Hotel in midtown, where her friend is staying and where the Breslin will be churning out burgers and fries for the duration of the hurricane. Regardless, the serious conditions outside are obviously demanding most of our attention at the moment, so we can only offer a quick dispatch to jump-start the week: a behind-the-scenes video interview with Sam Hecht and Kim Colin of the London design studio Industrial Facility, whose Muji-approved strain of functional minimalism is as beloved as the collection of regional everyday objects featured in their book with Rizzoli last year. While the book served to catalog the couple’s travels around the globe, the video — part of Herman Miller’s ongoing Why Design series — sees them reflecting on the world just outside their front door, and how it influences their work in small but important ways.
Is it every blogger’s secret wish to go into retail? This year alone, we’ve seen Sight Unseen’s own Shape Shop, Rhiannon Gilmore’s Dream Shop at the Walker, and as of this Saturday, Su Wu of I’m Revolting’s pop-up at Creatures of Comfort LA, entitled We’re Revolting. Perhaps it’s inevitable that we would all want to touch and feel and hold the objects we covet from afar, and to make tangible the narrative we create every day. But maybe it’s just as simple as this: “It’s kind of lonely being a blogger,” Wu says. “And this was a reason to get to know people. It’s kind of a scary thing: You think, ok, I admire their work, but will I actually get along with them? But in fact, I’m still kind of basking in it.”
If you have a particularly sprawling design-book library, or if you religiously follow things like Mondo Blogo or Herman Miller editorial director Sam Grawe’s Instagram feed, you may be relatively familiar with the heaps of amazingly designed archival ephemera that original modern furniture brands tend to generate over the decades. But the rest of us still get giddy when we come upon a gem like Vitsoe’s brand-new Tumblr, which the 53-year-old German stalwart launched last month to show off rarely seen bits and bobs pulled from its company files. Every couple of days, staffers dig up old invitations, promo items, photographs, and catalogs and post them alongside a snippet of information about their origins; with Dieter Rams as Vitsoe’s lead designer and Wolfgang Schmidt behind its graphic identity, there’s been no shortage of eye candy on the site so far. A few of our favorite examples are shown here, but we advise you to bookmark the site and visit it often — we have a feeling the Vitsoe folks are just getting started, and there’s no telling what they might turn up once they really dig in.
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