Louie Rigano sparkles and crafts an expansive range of wares from Glittering Urns to Rain Boots. His ability to jump from constructing handsomely made tables to wobbly, leather martini vessels is surprising and impressive. Rigano lives and works in NYC.
During this year’s 2013 Noho Design District, Sight Unseen is hosting a day of designer master classes on May 17 at New York’s Bowery Hotel. In each workshop, participants will learn a fun process or technique from one of our favorite up-and-coming New York designers — Fredericks & Mae, Noah Spencer of Fort Makers, or Chen Chen and Kai Williams (pictured) — then enjoy a period of guided experimentation before walking away with their own handmade objects. Classes are 75-90 minutes long, cost $50 per person, and each is limited to 20 participants, so read the class descriptions after the jump, or click here to sign up now!
Samantha Bittman’s optical works pulsate in and out, up and down with lines and shapes. They pull you in, spin you out. Bittman’s latest works are hand woven textiles, tediously executed patterns that create the illusion of dimension. She enhances and re-interrupts the weavings by applying acrylic paint to the maze-like works. Totally mesmerizing.
Designers Anna Bario and Page Neal may have gone to school together, but their a-ha moment didn’t come until several years later: Not only did they realize they’d both been designing jewelry since graduation, they also found they shared a defining interest in exactly how and where their pieces were made. After moving to Philadelphia and doing extensive research into ethical gem sourcing and low-impact practices, the pair set up shop as Bario Neal in 2007, and they’ve been making environmentally and socially conscious jewelry together ever since. Their ready-to-wear rings and necklaces, custom engagement rings, and heirloom pieces are extremely responsible — with many of them made from recycled metals and all of them fabricated by local artisans in Bario Neal’s workshop and on Philly’s historic Jeweler’s Row — but they’re also extremely cool, too, which is why Sight Unseen is psyched to offer you the chance to win your favorite pieces. Just follow the directions after the jump to enter, and you could walk away with a $200 Bario Neal gift certificate good for (almost) anything in the studio’s online shop!
A star power trio of Sight Unseen favorites come together as one: Iko Iko presents the collaboration of handbag designers Building Block and furniture makers Waka Waka, who have united to produce a limited edition of custom-order bags and more. Together they explore “how time and use can bring a new personality to the things we wear.”
Is it possible to love something too much? What about when you’re an avid collector of something that teeters on the line between fame and obscurity? For Austrian photographer Clemens Kois, a longtime devotion for the century-old Viennese design workshop Carl Auböck carried a particularly trying dilemma: He had the chance to make a book that could finally introduce the long-overlooked brand to the mainstream, vindicating his fervor and helping to build up the very collecting market he was engaged in, but that would in all likelihood make it harder for him to acquire the objects he loved so much. Luckily for the rest of us, he chose to follow his passion, joining forces with Brian Janusiak of Project No. 8 and powerHouse Books to create Carl Auböck: The Workshop, which came out this past fall. We’ve excerpted eight of the objects Kois shot for the book, along with their backstories, as told to he and Janusiak by Carl Auböck IV, the latest son to run this multi-generational atelier.
Don’t get your hopes up — you won’t find Karin Johansson’s necklaces in the Sight Unseen shop anytime soon, or at any other shop for that matter. Johansson isn’t a fashion designer, after all, but a Sweden-based jewelry artist who’s spent nearly two decades learning and refining her metalworking techniques, and her pieces are only available through high-end galleries like Barcelona’s Klimt02. That’s where we spotted the New Places collection, a colorfully graphic amalgam of handmade elements in enamel, plastic, and precious metals, plus crushed and “reconstructed” stone; Johansson based each necklace on a different photograph she’d taken while traveling inside her own city and beyond. “The inspiration and the starting point for New Places were photos I’d collected for a few years of different views, landscapes, and cities,” Johansson explains. “Simply by drawing a line in the picture and connecting the ends, then picking up the colors, I discovered a necklace giving hints of houses, streets, trees, water, sky, lines, and directions.”
Caitlin Mociun may have been the author of a cult-hit fashion line for only a few years, but the lessons she learned from that stint — about the way she wants a customer to feel, or about the way a body moves in space — inform nearly everything she does today. That first becomes clear when she talks about her massively successful fine jewelry line, which she launched almost as a palliative to her days as a clothing designer. “I never really liked doing my clothing line, and when I switched to jewelry it was such a different response,” Mociun told me earlier this fall when I visited her year-old Williamsburg boutique. “It seemed to make people feel good about themselves as opposed to clothing, which often makes people feel bad.” But it’s when she talks about her boutique that you realize that nothing in the shop could be the way it is if Mociun weren’t first a designer.
There’s an easy way to tell whether or not you were born to be a maker: sit down at a table piled with random junk and scraps of material, and see how long it takes you to conjure something useful and/or beautiful. For the Das Wilde Denken workshop last month, Matylda Krzykowski and the team behind Depot Basel joined forces with my favorite design/fashion boutique in Berlin, Baerck, and invited a handful of local designers to spend two days doing just that. The results, of course, were amazing — where an observer like myself couldn’t really make the mental leap past a jumble of discarded trolley wheels and wooden boards, this group envisioned lamps, sculptural table mirrors, jewelry trays, and stationery sets. The curators saw it as a chance for the designers to get back to basics and enjoy the simplicity of an open-ended crafting session, but they also likened the experience to reconnecting with childhood, when making wasn’t goal-oriented but immediate and spontaneous — hence the name Das Wilde Denken, which means “wild thinking.” (Momentary flashback to Malin Gabriela Nordin’s children’s workshop, which we featured last month.) All of the pieces created during the session, a selection of which are featured in the slideshow after the jump, will be on view and for sale at Baerck through February 2.
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.”
It’s holiday season again! Isn’t that crazy? We feel like it was just yesterday that we were at the beach, burying our toes in the sand. Granted, we’ll be at the beach again next week, when Sight Unseen takes Design Miami, but that doesn’t change how nuts it is that 2013 is already upon us. We didn’t want to leave all you gift-givers hanging, so we commissioned four new necklaces for the Sight Unseen Shop that we think you’ll definitely want stuffed in your stocking: two by designers we’ve worked with before (Tanya Aguiñiga and Iacoli & McAllister) and two by exciting new talents (LA’s Sonya Gallardo and Julianne Ahn of Object & Totem). May your New Year’s resolution be to collect them all.
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.
To understand what it was like for Ian McDonald growing up in California’s Laguna Beach, it helps to refer back to one of the greatest television dramas of all time. Not, mind you, MTV’s vapid reality show of the same name, but the heart-wrenching high-school football epic Friday Night Lights — McDonald’s hometown being pretty much the diametrical opposite of Dillon, Texas. “Laguna was founded as an artists’ colony,” he says. “Our school mascot, The Artist, ran around with a brush and palette and a beret. Even the football stars took art classes.” In fact, one of McDonald’s earliest run-ins with the medium that would eventually become his life’s work happened when his own sports-star brothers brought their ceramics projects home from school, where their art teacher was a local studio potter. “Most kids would ask their mom for milk money; my older brothers were always asking for clay money,” he recalls. By the time he himself got to high school, he says, “it hit me really hard: This is what I want to do.”
Whereas most of us may never fully grasp the meaning behind the testicular descension metaphors and self-referential glyphs woven throughout Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, the message behind his Drawing Restraint series — which has seen the artist challenge his creation process with obstacle courses and 270-pound dumbbells — couldn’t be more relatable: creativity flourishes in any struggle with limitations. Many designers, for example, profess to do their best work under the pressure of client briefs; then there are those, like the London duo Bernadette Deddens and Tetsuo Mukai of Study O Portable, who in the absence of such briefs will invent their own rules to work around. Since they started their studio in 2009, the couple have been using the alphabet as a testing ground for aesthetic and material experiments, producing letter sets in various combinations of wood, leather, and plastic that must conform to strict, self-imposed standards of size and legibility. “It’s really satisfying to work on the puzzle an ABC poses depending on one’s materials and techniques,” says Deddens. Their most recent is the Neon Alphabet, “a cross between signage, jewelry, and a font” that debuted at Design Miami/Basel this June with Belgian gallerist Caroline van Hoek.
At the beautiful new online journal Muse & Maker, UK-based graphic designer Emily Forgot indulges in some of our favorite pastimes: digging up gems on Etsy, surveying the world’s coolest shops, interviewing makers about their crafts, asking creatives to tell stories about their keepsakes, and spotlighting all manner of amazing handcrafted objects. We RSSed the site the minute we heard about it through our friend Bec Brittain, who was profiled there last month; considering how complementary our tastes are, we knew it was only a matter of time before Forgot turned her attentions to another designer who was near and dear to us. Enter Wing Yau of the jewelry line WWAKE, a RISD grad who approached us for a collaboration this past winter and ended up with two dip-dyed necklaces for sale exclusively in our online shop. Forgot interviewed Yau — whose work we love because of the way it manages to make something as rough and primitive as hand-knotted rope look so modern — about her working habits, her favorite spot in Vancouver, and her childhood immersion in South American crafts. Check out our excerpt of the Muse & Maker interview here, then pick up your own WWAKE necklace in the Sight Unseen shop!
In her day job, Tine Fleischer is an art director at the Swiss ad agency Die Gestalter, but in her spare time — in addition to creating collateral for the German party institution Relaxed Clubbing — she runs a style blog called Inattendu, which we first stumbled upon when Fleischer waxed poetic about our own webshop. “It might sound a bit weird, but even as a child I often found myself gazing at beautiful things,” Fleischer says. “I remember in winter it always made me sad when other children trampled down the fresh fallen snow in our garden, and so I forced them only to walk on a small path that I’d specially groomed for them. Whenever I discover something beautiful, it’s a moment of bliss; this is why I wanted to start my blog.” Like any good Tumblr, Inattendu chronicles Fleischer’s obsessions in fashion, interiors, graphics, and design, and in doing so it reveals the beautifully rigorous framework through which Fleischer sees the world — all blacks, whites, neutrals, metallics, and only occasional pops of neon and pastel. When we asked which of her recent subjects she might like to feature more in-depth for this column, she immediately leapt to Kerstin Greve from the Portuguese accessories label ANVE.
Anyone who was in New York for our annual Noho Design District event this spring should be familiar with the Irish online homegoods brand Makers & Brothers; they would have been the ones making a beautiful mess on the floor of the Standard East Village hotel, as their woodworker James Wicklow carved stools made from Catskills-grade green ash by hand over the course of four days. But most of what namesake brothers Jonathan and Mark Legge do to showcase their particular brand of native handcrafted goods takes place a bit closer to home — which in their case is a shed located on the same property as their parents’ home and architectural practice in Dublin. Since founding their online retail venture less than a year ago, the two have made a point of visiting and documenting the workspaces of the people who create products for them — the basketweaver who grows her own willow on the banks of the River Boyne, the Irish RCA grad who knits stool covers from a warehouse in East London, and, most recently, a family of glassblowers in Kilkenny whose Jerpoint brand drinking vessels the brothers grew up with. When we wrote Jonathan to ask if we could reprint some of their text and photos on Sight Unseen, he confessed he hopes to collaborate soon with Jerpoint — so perhaps a follow-up story will be in the offing for fall. Until then, if you’re in Dublin, you can pop by the brothers’ shed this weekend for a summer opening. If not, live the Makers & Brothers life vicariously through our excerpt after the jump.
If you’re lucky enough to be visiting next week’s New Designers show in London, which functions like a giant coming-out party for each year’s batch of graduating UK design students, you’re apt to see plenty of examples of projects meant to highlight how things are made. But only for one of them, presumably, will those things be mass-produced bread and highways. For his thesis at Brighton University of Architecture & Design, erstwhile Max Lamb intern Josh Bitelli got to know his local bakers and roadworkers, collaborating with each of them to produce a series of trophies, vases, and furnishings made from the raw materials used by two overlooked, workaday industries. Much like Carly Mayer’s documentation of roof-tile and fireworks factories previously published on Sight Unseen, Bitelli’s investigation into these “integral yet inaccessible” domains, as he puts it, explores the idea that “we have little idea of the inner workings of industrial production, and little or no relation to the people behind the scenes.” Check out the two resulting series in more depth after the jump, including making-of videos and photographs shot by the designer.
You might be a devoted fan of Rhiannon Gilmore’s work without even knowing it; you might even look at it every day. And yet on the off chance that you actually know who she is — the force behind the four-year-old inspiration blog Intelligent Clashing — did you also know that she’s both an artist and a writer? Intelligent Clashing belongs to that universe of curated image blogs that provide a steady stream of visual inspiration for creatives, but whose editors rarely express themselves in words. Rarer still are the moments when we see them exploring their fascination with a certain image by engaging with its maker. In that missing link, we here at Sight Unseen saw an opportunity: Why not give these bloggers a platform for mounting small investigations into subjects that had recently caught their fancy? Every Friday (or so) for our new column Peer Review, we’ll ask the curator of an inspiration blog to pick a recent post from their site and ask the featured artist, or else an expert on the topic at hand, three questions of their choosing. Our first participant is Gilmore herself, who relished the opportunity to interview the New York fashion duo ace&jig, who left behind their role as founders of LaROK to start a label based on hand-woven textiles and vintage influences.
As traditions go, you can’t get much better than the one that will commence this Friday in the window of the tiny Great Jones butcher shop Japan Premium Beef: An annual display of custom meat-themed installations, rendered in various incongruous materials. It started during the 2010 Noho Design District, with the delicate glass sausages that won Fabrica’s Sam Baron a similar commission for T magazine earlier this year. And it will continue for 2012 with a series of inflatable meat balloons — whose prototypes are pictured above — that are being specially created for us by the Chicago designers behind the Balloon Factory project. We asked Caroline Linder, Lisa Smith, Michael Savona, and Steven Haulenbeek for the skinny on their savory new creation, which we invite you to visit this weekend at the Noho Design District.
It’s not every day that one of our subjects answers the phone by giddily announcing she’s just opened the mail to find the Legend soundtrack she ordered and proclaiming that 1985 Tom Cruise fantasy flick to be her favorite movie. But then San Francisco artist Sarah Applebaum has always tended to march to the beat of her own drum: Paying no mind when her work meanders back and forth between craft and art, she mostly uses dime-store materials like yarn, papier mâché, and felt. Unlike most crafters, she often turns those materials into three-dimensional symbols plucked from her subconscious. And yet unlike most artists, she’s self-taught with a degree in politics, sells her objects at Jonathan Adler and in her own online shop, moonlights as a personal chef, and isn’t at all goal-oriented when it comes to gallery shows. When Applebaum makes things, alone in her home studio in the Lower Haight, it’s above all for making’s sake.
Though we often travel the world searching for stories and meeting subjects for Sight Unseen, the UK-based design duo Studio Glithero has somehow always eluded us. We were first introduced to their work in 2008, when they created a massive site-specific installation at Milan’s Nilufar Gallery during the annual furniture fair. After traveling through the gallery’s labyrinthine hallways and courtyards, we ended up in an eerie basement space where a series of motorized wicks hung from the ceiling, methodically dipping in and out of metal cans full of hot wax arrayed in a circle on the floor. But the pair was nowhere to be found. That’s why we were particularly excited to find a recent interview with the studio on the British magazine Icon’s website — not only for the article itself, which we’re reposting on Sight Unseen today, but also because it led us to Glithero’s Vimeo channel, where a vast archive of process videos has all the while been hiding in plain sight. The pair have been using film to document their work for years, which makes sense when you realize that they often use time as an integral material to their process.
Todosomething is a Los Angeles–based design and fabrication studio that specializes in custom furniture and cabinetry with precise, exquisite finishes and subdued color palettes. But in the last few years, as their studio has grown, partners Chad Petersen and Dakota Witzenburg have begun producing their own products as well, which are extensions of their minimal design aesthetic—the ’60s-inflected, powder-coated metal (S)tool, the paint-tipped plywood A(+) Chair, a scorched-pine slab table with spindly steel legs. Between the two practices, which overlap in more than just appearance, they’ve cultivated a reputation as representatives of a certain Modern American style, one influenced by everything from Sol Lewitt to Shaker furniture.
You can learn a lot about Daphne and Vera Correll’s clothing line, Correll Correll, just by looking at who they employ: No unpaid interns, for one. When their sunny Chinatown studio is at full production capacity — as it has been in the weeks leading up to their Ecco Domani Award–sponsored Fall/Winter 2012 presentation this Friday — it’s staffed almost entirely by proper assistants. It’s not really fair, Vera reasons, to get by on free labor when the labor itself is what sells the clothes. “They look precious because you can tell we spend a lot of time on them,” she says, pointing to a recent jacket made using one of their signature techniques, where more than 40 different kinds of yarns and vintage fabric strips are woven together into a textile befitting what Vera refers to as a “shepherd from the future.” Each of the jackets takes a day’s work to create, and the sisters can make 30 or 40 such garments in a season. “Our clothes go through so many levels of work, all this sewing and knitting, and people can see that,” she says.
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