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12.24.15

Eye Candy

The Collage-Like Paintings of L.A. Artist Ramsey Dau

The elements of Los Angeles-based Ramsey Dau's artworks look like they've been torn from old encyclopedias, or found in a utility drawer, or cut from Memphis material libraries, then assembled into collages that blend the modern and the primitive. But sometimes looks can be deceiving.
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12.07.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

The New Wave of Los Angeles Design, On View Now at Our Site Specific LA Show at Austere

When the folks behind the airy Los Angeles design showroom Austere asked us to create an installation in their space, the theme was a no-brainer — we'd showcase the new wave of L.A. design, inviting 11 of our favorite studios to install a selection of their work. The result is Site Specific L.A., which opened on Saturday and runs through February 14, and is like a mini, localized version of our New York show, Sight Unseen OFFSITE.
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11.24.15

Interiors

A Beige Interior By BROOK&LYN That’s the Opposite of Boring

Our website is known for its love of color. Today, though, we're taking a rare moment to celebrate the lack thereof, with a Los Angeles interior project by BROOK&LYN and Akin Creative that proves a rare exception to the "boring beige" maxim. The two studios recently teamed up to outfit the new L.A. outpost of Bassike, an Australian fashion brand known for its high-end line of basics, and took visual inspiration from the label's understated approach.
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10.05.15

Studio Visit

Los Angeles Textile Artist Rachel Duvall

Since moving to Los Angeles five years ago, the artist Rachel Duvall has been refining an almost scientific approach to handweaving, based as much in foundational considerations like hue and line as in methodical chemical experimentation. She uses only natural dyes and modifiers such as copper and iron to “investigate the subtlety of colors,” she says, though the range she achieves — including a bright neon yellow and purple from fermented lichen she collects herself and then brews in her backyard — is striking.
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08.27.15

Sighted

BZIPPY, Kathryn Bentley, and Waka Waka at L.A.’s Dream Collective

We've seen creatives collaborate in plenty of novel, inventive ways — by mailing materials back and forth, by playing games of exquisite corpse. But sometimes the best joint projects arise more loosely, like the one currently on view at Dream Collective in Los Angeles, featuring work by Bari Ziperstein, Waka Waka, and store owner/jewelry designer Kathryn Bentley.
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07.31.15

The Essentials

L.A. Jewelry Designer Kathleen Whitaker

For the past few years, Kathleen Whitaker's name has been practically synonymous with the ubiquitous gold dot and line earrings that are a staple in boutiques everywhere. But her work has been evolving recently, making it the perfect time to check in and see what's motivating her now.
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07.30.15

Excerpt: Book

The Prettiest Plants and Pots You’ve Ever Seen

A new book documents the jaw-dropping collaboration between Japanese plant whisperer Kohei Oda and longtime Sight Unseen favorite Adam Silverman, who over the past year have made a series of potted cacti that are amazing in their complete and total eccentricity.
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06.26.15

Sighted

L.A.’s Newest Design Brand, TOOOLS

Back in 2012, we wrote about the launch of a gallery called Beginnings in Brooklyn, which, a year later, met an untimely and unfortunate end. But two of the gallery's founders have since gone on to forge a new (ahem) beginning, this time giving it a far less superstitious name: TOOOLS, a Los Angeles–based object-design company recently started by artist Caroline Hwang and designer Joel Speaskmaker that aims to be "a new company with an old ethos: form & function." See what the duo have to say about the project, and see tons of images, after the jump.
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05.30.15

Saturday Selects

Week of May 25, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a hip summer pop-up shop in Sagaponack, two ceramicists branching out into wallpaper and shelf brackets, and more work you might have missed during ICFF, like the Earnest Studio trivets above.
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04.13.15

8 Things

Los Angeles Ceramicist Ben Medansky

Anyone familiar with the work of Los Angeles ceramicist Ben Medansky would be surprised to learn that, when he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, his work was actually colorful, spanning the full spectrum of glaze hues. But after he graduated and went to work for a succession of other artists — among them the Haas brothers, who hired him to set up and run their in-house ceramics shop, and Peter Shire, for whom he spent a sweaty summer splatter-painting dishware — he decided he needed to find his own signature style, so he abandoned color entirely upon setting up his own studio in 2012 and started by focusing exclusively on form. The strong, graphic shapes he’s been creating since, all in earthy orange stoneware peeking out from under a speckled-white glaze, have become instantly recognizable in the contemporary ceramics scene.
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04.06.15

At Home With

Brook & Lyn, Los Angeles Furniture Designers

The precision-machined brass bars lining the base of Mimi Jung and Brian Hurewitz’s Pepto-pink sofa? They’re a doggie jail. At least they were, conceptually speaking, intended to be; the couple lives with three dogs in Los Angeles’s Mt. Washington neighborhood, and Truffle, the most diminutive of the bunch, necessitated the arrangement. “If you give her six inches of space underneath anything, she’ll steal things from around the house and drag them in there,” says Jung. “I wanted to make a couch that had prison bars for her, so she couldn’t get in.” Granted Jung started out sketching metal poles and wound up creating a system of stunning, diagonally canted fins that subtly shift in appearance depending on one’s vantage point, but the sofa overall was — like much of Brook & Lyn’s work — designed to serve very specific, very personal needs. Since they moved from Brooklyn to L.A. a year and a half ago, Jung and Hurewitz have been populating the studio's portfolio with pieces they’ve created for themselves, and their new home.
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03.23.15

What They Bought

Julia Leonard of Either Way LA

“I sometimes think I wear too many hats,” says Julia Leonard, the Los Angeles–based artist, interior designer, curator, gallery owner, and shopkeeper, whose backyard retail venture Either Way LA — an every Sunday sale of thrifted or commissioned pieces — has recently become a hit via Instagram and word of mouth. Since moving from San Francisco a little more than four years ago, LA has offered her the chance, as it does to so many, to start over. In San Francisco, where she had studied, worked, and lived for over a decade, she had been teaching alongside her art practice. However Los Angles marked the opportunity to focus on her art, giving her a fresh perspective: “I even dress differently,” she admits wryly.
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