This Canadian Design Show Was Dreamed Up Before the Pandemic. So Why Is It About Mutation, Isolation, and Fear of the Unknown?

Set in an abandoned, somewhat post-apocalyptic-looking building in the middle of Montréal, FICTIONS offers visitors a surveillance-like experience, with four different camera angles offering a glimpse of the half-shrouded pieces, alongside an eerie accompanying score. Though there was no brief, many of the pieces play with ideas about mutation and perception.
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The New Lambert & Fils New York Showroom is, Like the Brand Itself, an Incubator for Collaboration

To celebrate Lambert & Fils’s 10th anniversary back in early March, the Montreal-based brand’s founder, Samuel Lambert, traveled to New York City to sign a lease on a 1,500-sq.ft. space on the corner of Hudson and Duane Streets in Tribeca, fulfilling a longtime dream of opening a showroom in Manhattan. Of course, we all know what happens next: Within 24 hours of signing the lease, the city was in lockdown. “It was pretty much inked paper and then total chaos,” laughs Lambert’s brand and marketing director Rory Seydel. “But we took the challenge as a part of the process. What does a showroom even mean in 2021?”
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Milan Preview: New Lighting — And the Cutest Café — By Lambert & Fils

At Salone every other year, a special portion of the fair is devoted to Euroluce, aka all the lighting brands you can cram into one (or two) pavilions. But this year, one of our favorite lighting brands is debuting its new collections miles away from the fairgrounds of Milan: Next week, the Montréal-based Lambert & Fils will pop up with a six-day concept café at Alcova, a former panettone factory in the northeast corner of the city.
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Visiting Brian Rideout’s New Show Is Like Walking Into One of His Paintings

Canadian artist Brian Rideout's paintings are inspired by amazing art-filled vintage interiors he finds in old magazines and DIY books, and at his new show, they're installed in a very unique, very meta way: with period-appropriate paintings by Al Held, Fernand Leduc, and Guido Molinari sprinkled in between them, and a "living room" full of vintage furniture placed in the middle of the room, so that the gallery effectively becomes a 3-D representation of the spaces depicted in his canvases.
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New, Super-Graphic Housewares from MPGMB

Montreal duo Maude Beauchamp and Marie-Pier Guilmain of MPGMB may be responsible for one of our favorite necklaces in the Sight Unseen Shop, but they also have a thriving housewares line — in 2014, they released the Arizona Collection of stoneware planters perched atop wood-fiber stands, and now they've released a new summer series inspired by some of its design elements.
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MPGMB, Industrial Designers

We never really thought we'd be featuring someone who'd also graced the pages of Modern Cat magazine. But that's exactly where Montreal designers Marie-Pier Guilmain and Maud Beauchamp ended up a few years ago after they hit it big with their chic, flat-packed cardboard teepees and cabins for cats. Back then, the two were known as Loyal Luxe, friends and designers who'd met and hit it off studying industrial design at the Université de Montréal. But a year ago, the two decided to change course. Their Loyal Luxe designs now mostly licensed to Suck UK, Guilmain and Beauchamp embarked on a new adventure, which they called mpgmb. In some ways, their mission is the same as it was when they were known as Loyal Luxe — to imbue everyday objects with beauty and sophistication through the manipulation of materials, textures, proportions, and form. But here, they're more interested in items at a human scale: beautiful, turned wood and marble pedestals, patterned stoneware, and colorful wall decals that all have in common a major graphic impact. We recently spoke to the two designers by email to find out more about what's influenced them in the past (we love the Sottsass table they chose!) and where they're going next.
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