Week of February 24, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, proof that floor-to-ceiling carpet is having a moment, an freshly optimistic take on the armchair, and some solace to art-loving Angelenos.
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This Dutch Artist’s Warped Archival Photos Are the Break From Reality We Need Right Now

When I first discovered the Dutch artist Koen Hauser, and his Skulptura series in particular, I viewed his work as an escape — moments of disrupted reality, primarily in the form of warps and swirls edited into photos of artworks and artifacts taken from old books and museum archives. And I liked it not only because it was weird and disorienting, but because I had rarely seen that kind of technique deployed to such beautiful effect. Yet there's actually more going on in Hauser's images.
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Week of September 23, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, and more from the past seven days. This week, a series of opalescent flower photos, Nathalie du Pasquier's ode to the brick, and an architectural puzzle destined for holiday wishlist ubiquity.
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An Artist Responds to the Work of Victor Vasarely, Father of the Op-Art Movement

An internationally exhibited conceptual artist working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Oran Hoffmann was invited to the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence in 2017, where he sifted through boxes of Vasarely’s tiles, parallelograms, serigraphs, and other ephemera used to inspire and lay the groundwork for the unusual architecture of the foundation and the optically boggling sculptures and spaces within. Hoffmann’s new book is the culmination of a year of research and working with Vasarely’s archives.
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Today We’re Revealing Our Secret Source For Discovering New Talents — Including These 23 Artists and Designers

If you're one of the many, many people who have always wanted to ask us the same million dollar question — how do we decide who to feature on Sight Unseen? — pay attention, because we're answering it here today. First things first, we feature people and things we like, it's as simple as that. More complex is how we find those people and things. Some of our biggest sources are Instagram, exhibitions we attend, and submission emails we receive. But not too long ago, we found another source that's an endless wellspring for discovering new names in art and design: Cargo.
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How Do You Capture Kinetic Motion in a Still Photo?

That's the challenge Kinfolk magazine recently gave London-based photographer Aaron Tilley for its current Architecture issue. Tilley's work is often concerned with motion or the moment just before motion begins; his subjects include bread whose slices appear caught in mid-tumble or paper sheets that seem to be floating on a table's edge. For Kinfolk, however, the still-life photographer was asked to create the effect of a Rube Goldberg machine — a series of photos in which one action triggers another and another until the payoff in the final frame.
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Meet the Florist Behind Instagram’s Dreamiest Still Lifes

Doan Ly's floral still life photographs could, in a way, be read as contemporary vanitas paintings — compositions of hyper-saturated bouquets, exotic fruits, and colored lights whose addictive, saccharine appeal might symbolize the fleetingness of beauty, and of Instagram culture itself. Yet we prefer to look at it like Ly does: The world is a shitty, shitty place right now, so let's all just take a sec to enjoy some insanely pretty flowers.
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See Our Favorite Simple Housewares in the Homes of Five Photographers, Then Win a Chance to Own Them

We chose five of our favorite items from Unison — one of our favorite sources for elevated design basics — and gave them to five of our favorite Sight Unseen photographers, who shot the pieces in the context of their own homes alongside BZippy vases, vintage lamps, and Upton prints. Check out the results, then learn how you can win a $100 gift certificate to Unison for yourself.
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These Psychedelic, Rainbow-Colored Landscape Photos Make a Subtle Political Statement

You might not think of a series of landscape photos awash in dreamy swipes of color as a necessary political statement, but Oakland-based artist Terri Loewenthal is making one: "Our current political reality includes a government unwilling to confront ecological collapse and a president who is actively deaccessioning public land," she said in an interview earlier this year. "I want my images to help preserve the wildness of our open spaces — by heightening and newly envisioning that wildness."
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