07.11.14

Eye Candy

Studio Uribe’s FW14 Collection

We spotted the new London-based jewelry designers Studio Uribe on the shelves of one of our favorite boutiques, Hunting and Collecting in Brussels. Helmed by couple Sion and Tiffany Phillips, the brand recently launched its first collection for FW14, which pairs sleek 18K gold-plated brass with abstract striped-enamel and lapis lazuli accents.

07.07.14

Eye Candy

Kristina Krogh, Artist and Graphic Designer

Kristina Krogh studied graphic design before setting up her own studio in Copenhagen in 2012, where she spends part of her time on freelance design projects and the rest on her extensive line of limited-edition art prints, notebooks, and notecards, pictured in this post. Her layered geometric compositions feature a mix of contrasting and complementary surface textures taken from everyday materials like marble, ply, wood, cork, and paper. "My inspiration comes from the things that surround me: a beautiful old parquet, a perfect color combination on a building, a stone floor in a church, a bike ride through Copenhagen," she says.

06.28.14

Saturday Selects

Week of June 23, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we indulge our inner shopaholics with a new Norwegian emerging-design purveyor, three designer pop-ups in New York and LA, and a mini online shopping guide that includes a little something for the guys, too — chic Op-Art pocket squares.

06.20.14

Invitation

Q+Q Watches Shot By Amanda Ringstad

When Amanda Ringstad showed a friend recently one of the images she'd styled and shot for us of a cluster of Q+Q SmileSolar watches, all linked together in a random shape, her friend's first reaction was: "That looks like a lawnmower!" Ringstad was thoroughly pleased — having been invited by us to apply her styling genius in the service of our friends at Q+Q, who partnered with us on this year's edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE, the Seattle photographer's main objective was to present the watches in a simple, abstracted way that left plenty of room for the imagination. "Watches are a simple thing, but difficult to disassociate so that they convey something else," she explains. After initial attempts to weave them together into a kind of "textile," or arrange them on top of summery backgrounds depicting water or sand, in the end Ringstad used spare colored planes and graphic shadows to elevate her subjects above the realm of mere utilitarian objects.

06.02.14

Sighted

Amazon Primed by Noah Kalina

Most of the images that photographer Noah Kalina posts on his popular Tumblr feed are relatively random — portraits of friends, excerpts from his commercial shoots, behind-the-scenes tidbits. But every once in awhile, any of his million-plus followers who are paying attention will notice him initiating or adding to a recurring series, like the one in which he always documents, while traveling, the view from the window of his temporary room. These mini-projects represent his most personal work, the ideas he has and then pursues in his spare time, for no other reason than to challenge himself creatively and/or keep himself busy between shoots. Amazon Primed, his latest such endeavor, showed up on his Tumblr in late February in the form of an image depicting three external hard drives and an ethernet switch.

05.29.14

Fair Report

New York Design Week 2014: ICFF & The Best of The Rest

There was only one drawback to having a smashingly successful show of our own this year: It left us woefully little time to pound the pavement, seeing what other goodies this edition of NYCxDesign had to offer. A partial list of things we were sad to have missed: The Gourmand's fruit stand at Vitsoe, the gorgeous Alexander Girard for Herman Miller space, a dance performance at The Future Perfect the night of our own cocktail party, Anna Karlin's textile collaboration with Japanese weavers Hosoo at Atelier Courbet, the Yabu Pushelberg exhibition Rational x Intuitive Thought, and the debut of what may end up being the first and last furniture collection by Fab. But there were moments when we did manage to sneak away.

05.16.14

Invitation

Print All Over Me x Sight Unseen

Back in December, we embarked on an experimental curatorial collaboration with Print All Over Me, the amazing print-your-own-pattern service, founded by fashion designer Jesse Finkelstein and his sister, Meredith, that allows designers to upload any graphic they please onto fashionable white blanks — sweatshirts, bomber jackets, shift dresses, backpacks, leggings, and more. The project — for which we hand-selected illustrators like Will Bryant, Tim Colmant, and Clay Hickson — was such a rousing success that Jesse approached us for round two a few months ago. We were already 100 percent sold on the idea, thinking we could sell the results at a pop-up at our Sight Unseen OFFSITE event — which opens today at noon! — when Jesse casually emailed this bomb: "Hey! Let's also talk about print all over furniture!"

05.13.14

What They Bought

The I’m Revolting Ceramics Shop

Ceramicists know how to deal with heartbreak — these are artists, after all, who make something they love and then willingly throw it into a fire. So while the I’m Revolting Ceramics Shop that I've curated for Sight Unseen OFFSITE — opening at noon this Friday at 200 Lafayette in Soho — is in many ways a survey of talented young people working today in clay, it’s also a small tribute to the beauty in unpredictability and letting go. Unlike painting or weaving or most other mediums, potters don’t get to see the thing complete in front of them as they work. They shape a piece of clay with their hands and then give it over to the heat of the universe. And though this sounds totally cheeseball, that might be why I love it so much — that every piece carries in it some accident. The range of work in the I’m Revolting Ceramics Shop is a reminder of this possibility in imperfection: our perpetual struggle to take the same stuff there has ever been – mud and fire, failure and ambition – and create of it something distinctly personal.

05.10.14

Saturday Selects

Week of May 5, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a little bit of Scandinavian design heaven in downtown Los Angeles, lots of emerging designers under one roof in far-out Brooklyn, and a preview of the design hothouse that is the coming week in New York City.

05.07.14

Studio Visit

Upstate, Fashion Designers

If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at Sight Unseen, it’s that a lack of training can sometimes go an awfully long way. Such was the case with Kalen Kaminski and Astrid Chastka of Upstate, who started their popular Brooklyn-based, shibori-inspired womenswear and accessories label back in 2010 with nary a day of fashion training between them. When they first met a few years earlier, Kaminski was an anthropology major turned prop stylist and Chastka was an architecture grad turned unhappy architect. Soon after bonding over an appreciation of handcrafted items, they found themselves trawling New York fabric stores, trying to replicate one of Kaminski’s vintage scarves. “We couldn’t find anything we liked, and we probably had no idea where to go,” Chastka told me when we visited the pair’s Greenpoint studio a few months back. “At the time, Kalen was living with an artist, and he had a shibori tapestry on his wall. We saw that, and we were like, ‘That’s perfect.’”

05.05.14

Sighted

Project No. 8’s New Website

For years, fans of the New York concept shop Project No. 8 have been begging its founders, Brian Janusiak and Elizabeth Beer, to expand beyond their LES flagship and Ace Hotel annex and open more stores. But the pair have consistently refused, because they knew all along exactly where their next location needed to be: online. Their original website launched in 2006, but they'd recently grown so frustrated with its outdated design that they'd stopped updating it all together; this weekend, they quietly launched projectno8.com 2.0, a brand new site that's truer to their current inventory and that effectively leapfrogs them over eight years of e-commerce evolution. Greeting visitors to the homepage is a slideshow of still-life images by New York photographer Clemens Kois, who met Janusiak when the pair collaborated on Carl Aubock: The Workshop — we asked each of them to tell us a little bit more about the project.

04.22.14

Up and Coming

Doug Johnston, Basket Artist

Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Doug Johnston was surrounded by the Native American art that his parents voraciously collected — woven rugs, Kachina dolls and coiled baskets made from materials such as pine needles, yucca, acacia and bear grass. But when the Brooklyn-based designer decided a few years ago that he’d like to learn coiling himself, to make baskets from stitched lengths of cotton rope, he didn’t travel to the Southwest to train with a master craftsperson. Instead, he went on YouTube, scouring instructional videos for a new approach. “Traditional coiling techniques are really labor-intensive,” he says. “You have to go inch by inch, one stitch at a time, and mastering that technique could take years. I was too impatient.”