If you had to imagine the place in which you might do your best work, where would it be? Would it be a quiet, remote island? Would it be poolside? Would it be in the company of a dozen other creatives, spurring you on? What if the answer were all of the above? That’s how Matt Olson of Minneapolis’s ROLU studio spent the last month of his winter, engaged in a residency on Captiva Island off the Gulf Coast of Florida, on a massive estate that was once home and studio to Robert Rauschenberg. Olson was part of the residency’s pilot program, which invited artists from different disciplines, all over the world, to spend a month making work, building a community, and generally inhaling the Rauschenberg aura. We spotted this diary by Olson on the Design/Miami blog about his time there, and had to share.
Visit Nick van Woert’s massive studio in Greenpoint, and in all likelihood you’ll find a cluster of white people standing in a corner, naked and clutching at each others’ butts — these artificial neo-classical statues have been a recurring theme in the Nevada-born artist’s work since shortly after he began his career in earnest in 2006. Many of them get tipped over and enveloped in a cascade of colored resin that hardens in mid-drip; in one series, he hollowed out their midsections and let the wind give them garbage guts. “It was like a little trap, and the wind would blow weird shit in there that accumulated outside my studio,” van Woert says. “Anything from Doritos bags to Monster Energy drink cans. The DNA of the world outside.” It was his most literal manifestation of the mantra that drives most of his practice: You are what you eat.
Many Sight Unseen readers will no doubt be familiar with the work of Gaetano Pesce, the Italian design icon most famous for his use of amorphous, Jello-y plastics. But how many of you knew that he’s been based in New York since 1983, with a huge studio in Soho and a workshop near the Navy Yards? You heard me, the Navy Yards! If you had no idea, it’s not really your fault; the man is rarely spotted at design openings or speaking on panels, and he hasn’t had a major solo show in the city in 25 years — until now, that is. To mark the debut of L’Abbraccio, a retrospective of his work that opens tonight at Fred Torres Collaborations in Chelsea, I interviewed Pesce for the online magazine The Aesthete about why he moved to New York in the first place (because it’s a “service city,” aka whatever you want whenever you want it) and why he feels like he “didn’t exist” here until now. Special treat: studio photos shot by SU contributor Brian W. Ferry! Check out a preview of the piece after the jump, then head back to The Aesthete for the full story.
Pia Howell expresses emotions. Her spirited shapes, abstract but recognizable, may sometimes symbolize a woman, feelings or more directly, brush strokes. “I think about making images with components (whether they’re textures or shapes or lines) that oscillate between representation and abstraction. I’ve been really into starting to paint and enjoying that as an expressive, gestural practice but also going after like ‘the perfect brushstroke,’ or essentially the symbol of a brushstroke.’
If you’re wondering why we chose to kick off a story about a graphic designer with a series of objects that fall squarely in the art/furniture realm, there are two reasons: First, they were our first introduction — via Pinterest — to Till Wiedeck’s work, and second, they illustrate perfectly what’s so great about the Berlin-based talent. Though he refers to himself as a hyper-functionalist, preoccupied with detail and simplicity and too serious to answer our sillier interview questions about Google searches and fictional characters, somehow he’s still the kind of guy who would take a sizeable chunk of time out of his client schedule to build a suite of semi-useless objects like these. You’ll find the same juxtapositions in the portfolio of his graphics studio, HelloMe, where he might pair spare typography with lush hyper-color flower arrangements, creepy Photoshop smears, or experimental acid-trip paintings he and his cohorts have made by hand. It all comes together in our interview with Wiedeck, who has a thing for both Bauhaus and Memphis, modernist chairs and tchotchkes. Whatever it is, it’s working.
If photographer Brian W. Ferry shoots like he takes absolutely nothing for granted — making us pine hard for moments of intensely quiet, understated beauty that probably already exist in our everyday lives — it’s likely because he feels so grateful to be doing what he’s doing. He may have discovered his inner camera nerd way back when he was growing up in Connecticut, but just a few short years ago, he was working long hours as a corporate lawyer in London, taking pictures merely as a personal creative escape hatch. Only after his blog began delivering fans and potential clients to his digital doorstep did he gather the resolve to quit his job, move to Brooklyn, and make a career out of triggering in people a kind of strange, misplaced nostalgia. “I think a lot about taking photos that are about more than capturing something beautiful, that have a heaviness attached to them,” Ferry told us earlier this winter at his Fort Greene garden apartment, as we rifled through his belongings together.
To know a ceramicist is to see their test pieces, and Bari Ziperstein has the kind of overflowing studio that doesn’t happen in a minute, that comes from years of private experiments and the hard work of learning not to care so much. “I think of these pieces as sculptural doodles,” she says, referring to a series of small, accidental ceramic sculptures. “They’re such a discrepancy from how I usually work, something no more than two inches. It’s really free and immediate.”
To the extent that we cover art on Sight Unseen, it makes sense that we’d naturally gravitate towards action painting — artists may always have plenty to say about the relationship of their work to the viewer, or to philosophy, or to the context of art history, but most of the time we’re interested in something a little more prosaic than that, like how they get their hands dirty, and why they’ve chosen one medium over another. With gestural works, it’s all about the process, and the liminal moments just before and after materials cease to be ordinary and paintings transform into something more than the sum of their parts. The work of the Greenpoint-based artist Landon Metz is a perfect example: His paintings are about painting, and how colorful enamel shapes laid down on a tilted canvas will move and evolve as their surface interactions and drying times are influenced by factors like humidity, daylight, and temperature. Sight Unseen contributor Paul Barbera visited Metz’s studio recently for Where They Create, and — oh lucky day! — he did our work for us, creating his own podcast interview with the artist which you can listen to after the jump.
We first spotted Shino Takeda’s awkwardly lovable, one-of-a-kind ceramic spoons and desert-style dishes at Caitlin Mociun’s store in Brooklyn, but the ceramicist’s work is a testament to the fact that you can still find amazing things on Etsy if you know where to look: Takeda keeps a store there called “Shino’s World,” and browsing its vases and bowls, you really get the sense that she lives inside her own storybook, where tea sets are named after bluebirds and sake cups appear poised to kiss. But we didn’t know much more about the real Shino until last week, when Inventory Magazine took a more literal look inside her world — with editor Ryan Willms photographing her at work in her Brooklyn studio — and so we couldn’t resist the chance to feature the story here in an attempt to put all the pieces together. The text of Inventory’s piece is after the jump, along with a few of the images, but you can see a lot more back at Inventory’s own site, including a portrait of the ceramicist herself.
Ahh, design school — where navel-gazing and the pretentions of identity art are not only tolerated, but encouraged (on days when the lesson plan doesn’t focus on sustainability or people with disabilities, of course). It’s easy for lesser talents to get sucked too far into these themes and end up with over-baked work that either borders on kitsch or is completely irrelevant to the wider world, but when done right, the results can be both beautiful and culturally illuminating — as in the case of Ya Wen Chou, who used her time in the RCA’s textile department to dig into the traditions of her grandmother and her home country of Taiwan. “My grandmother’s house was always full of handicrafts made by Taiwanese artisans,” she told the Arts Thread blog last year, explaining a main source of her inspiration. And her Precious Objects project — which first caught our eye on Pinterest — explores her culture’s traditional reverence for nature’s role in everyday life, which does feel rather universal, having a lot in common with everything from Icelandic elf mythology to Native American spirituality. Read more about Chou’s point of view in our interview after the jump.
Whatever Fabien Cappello’s studies at ECAL may have taught him about luxury, his subsequent grad degree at the RCA may have un-taught him: The London-based designer has made stools carved from trashed Christmas trees, Venetian glass vessels melted onto lowly bricks, and benches constructed from shipping pallets or punctuated with cheap street-vendors’ umbrellas. That’s not to say, of course, that Cappello’s work isn’t high end — it’s been shown at the likes of Libby Sellers Gallery and has won him an Elle Decoration New Designers Award — just that the materials and ideas he sees value in wouldn’t exactly be considered the norm. If he’s come a long way since setting up his own studio in 2009, it’s because his focus on local and overlooked resources has captured the curiosity of the design world, not just its eyes or its wallets. That said, with the world headed where it’s headed, his style of economical chic may become the new luxury before long, so we figured he was worth checking in with. He gave Sight Unseen a quick glimpse into his practice below.
After Jean Lee met Dylan Davis while studying industrial design at the University of Washington, and after a string of successful school collaborations led them to start dating, the two of them did a semester abroad together in Rome. “Those were the good times,” laughs Lee. “We saw all these independent studios there, and designers working more as artists, and it was really inspiring for us. That wasn’t happening at all in Seattle.” And so after they graduated in 2005, Lee went on to work for a messenger bag company based in Philadelphia, while Davis joined the team at Henrybuilt. They did a small trade selling vintage finds on Etsy for awhile, and eventually started repurposing those objects into new designs as a hobby. But what finally led them to join forces as Ladies & Gentlemen in 2009 were the first signs that they might be able to find in Seattle what they experienced in Rome after all: Not only had studios like Iacoli & Mcallister and Grain begun to flourish by making and selling their own work, their new coalition Join was gathering together local designers to collaborate and exhibit together. “Jamie Iacoli asked us to contribute to a show, and were like ‘What the hell? Let’s do it!’”
It’s been a tough two years for Dutch design. First a newly elected right-wing government slashed the tiny country’s legendary arts funding, causing seemingly irreparable damage to its institutions and grant programs, and then a series of high-profile resignations called into question the inner workings of Eindhoven’s hallowed Design Academy. But even if there are signs that the fairy-tale may not last — that creativity and experimentalism can’t elude the death-grip of capitalism forever, even in a place where designers still benefit from squatters’ rights — we still look forward to Dutch Design Week as a reminder of the happier consequences of those values. While we couldn’t attend this year ourselves, we asked our faithful contributor Marco Tabasso, who’s second-in-command at Rossana Orlandi gallery in Milan, to report back on his experiences at the festival — from his mixed feelings about the Design Academy show to the paella dinner he and Rossana shared with Nacho Carbonell in the designer’s studio, above.
For those of you who weren’t aware, your editors — Jill and Monica — are based in New York, where a massive tropical storm is bearing down today with increasing intensity. Jill is safe in the East Village with her family, while Monica fled her Brooklyn apartment for a world of luxurious denial at the Ace Hotel in midtown, where her friend is staying and where the Breslin will be churning out burgers and fries for the duration of the hurricane. Regardless, the serious conditions outside are obviously demanding most of our attention at the moment, so we can only offer a quick dispatch to jump-start the week: a behind-the-scenes video interview with Sam Hecht and Kim Colin of the London design studio Industrial Facility, whose Muji-approved strain of functional minimalism is as beloved as the collection of regional everyday objects featured in their book with Rizzoli last year. While the book served to catalog the couple’s travels around the globe, the video — part of Herman Miller’s ongoing Why Design series — sees them reflecting on the world just outside their front door, and how it influences their work in small but important ways.
The Fundamental Group’s designs may be inspired by geometric principles, but the burgeoning Berlin studio owes its existence, at least in an abstract sense, to another realm entirely: physics, ie, the field in which opposites attract. As architecture students at Berlin’s University of the Arts back in 2003, Gunnar Rönsch and Stephen Molloy worked as assistants to rival department chairs, which in the world of academia, meant that they were automatically rivals, too. “If you sign up with one, you hate the other,” Rönsch explains. “Mine was building construction and detail design, while Stephen’s was based on a programmatic approach to structure — my chair basically had to solve all the problems created by his.” In time, however, the pair realized the inevitable — that by joining forces, they’d be stronger. First they became roommates, noticing how smoothly their collaboration on the apartment went, and then they began working together professionally, on projects like a friend’s house remodel. Their only other major conflict came when it was time, in 2010, to choose a name for their new company: Rönsch & Molloy, or Molloy & Rönsch? “A mathematician friend of ours was sitting in our kitchen talking about the fundamental group — a term from algebraic topology that describes very complicated 3-D surfaces,” says Molloy. “It was the perfect compromise.”
It took me 16 issues (Miranda July) to discover the Berlin-based magazine mono.kultur, after seeing its pull-out poster on my friend’s wall a few years back. “Dear life,” it read, “do you want to hang out tonight? I should warn you that I will not be wearing any make-up and my hair is dirty. If you can handle that, call me. Yours, Miranda July.” Five issues later (Tilda Swinton), I was obsessed: Here was a publication that, with each issue dedicated to a single long-form interview, was less about collecting personalities for front-cover bragging rights and more about truly, painstakingly, and intimately getting to know them. Which is all any of us dream about when it comes to our cultural idols, even those of us who, from time to time, have the honor of crossing their paths ourselves. So even though we’ve profiled Martino Gamper on Sight Unseen before — our lovely London contributor Claire Walsh having toured his home garden and secured us his favorite pasta recipe — we still jumped at the chance to excerpt mono.kultur’s new sit-down with the Italian RCA grad, who talked to its editors about his latest public design projects, his feelings about Ikea, and the use of humor in his work. The interview runs to 10,000 words and — in print — comprises three booklets hand-assembled into one exhaustive artifact that stretches far beyond the small sample presented here. After reading it, scroll down to learn how to get your own copy before it — like most of the issues this cult favorite has produced — sells out forever.
Being that he’s still a student at Konstfack in Stockholm, you’ve probably never heard of Norwegian artist and graphic designer Kent Fonn Skåre. But his work, even at first glance, is ridiculously easy to love: It’s got a heavy focus on materials, lots of marble, and a whiff of Memphis — yes, the three “M”s, the golden trifecta of the current avant-garde, or at least the little corner of it that we’re obsessed with, which also includes folks like Clemence Seilles and Jens Praet. We discovered Fonn Skåre via a fleeting image on Pinterest, but found surprisingly little information on him and the ideas behind his work, so we did what we do best, harassing the poor man until we were able to tease out a bit of insight into his practice. Check out the interview and accompanying photos here, then bookmark Fonn Skåre’s Flickr feed to browse more of his graphic design work and follow his future projects.
When we first got wind of the new Scandances by Prince Ruth textile collection for Urban Outfitters, we had two questions: Who is Prince Ruth? And what the heck is a scandance? The latter question, we found, was easy to answer: It’s that jittery, seismograph-through-the-lens-of-an-acid-trip effect you get when you manipulate an image while it’s in the process of being scanned. As for the former, we assumed — this being Urban, who has an additional collaboration out this month with Sight Unseen favorite Caitlin Mociun, and who’s previously worked with friends like Rich Brilliant Willing — that Prince Ruth was some under-the-radar designer we somehow weren’t cool enough to have noticed. And in a way, that’s exactly what it is: Prince Ruth is the name of a Brooklyn-based surface design studio run by Zoe Latta, a 24-year-old textile artist and RISD grad whose work is more famous than her pseudonym would suggest.
On Friday we introduced you to Oeuffice’s Ziggurat Towers for the Beirut-based Carwan Gallery, and today it’s the gallery’s contribution from London designer Philippe Malouin, who’s also showing with Plus Design and Kvadrat in Milan this week. Malouin was one of nine designers — along with Karen Chekerdjian, Khalid Shafar, Lindsey Adelman, Studio mischer’traxler, Nada Debs, Oeuffice, Paul Loebach, and Tamer Nakisci — who traveled to the Middle East late last year for a grand tour of artisan’s studios, each pairing up with a different craftsperson to produce a new twist on an old archetype or technique. What caught Malouin’s eye was the wood-inlay method called intarsia, in which pieces of various types of wood are cut and assembled into a jigsaw-puzzle like image or pattern that often has the illusion of depth. Rather than using the method in a conventional way, however — as a decorative add-on — he tried something a little bit different; here, he explains how he arrived at the final design for his Intarsia Bowl.
Last week, armed with the new Marc Newson–designed Pentax K-01 digital camera, we popped in on five different design studios in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, taking sneak peeks at work destined both for this past weekend’s Architectural Digest Home Design show and the upcoming New York Design Week. The result is a two-part Red Hook Studio Visit series, the second installation of which debuts today with visits to designers Bec Brittain and Uhuru. Brittain’s studio, where she works alone without the aid of interns or assistants, is inside what can only be called a complex belonging to Rhett Butler of E.R. Butler fame. And while we’d been inside Uhuru’s 10,000-sqft. studio before, we couldn’t come back to Red Hook without a fresh look at what they were up to.
A subway-less industrial bastion perched halfway down the western coast of Brooklyn, Red Hook is a pain in the ass to get to. But when the weather’s nice, you never want to leave. Last week when we showed up, it was 70 degrees and blindingly sunny, and from all around the warehouse that some of New York’s brightest up-and-coming designers share with Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie, the East River sparkled at us suggestively, with the Statue of Liberty looming not too far in the distance. It was the kind of day that seemed made for boat-spotting, beers, and an impromptu Fairway picnic, and yet we were there for one reason and one reason only: To make a few long-overdue house calls. Armed with the new Pentax K-01 digital camera — designed by Marc Newson with a sleek, Braun-like aesthetic that’s even more striking in person — we popped in on five different design studios in the neighborhood, taking sneak peeks at work destined both for this past weekend’s Architectural Digest Home Design show and the upcoming New York Design Week. The result is a two-part Red Hook Studio Visit series — all shot with the Pentax K-01 — which kicks off today with Liberty Warehouse occupants Fort Standard, Piet Houtenbos, and recent Pratt grads Persico + Dublin. We aren’t professional photographers, but we think the results turned out pretty swell.
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.
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.
The launch of the first-ever Sight Unseen book — debuting in April as part of the Karlsson’s Vodka Unfiltered project — is just around the corner. Now through Friday, when we’ll go back to business as usual with a story by a brand new Sight Unseen guest contributor, we’re posting sneak peek images and asking our readers to guess who the subject of each photograph might be. Here’s a quote from today’s featured designers, a duo whose colorful Berlin-based fashion line seamlessly incorporates objects like teacups, pillows, and rugs: “I almost always start our prints from photos. I collect structures — for example for the last winter season, we were walking down the street photographing different surfaces from the ground, which gave us ideas for the graphics. Those images were taken out and put together again to create a digital print.”
The launch of the first-ever Sight Unseen book — debuting in early April with a bash co-hosted by Creatures of Comfort and the Karlsson’s Vodka Unfiltered project — is just around the corner. Over the next two weeks, we’re posting sneak peek images and asking our readers to guess who the subject of each photograph might be. Here’s a quote from today’s featured designer: “We both nerd out a lot when it comes to materials. We like finding something new and researching it. For a month we were playing around with shellac. Basically it’s beetle excrement, and when you order it really raw, it comes with beetle parts and bark dust still in it.”
Newest/Most Popular
Department/
